The quality of light this morning was magical, reaching into the kitchen and making the water I drew into the coffeepot sparkle and dance. I watched a cardinal streak through the yard, his red wings blazing. Even the squirrels seemed a clearer, sharper gray.

After breakfast I walked across the meadow, stopping in the middle to stretch up and back and side to side, letting the sunlight pour over me like honey. In the prayer garden at the edge of the woods I gathered my thoughts, my hopes and dreams for the coming months. Back in my own garden then I sat beside the pond for a while -- the fountain is running and the plants have begun to spread across the water's surface. Another week or so of warm weather and the fish that have lived all winter in the basement can be reintroduced, and summer will have come to Woodridge.

Before going off on my day's agenda, I decided to deadhead the daffodils. In the past I was so busy in the spring, so consumed with end-of-school-year issues that I often let this go. Nor did I trim up the foliage as it died, divide large clumps, or apply an appropriate food, despite knowing that these actions would ensure better blooms the next year. The daffodils have always seemed oblivious of my neglect, however, and have come back year after year, making me wonder what I'd have if I really paid attention to them.

I reached in and pulled off the swollen seed pods, enjoying the dry papery crackle of the shriveled petals. I also pulled some of the wild onions that invade my flower beds -- some of these came up whole from their loamy spots under the ivy leaves, and the fragrance was not unpleasant. I filled a grocery bag with the refuse, dumped it on the compost heap behind the old playhouse, and went on my way.

My task today was to determine just how much more work needs to be done in the "reading" of the cemetery attached to Spring Creek Church of the Brethren in Hershey. This is a project of the Derry Township Historical Society which has been going on since 1996. It is the goal of the cemetery committee to identify the location of all cemeteries in Derry Township and compile a data base of the names of those buried there.

Some of these cemeteries are on private land, existing as a clump of headstones out in somebody's field. Some have been so neglected that all the stones have fallen or been removed, or the land has become so overgrown that the physical location of a cemetery referred to in a family narrative cannot be determined.

Spring Creek, however, is not one of these. The congregation is alive and active and the churchyard is well cared for and continues to receive burials. Nevertheless, it is on the list of areas to be mapped, and in the fall I was handed a sheaf of papers containing the work already done and assigned the task of completing it.

I suppose whenever there are a dozen people working on a project such as this it's inevitable that there will be a dozen ways of approaching it. The papers I acquired are of different sizes and have been marked in several different colors of ink and pencil in hands of varying degrees of legibility.

The three sections of the cemetery have been referred to as "left of church," "right of church," and "far right." Understanding this system depends on knowing where the original person was standing and how he or she was thinking at the time -- in reality, if you stand facing the church as if you are going in, the whole cemetery is to the right and it's the heart of town that's on the left. I decided to call the sections A, B, and C  left to right as one faces east.

The people who did the work numbered the rows "front to back," with several opinions about where the "front" is (east end or west end?) and then numbered the stones in each row, although some compilers walked north to south and others went south to north. Also, what might have been straight rows in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have shifted over time, and in some rows the information is on the east face of a stone while in others it is on the west. Throw in the occasional obelisk, a plot with three stones for the same person (an upright head marker, a low pillow stone at the foot which appears to be part of the next row, and a bronze plaque from the veteran's grateful government), and you have a daunting task with not very clear directions for how to proceed.

It took most of the morning for me to get my bearings about where I left off in the fall. (This work requires a day with very little wind.) I determined that it is the large central section (Section B) that is completely uncategorized. This will be the most difficult, as it contains the oldest stones, some of which are engraved in German on native brownstone so weathered that with some I can't even tell which side has the information I need to copy. As I looked at the broad sweep of stones I was having trouble remembering why I'd agreed to take on this work. I felt unequal to, and unenthusiatic about, the task before me.

I noticed that there were some new graves in Section A, so I decided to determine how much of the information already recorded would need to be updated. And that's when I got drawn into the stories, my primary reason for loving cemeteries so much.

I found the obelisk for Christ Weaver (the original reader had thought the family name was Christ) who was either six or eight years younger than his wife Caroline (the last digit in his birth year has been rendered ambiguous by the calcium which has leeched out of the limestone). Resting with them are their daughter Irenee and their son Frank and both of his wives, Mabel and Hazel.

Hellen (two l's) Reilly was aged only 18 years, 3 months, and 16 days when she died in 1919. The stone assures us she is "Gone but not forgotten."  Richard Snavely and Justin William Bray are the only occupants of Row 11. They were both Aged 1 day  when they died, Richard in 1810 and Justin in 1991. How they wound up together is a mystery. In front of them, in Row 10, are Nelson and Margaret Walker, a couple in their forties who died together on June 24, 1972. "They perished in the flood waters of Agnes,"  the stone tells us.

The Hostetter stone was set in 1935 when Thomas, who was only 45, died. His name and his dates were chiseled as bas-relief  letters into the pink marble, along with the name of his wife Kathryn and her birth date, Jan. 12, 1905. She died just last year, and the lettering of her death date, fashioned more than half a century after the original, exactly matches it. I think that's really nice.

Finally, I stopped in front of two low stones which were almost completely obscured by the glossy foliage of two vigorous clumps of daffodils. I had to hold the leaves aside in order to learn that the stones mark the final resting place of Violet and William Miller, a couple born during the 1880's who lived into their mid-sixties. Beside them is their daughter, Elizabeth, who was born in 1918 and died, unmarried, in 1955.

Just beside them is a brand new grave marked only by the funeral director's temporary metal stake. The ground has settled but is still bare orange dirt in need of top-soil and grass seed. I peered at the marker -- it's for Virginia M. Miller, 1915-1998.

A devoted daughter and sister, I surmised. For fifty years she tended this plot. She planted the daffodils, cultivated them, fed, divided, replaced them. This is the first spring she hasn't been here. No wonder the blossoms have gone to seed.

I went to my car and found a trash bag. Then I came back and deadheaded the Miller daffodils. As I did so I began to think that with maybe an hour or so a day over the next few weeks I can make some sense of Section B. After all, I want to come back to keep an eye on this foliage and begin to pull it when it dies back. I'll bring along some Bulb-tone when I feed my own plot, and in the fall I'll divide my biggest clumps and bring some along for Virginia, whose faithfulness to a self-chosen task has given me new energy to tackle my own.