A modern-day barn raising

Fence-painting party touches up neighborhood in more ways than one|

Although I’ve never been to an actual barn raising, in my younger days I did participate in gatherings to help friends complete construction and painting projects.

It is also a long-standing Sonoma Valley tradition that friends and neighbors help each other bring in their crops, especially wine grapes and olives.

There was a time when many of us could count on our friends to pitch in with one of our do-it-ourselves kind of projects and we would do the same for them.

Some major public facilities like our Plaza, Arnold Field, the Little League fields and Field of Dreams, were also built with the same kind of voluntary efforts.

I was thinking of that recently when my friends Chad Overway and Jeanne Montague invited me to participate in their fence-painting party.

Chad, who is an architect, and his wife Jeanne Montague, are building a new home for themselves on the 600 block of Austin Avenue in Sonoma. It is the former site of the home of Mike and Elizabeth DeLong. Mike was my journalism teacher at Sonoma Valley High School. He died in 1988. The SVHS library is named in his honor. Elizabeth, his widow, passed away last year.

During construction of their new home on the site, Chad and Jeanne decided not to put up the ugly chain-link fencing that usually fronts a construction project, choosing instead a solid wood fence.

But feeling it still was too drab; they decided to take it one step further. They asked friend and neighbor, Pam Gilberd, who had painted some temporary outdoor art for me, if she would create something to brighten up their fence.

They invited their friends to help her with the guarantee of liquid refreshment and food as additional enticements.

More than a dozen, myself included, showed up and spent the afternoon following Pam’s directions, adding personal touches of our own. As shadows began to fall, our work was completed and the fence is no longer drab.

I have a feeling that my old teacher would have enjoyed the party and good feelings of Sonoma neighborliness at his former digs.

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