The dead and the gone

On my recent visit with the parents, I dropped by the cemeteries located near their former house in Summerfield, FL. The folks have moved to a more convenient and accommodating apartment building nearby, but their old neighborhood beckons. Their house was located in the Stonecrest gated community, and, being gated, it is now off-limits to me. But the cemeteries lie just outside Stonecrest, with access via bumpy SE 170th St., which skirts the development's northern periphery and is maintained by... who knows?

Forest Hill Cemetery, the "white" cemetery, occupies a little slope up from the road's dead end just outside my parents' old back yard. For the roughly 15 years my folks lived there, a pair of bald eagles maintained a nest near the top of a longleaf pine in the cemetery and raised cohorts of eaglets. I say "a pair," but there was some turnover, as at least once the female apparently died from one cause or another, and the forlorn widower had to find another mate. Or at least, that's what the human eagle-watchers inferred. My parents watched them daily, if not hourly, from the back porch.

In recent years the pine died, and the enormous, untidy nest in a crook of the tree's skeleton finally succumbed to hurricanes and decay as did, ultimately, the tree itself. The eagles, who fed on fish from nearby Lake Weir, have moved on. It was some comfort to me that my parents departed before their beloved eagles... or around the same time, in one of those strange coincidences. 

Forest Hill has graves dating back to the late 19th century, and is still used today. Graves are fascinating, and sad, of course. On this visit, a couple in particular struck me, along with the memorial placed at the stump of the eagle tree. Mattie Barker's marker is in too good condition to be the original. One wonders who is maintaining the grave of an infant who died 136 years ago. It is only few miles from the location of "Ma" Barker's famous last shootout across Lake Weir in Ocklawaha... another coincidence.