I can’t count the number of times I had dreams, nightmares really, where my backyard fence was missing or broken, and the dogs were free to escape.  They were as unwilling to come when called in my dreams as they were in real life.

In reality, my fence was strong and never yielded to either barometric nor paw pressure.  Until last September.  L’acy had passed away a couple of years before that, so the breach wasn’t a nightmare come true, but the fence crumbled under the force of a strong windstorm.  Two posts snapped at their base and the attached panels, each some eight feet wide, fell to the ground.  No big deal, I just had to replace the posts and reattach the panels. 

Not so fast.  I needed to remove the concrete sleeves the posts were given when they were first installed.  They were about ten inches wide and sunk to two feet under the ground.  I called a fence contractor and asked for an estimate.  Hilarious.  You know a contractor really doesn’t want the gig when they ask for $2,500 to repair about twenty feet of cedar fencing.  Either that, or I really don’t know how much this stuff costs.

I managed to convince a friend of mine to help me dig out the concrete sleeves.  It took two lunchtime sessions and a whole lot of false anger, but we managed to remove the concrete and maintain the integrity of the resultant holes in the ground.  I ran to the home improvement store, picked up a couple new posts and some quick setting concrete.  In short time, I was back in business.

Until April.  Another windstorm blew through and more posts met their maker.  At this point I decided it was time to step back and improve the fence system as a whole.  A post that held up fencing between the garden and the back yard had also broken free, and the gates were sagging to the point where they were hard to use.  I think twenty-five years is long enough.

I started work on the new gate frames, but before I got very far, summer temperatures soared into the nineties and my outdoor efforts became focused on the landscape and garden.  The summer passed and very little work on the gates had been done.  As fall approached, however, old frames were removed, as was the fence between the garden and back yard.  You could stand in the street in front of my house and look all the way to the back alley.  For over a month, I felt exposed.

I slowly completed the gate frames, mounted them to posts, and tuned them to work with ease.  I was stoked.  What remained were three concrete sleeves stuck in the ground and I wasn’t sure I had enough energy to remove them by myself.  My friend helped me with one of them, but two lingered in the ground until a week ago.  Fortunately for me, a group of young men from the neighborhood church ward volunteered to help.  Actually, they were too skinny to help dig and pry, it was their dads, there to supervise, that provided the hard labor.  The kids gathered the shards of concrete and scooped dirt from the holes when they weren’t playing tag on the lawn.  It took about an hour before the last of the sleeves were pulled from their graves.

Over the next couple of days I replaced posts and rails and reattached slats.  The back yard is once again ready for dogs.