This was totally inspired by the Mending Wall by Robert Frost, do you know it? I was even going to include the line 'good fences make good neighbours', but realised the dissolution of the boundary was needed for the metaphor. 

Yeah that slicing and dicing was totally him trying to control his world when his wife left. He's loosely modelled on our neighbour who has the opposite garden to us, but both maintain quite the boundary of pines and a fence to continue to ignore the other. I doubt he'd even glance at a baby magpie. Fifteen years we have been nodding at the guy and he refuses to acknowledge us since we asked him to angle his floodlight south instead of west into our place. Haha am I resentful much?

I'd love to rework this one, there's definitely potential as trying to keep it Hive readable at 1500 words total max was hard. Thanks for getting it.