MPG AND AUTUMN

The cooler temperatures transitioning into mild afternoons with beautiful blue skies is one of the reasons fall is Karen Ford’s favourite time of year.

“The change of colour seems to bring the best out of everybody,” says Ford, the Property Manager at Meadowvale Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Centres. “It’s a beautiful thing to see and hear at our sites.”

“You really see that a lot of our sites have beautiful tree canopies and features such as Gardens of Remembrance, that in the fall just pop because of all the foliage changes.”

It’s her favourite time of year professionally too. As Property Manager at Meadowvale Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Centres, she finds she must be more flexible with scheduling and prioritizing work for the grounds’ maintenance. The summer students, who are an important part of the MPG team return to school in the fall, so their workforce is reduced by at least 50 per cent, not to mention the unpredictable weather making it difficult to have a set plan.

“You need to prioritize what needs to get done with the limited staff that you have… and it’s been a lot wetter than we would normally have,” she says. “It’s just juggling jobs and trying to meet the customers’ expectations with all those variables in place.”

“A lot of people, especially in the city, enjoy coming out to Mount Pleasant; it’s somewhere that they can walk in and enjoy a park like setting in a cemetery,” says Ford.

In fact, the public makes good use of MPG’s properties to enjoy the vibrancy of fall’s colours.

“Families that have loved ones at our property seem to really enjoy the fall. There’s an abundance of memorialization in terms of people tastefully personalizing at this time of year,” says Ford, who notes that cemetery by-laws do limit the extent to which visitors are allowed to customize their memorials. “It’s just a really nice time to be on the grounds.”