Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies

A promise in passing

The close-knit residents of Aripeka stay connected to their past, and in a way, their future, by tending to their 99-year-old community cemetery.

SPRING HILL - The sparse grass had grown almost knee-high since Carol White's last visit.

Smilax vines curled around headstones and the sandy ground was littered with moss-draped branches.

White, who had come here to bring order, looked purposeful in her sun visor and gardening gloves. Her husband, Roye, would pull up shortly, towing her prized mower.

But she didn't intend to hurry. She wouldn't let work keep her from visiting.

"Sometimes I want to fuss at them," White said, kneeling to pull spindly weeds from the pea-gravel bed over her parents' graves.

"Mom, why didn't you live long enough to help me raise kids? I didn't know anything about raising kids."

Aripeka is a famously tight village of about 200 houses surrounded by salt marsh on the Pasco-Hernando county line. Less well-known is that its communal feeling is extended to deceased friends and relatives.

In a time when populations are transient and burial is an industry, the people of Aripeka maintain a true community cemetery - and a living relationship with the dead.

"If I pull back and look at it with cold logic, it doesn't matter to me where my body ends up; it's like disposing of a fingernail, basically," said White's brother, Wayne Norfleet, 66.

"But it matters to the living. This is really for the living."

If residents of Aripeka are not rich, they sometimes sound as though they are. They have the same sense of privilege, as though just by living there they got lucky, that they have been granted an unusual gift.

That's certainly true of the cemetery, which was deeded to the town in 1906, after the drowning of a young girl.

When word spread that her family could not find a place to bury her in the low, wet ground near town, a couple living a few miles inland donated 5 acres for a graveyard on the bank above Hunter's Lake in what is now Spring Hill.

Every Aripeka resident has the right to be buried there "regardless of religious affiliations or belief," according to a history of the cemetery compiled by members of the Aripeka Baptist Church. The only payment expected is in labor - to help keep up the graveyard as residents have for 99 years, meeting before every funeral and almost every month during the growing season.

White, having turned off U.S. 19 opposite the KFC, was the first to arrive for the last cleanup of the fall, rolling down the limerock road to the cemetery - a grove of oaks and cedars sealed off from the sprawl of Spring Hill by a fringe of woods.

White's husband came next, then a brother, a sister-in-law, two more brothers and a couple of friends she has known for more than 30 years.

The cleanup crew is mostly Norfleets, because most of the town seems to be part of this very close family, said White, who was born a Norfleet:

"We don't have a family tree, we have a family bush."

She paused at the grave of her grandparents, Aripeka pioneers James and Amanda Kolb.

"I think they were first cousins," she said.

Two of their daughters married Norfleets. All six of White's siblings live in Aripeka, and they, along with their children and grandchildren, visit the family homestead - White's house - on Christmas Day.

"Last year, we hung 86 stockings," she said.

Family, inevitably, is what comes to mind while you work in the cemetery, said Wayne Norfleet, who stood and talked for a few minutes while the rest of the crew fired up tractors and trimmers or began picking up sticks. And the person he finds himself thinking most about, he said, is his uncle Fred Wayland Kolb, B. May 1913, D. Jan. 1998.

He remembered helping his usually law-abiding uncle spotlight and shoot a deer that had been raiding his pea patch.

"That was highly illegal, of course. And Uncle Fred was very honest. But eating your peas . . . That was bad," Norfleet said.

Shortly before his death, Kolb started to tell one of his standard tales - of catching a fish so big it pulled a heavy cypress boat out against the tide.

"His wife, Jessie, said, "Fred, you've told that story 100 times.' And he said, "Well, it won't hurt them to hear it again.' So he told it again. And we listened," Norfleet said.

Along with his stories, Fred Kolb passed down a habit of forgiving his nephews when they borrowed a tool or boat motor and returned it broken - which was often.

"Uncle Fred would never yell at us. He'd just say, "Well, you shouldn't break it.' And, "I'll fix it,' " Norfleet said.

Now, when younger relatives remark on his similar calm, Norfleet said, "I tell them, "You can thank Uncle Fred for that.' "

Carol White raced back and forth on her mower, working levers to pivot instantly at the graves of a former pastor, a Sunday school teacher and various cousins and uncles.

"It brings back all these memories: who made the best cookies when I was a little girl, who gave out the best Halloween candy" - and, White said, who made moonshine in the woods outside of town, Romaine F. Equevilley, 1890-1968.

"Isn't that terrible?" she said. "I probably wouldn't be able to picture his face, but I remember his still."

The other natural thought of graveyard maintenance workers, especially when most of them are retirees, is mortality.

Nancy Norfleet, 61, an Indiana native who married Wayne Norfleet when he worked for General Electric Co., babysat her niece's 2-year-old son and 7-month-old daughter as she picked up sticks. She imagined someday talking to them, just as her in-laws talk to her.

"I'm going to tell them they have to get out here and mow," she said.

"I like the seamlessness of it, one generation following the other," Wayne Norfleet said.

"Whey my father (J. Leverne Norfleet) started using a cane, he said: "After the cane comes the crutches, after the crutches comes the wheelchair. And after the wheelchair comes Hunter's Lake.' So I'm sliding down that same path behind him."

"When I'm dead I'm dead," White said. "I won't know where I'm buried. But this is free and we worked for it. And it's around friends and family. I couldn't imagine going off to one of those big fancy places."

By the time she finished mowing, she joined her brothers John, 70, and Wayne. Their faces darkened like coal miners' by the dusty work, they stood and talked about the improvements they hope to make in the next few years.

Some of the oldest graves are marked only with letter-sized sheets of aluminum stamped with the names of the dead and dates of their birth and death. They'd like to replace those with marble or granite headstones, they said.

Rust has eaten away wide gaps in the fence along the road. They'll use money raised from fish fries to put up a new one, and to rebuild the collapsed, concrete-block gate.

But they also agreed that the cemetery looked better for their afternoon of work.

The grass was not as green or neat as the fertilized and buzzcut hybrid at some of the nearby cemeteries; there were no showy floral displays.

But the lake could be glimpsed through the woods, which was brightened by wildflowers and beauty berry. The headstones stood out cleanly, freed of weeds and the clumps of tall grass.

"This ought to last til March or April, unless we have somebody die on us," John Norfleet said.

"At our age, that could happen at any time, right Johnny?" his brother said.

"That's right."