Bonnie Sargent manicures Penacook, mowing around the Union soldier at the rotary like she was cutting the lawn in her own front yard.
It’s a common scene downtown, a picture postcard of unselfishness in a New England community by a woman who simply wants her home – which she sees as more than just her house – to look nice.
“She makes sure she picks up all the trash in the community,” her daughter, Alexis Sargent, wrote, nominating her mother for Hometown Heroes distinction. “She makes it look nice.”
Bonnie, a Bradford native, makes it look nice with a few local volunteers, 4½ years after a well-known retired Penacook doctor, Robert Gabrielli, the founder of Penacook Family Physicians 40 years ago, began rolling up his sleeves and beautifying the spot directly across the street from his old office.
His patients changed, from people to yellow, purple and pink flowers, and Sargent, Matt St. Onge and Dave Duhamel have since joined a loosely-constructed staff, mowing, mulching, watering.
Commenting on her nomination by Alexis, Bonnie said, “At first I was shocked, but she wanted to do it. She told me I do a lot of things around here and I don’t get recognized.”
She’s Penacook through and through, running the laundromat within a Mac Jones pass from the rotary, and working overtime – her own time – at the statue, near an area that easily could fall into disrepair, but thus far has not been allowed to.
She used to work at the convenience store at the circle. She noticed the area outside the window was turning a bit shaggy.
“It needed to be mowed,” Bonnie said, “so I took it upon myself to mow it. The trash there, people throw their cans over there and the city needs to pick it up more often.”
Word spread. About the doctor who retired from medicine and became a landlord and a public gardener. About the woman who ran the local laundromat and pitched in. About the others who joined in.
And about the pride being nurtured in a highly visible spot, seen by anyone who lives in the area.
“I enjoy it,” Bonnie said. “I enjoy being out there and working and being out in the sun.”
It’s a different life from years past. A licensed nursing assistant, Bonnie worked in hospice and cared for those with Alzheimer’s for 19 years, before hurting her shoulder lifting a patient. “I had to step back and take a look at it, what I was doing,” she said.
The sprucing-up season at the rotary is long over, chasing away the yellow and the red and the pink for another year.
Bonnie extends her landscaping business as long as she can, but it’s cruel here, and the warm weather won’t return until April, at the earliest.
Bonnie will be ready.
As Alexis wrote, her mother’s effort makes it “brighter to drive through that area, and it makes it a happier little town.”