Friends Helping Friends in VBT: Eleanore Hendrickson says she’s ‘fortunate’

Last week, neighbors joined in to help clean up the yard of 92-year-old Eleanore Hendrickson on Robson Road in Van Buren Township. A neighboring couple hadn’t seen her out for a while and they asked the township senior transportation driver in her yard if she was home and the driver said she was.
So, they started cleaning up the yard and soon other neighbors joined in. The group did both the front and back yards and since there was no yard waste pickup in the township at the time, the older couple began moving the waste by wheel barrel across to their property.
“I thought it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me,” Eleanore Hendrickson, 92, said of the work her neighbors did to clean up her yard. “I got to crying. That’s what happens when you’re older than dirt,” she said.
She said she hurt her legs several times and hasn’t been out of her house for a couple of months. Hendrickson said she has bleeding ulcers, a stent in her heart, and other physical problems.
She said Beverly Porter, head of the Senior Center’s transportation, has kind of adopted her and watches over her. Hendrickson said she has been a member of September Days since 1984. She said she asked next-door neighbor Charlie Brown to take her trash and recycling out to the curb one week and he’s been doing it ever since.
“I’m a bawl bag. I sit here and cry because I am so fortunate,” she said.