The Wall Between

A stone wall divides the property line between two farms circa 1920, it has been there for generations, and is falling down. No one remembers who owns it and both think the other should fix it. Hate runs deep between the two farms. A young woman of the family comes to live on one side, and begins to melt the tension, or so she thinks. Excerpt from The Wall Between, the Howe and Webster farms adjoined, lying on a sun-flooded, gently sloping New Hampshire hillside. Between them loomed the wall. It was not a high wall. On the contrary, it is formidable as the result of tradition rather than of fact. For more than a century it had been an estranging harrier to neighborliness, to courtesy, to broad-mindedness; a barrier to friendship, to Christian charity, to peace. The builder of the rambling line of gray stone had long since passed away, and had he not acquired a warped importance with the years, his memory would doubtless have perished with him. All unwittingly, alas, lie had become a celebrity.