Summer | unscripted 2017 - #9 Gift Horse

The oft quoted line from Frost's poem Mending Wall is 'Good fences make good neighbors,' but he contends the opposite, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.'

I rise early to run but spend 30 minutes on the toilet—drafting choice words for McConnell
(location, location, location!)
 
Leave late. Pause—photograph bucolic Topanga scene:
 
Horse at Fence. 
 
An old-timer outstripping ravages of stroke moseys down the driveway,
mid-sentence--
 
...so, anyway, I was born in Santa Monica, service, got married, this that and the other thing, she’s dead, been here close on 60 years. Don’t know where you are on the spectrum—eh, doesn’t matter, tight-knit neighbors here...    
 
Welcomes me, unvetted, with 45 minutes of friendly filibuster. 
 
The soft-eyed gelding stands between us, shifting his weight, swishing flies.

* A while back, a Topanga friend of mine noted an endearing and exhausting feature of canyon life: far-right and far-left countercultures (she used other epithets) co-exist here; sometimes there's harmony, other times an uncomfortable clash of ideals. (One thing they usually agree on -- an only-half-kidding suspicion of New Yorkers.)