Cemetery Cleanup Day

Yesterday was cleanup day at the cemetery. This cemetery is in northern Minnesota and is connected to my wife’s family church. We are camping nearby for Memorial Day weekend, so we went over to help.

I didn’t have any gear so I was put on blower duty. Several others had weed trimmers and I followed to blow off the headstones.

The headstones went back to the early 1900s and were in varying conditions. It wasn’t necessarily a new/old thing. Some of the old ones were easily readable and some of the twenty year old headstones were faded.

There was something about cleaning around the headstones. I am what you would call (or at least my wife calls) a casual cleaner. But around the headstones it felt important to do a better job. People probably wouldn’t notice and the chances of the families stopping by was slim. Still, my normal “good enough” approach wasn’t good enough here.

I would pick weeds here and there that the trimmers couldn’t get to and made sure the flowers and such the visitors had left stayed in place. We added fill dirt to places where the graves had started collapsing in.

There are those that work as groundskeepers for cemeteries. I wonder how they think of their work. Is it a job or is it something else?