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Our World: Called to clean
JUDY LUTZ / Daily News
Margaret Eldrige scrubs the exterior of a tombstone early Wednesday morning at a cemetery in Bonita Springs located off of Imperial Parkway. Eldrige had passed by this particular tombstone a few times and decided that she would clean off the mold and give the weathered monument some much needed sprucing up. "I'm going to take care of it" Eldridge said, "I'm going to clean up more too because I care about these people, even though I don't know any of them.
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On the corner of Bonita Beach Road and Imperial Parkway, the warming rays of another day creep over the weeds and rocks scattered like hastily ripped wrappings from a present.
The traffic grows louder now. Birds sing, and there’s another, less-identifiable sound: swish swish swwwwishhhh!
In the old cemetery, a woman scrapes the top of a small tombstone with a soft brush. A blue bucket is at arm’s length. It’s filled with paper towels, rags, a gallon jug and a pocketbook.
She pauses briefly to wipe away beads of sweat like the pink pearls around her thin neck.
Her name is Margaret Eldridge.
“I’ve been passing by here for some time and it was calling out to me,” says Eldridge, who lives near the cemetery. She gestures to a small monument barely 2 feet tall.
She says her age is “somewhere up there,” and then she returns to scraping off the mold that has taken over the tombstone of someone she does not know.
Her hope is to bring it back to what she thinks was its original shade of off-white. No one asked her to do it. She’s not getting paid. She just feels the call.
“I don’t know any of them that are here, but they need me,” Eldridge said as the morning light began to filter in through the tree branches, casting her in a honeyed tone.
“Oh, I just want to do it,” she continues. She puts the finishing touches on the paper-like petals of a bouquet that sits in an abalone shell at the base of the faux concrete monument.
There are other headstones that need attention, but she shakes out the remaining bit of water in her brush, saying, “That’ll do for now.”
She’s busier in retirement, she says, than she was when she was working.
Eldridge reaches for the handle on the dented fence that borders the cemetery and takes one last look at her handiwork.
“Yeah, it’s looking better. I’ll work on it more tomorrow,” she says as her small frame disappears into the rows of mobile homes.
The weathered angels watch her go.
E-mail Judy Lutz at jhlutz@naplesnews.com
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