There is a fence called The Kissing Fence. It lies along an avenue a few blocks from where I live. You can see it here behind these pink coneflowers, a fence of very dark blue wooden slats.
I live in an older neighborhood, my own little kingdom, as I think of it, where 100-year-old trees tower over 100-year-old Victorian houses, wood-frame bungalows, and fairy-tale cottages. If you walk two blocks down this very street, you will come to our little bungalow, where we have lived for some twenty years.
The streets that lie north/south are all avenues, and so my neighborhood is sometimes referred to as "The Avenues." When I go for a walk, I love the thought that I am walking among the avenues.
One of the places I often pass on my walks is this long blue fence. I didn't know this fence had a name until a few weeks ago when I walked here with a friend. She said when her boys were little they had gone to the school in the bungalow that lies just behind the fence. It is a Montessori school with a very fine reputation. Every morning, she said, the children and parents kissed each other over the fence, not to say goodbye, but to send each other off into the world with love.
And so the fence became "The Kissing Fence."
In order to facilitate the kissing at the fence, a long two-step stairway with railings was built on the children's side. Here is a view of both sides: the children's stairway-side inside the playground and the parents' sidewalk-side along the street.
I have seen children and parents kissing and talking over this fence for years, and so I am amazed, and really quite, I don't know, humbled, I guess, by the power of a name, for ever since my friend told me that this fence is called The Kissing Fence, the fence has become mythic to me. Folkloric, poetic, legendary.
My friend put it best when she said, "It is a sacred place."
The wood slats have been painted the most magical shade of blue, a very deep royal-cornflower blue that has been blackened, either by age or antiquing or both, making it look colorful and vintage at the same time.
I want to make a greeting card in honor of The Kissing Fence, and so I have begun to sketch out an idea. The fence is pretty much straight across, but if you look closely at the boards, you can see that they are very slightly castellated at the top.
This is my first sketch. Initially, I used this exaggerated castellated effect, because the straight-across fence feels ~ um ~ too straight across. My first thought was to make it a picket fence, but right away I tossed that out: all those dagger-like points in a row ~ way too dangerous for kissing across! But this castellated effect feels a little menacing, too, like battlements on a castle tower.
My husband (who is an architect, among other things) suggested the rounded tops, like this. Yes, I think this will work very nicely. Well, then. This is a very very very rough sketch, definitely a work-in-progress, but if I put it here for all the world to see (not that anyone in the world knows how to find me here!) perhaps I will be forced, no, let's say inspired, to carry through.
And I've been wondering about all the other portals in the world where this particular kind of kissing takes place every day. Perhaps you have one in your own home or nearby somewhere. The Kissing Door, The Kissing Gate, The Kissing Bus Stop. They must be everywhere, when you think about it.
Well, wherever they are, they are very sacred places.
