Catherine Scott’s ‘fetish’ is a benefit to all of Milton

Catherine Scott hasn’t lived in Milton very long, but she’s already made a name for herself picking up other people’s trash when she takes her twice-daily walks around town. It’s a form of community service she started years ago when living in other communities.

“I got tired of seeing all this crap, so I started picking up the trash to make things cleaner and neater,” said Scott, recognizing she picks up the trash, in part, because she’s got an undiagnosed case of obsessive compulsive disorder. “It’s a little bit of a fetish.”

Scott is hard to miss when she’s out on one of her walks. An older woman, 75, walking with determination, while carrying a plastic bag and bending over to pick up litter every few steps. She was quick to say yes when asked if she could be interviewed while she completed one of her loops.

Dressed in a purple velour jumpsuit, with a Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt underneath and purple sunglasses to match, Scott was ready to go the morning of the interview. It was a Sunday, the sun was out and it was one of the last cool mornings the area will see until fall.

Scott lives in the Luther Gardens apartment complex on the northwest side of town. Her typical route takes her around Milton – out Bay Avenue, across Union Street to Willow Street, which brings her to Mulberry Street. She heads toward and then goes down Lavina Street before making her way to the Milton Rail to Trail. When she reaches Federal Street, she heads back toward downtown, making her way to Bodie’s Dairy Market, before going back to Luther Gardens while zigzagging back and forth on Milton’s one-way streets.

Scott estimates her route is about three miles long. Most days, she said, she does it twice.

“I feel awful if I miss them,” she said. She did a pared-down version of her walk for the interview, which meant Lavina Street to the trail was cut out.

Scott is from the West Chester, Pa. area. She moved to Millsboro about 30 years ago and has lived in Milton for the past three. She’s been married twice, most recently for 30 years to poultry farmer Calvin Scott, who died of lung cancer a few years ago.

“I never expected to meet my husband when I came to Delaware,” she said.

She said she met Calvin at a McDonald’s while she was here visiting her sister in the early 1990s. He said he had 50 chickens and she thought that sounded interesting.

“I didn’t realize he meant 50,000 chickens,” she said. “I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.”

Scott said she enjoyed life on the farm – growing soybeans and grain, and taking care of the chickens. She said she didn’t even mind the odor of the chicken houses.

“Calvin would say it’s the smell of money,” said Scott.

Scott said she started picking up trash near a Walmart while walking years ago, when she and Calvin would spend half the year in Delaware and the other half in Florida. It just needed to be done, she said.

Scott is a walker-and-talker, but she also had her head on a swivel and eyes glued to the ground looking for trash. She noticed a piece of plastic in the field off Mulberry Street and picked it up. Sometimes, she said, she’ll walk all over the field to find trash. She walks on the sidewalks, but also on the street side of the curb to see the trash that doesn’t make it down the storm drains.

Her time in Milton has been short, but people already recognize her. A couple drinking some morning coffee while sitting on their porch off Mulberry Street thanked her for helping the town. They noticed her Steelers sweatshirt, saying they are Baltimore Ravens fans, but they didn’t hold it against her.

Scott said she typically wears a safety vest when walking. One time, she said, a driver brushed her arm with a rearview mirror as she made her way down Lavina Street.

“They felt so bad, but everything was fine,” she said, laughing.

Scott’s walking route used to take her up by the Food Lion shopping center. She said she got so good at it that someone at Food Lion offered her a job picking up the trash around the shopping center. She declined.

“I wouldn’t want to do it if I was getting paid for it,” she said.

At Bodie’s, she went to the area between the store and the town’s recently completed parking lot off Magnolia Street. She picked up a few cigarette butts and a couple other pieces of random trash that looked like they fell out of someone’s car, but otherwise the area was in pretty good shape.

“Not too bad today,” she said. “That’s not always the case.”

There are a few pine trees on the corner of Mulberry and Magnolia streets. Scott said she was even picking up the pine shats for a while, but she’s stopped doing that.

Scott wears gloves because she never knows what she’s going to find while out on her walks – diapers, condoms, lottery tickets, just plain trash. She said cigarette butts are what she picks up most.

“These new cars don’t have ashtrays in them, so people just flick them out their windows,” she said.

All the walking helps keep Scott in generally good health. She said she recently lost 40 pounds because she also stopped eating junk.

“My doctor was concerned because I was losing the weight too fast, but it’s frustrating because that’s what they were telling me to do,” she said, shaking her head with a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t tone.

The morning walk didn’t last long. Heading back up Union Street to her apartment in Luther Gardens, it was a little after 9 a.m. and Scott was getting ready to get chores done and finish watching the movie she had on before the walk. She said she’d go back out on another walk later in the afternoon.

“Like I said, I feel awful if I don’t do it,” she said.