White Picket Fence

Everywhere, USA

From its Colonial origins, this American icon finds its apex in Tom Sawyer's enterprising, sleight of hand but has resonated in our culture ever since. For artists and sociologists, the fence delineates suburban middle-class dream, as well as its dark underside beneath the conforming surface of things. (See David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.)

As an American teenager in Ireland, where homes were flanked by stone walls or metal gates, I missed these fences and even saw them as representative of the more open, accessible ways of folks back home, compared to the friendly yet remote ones of my new neighbors.

Elinor