Some older folks take up golf, some travel, some go to Florida for their retirement. Some others who don’t have the right swing or have done too much traveling or can’t abide Florida think of ways to pass the time at home. That’s easiest if you like where you live and you can find something interesting, maybe even fulfilling, to spend your time doing. It doesn’t work for long if you give your retirement over entirely to TV or social media. 

I’ve done a lot of volunteering and still do and find it definitely fulfilling. I recommend it. But long ago I thought one day I’d write creatively. That idea got rekindled and because I’d always had to write stuff for work, I had the Strunk and White down pretty well. I’ve always had opinions about things and have accumulated 75 years of dealing with the world so I have stories to tell. The creative part was making them interesting enough for people other than myself. 

I decided to get my practice by becoming a volunteer citizen journalist for our local newspaper, the Spirit of Jefferson, the oldest continuously published paper in West Virginia. I had five decades of reading the news and was pretty much on top of goings-on locally and nationally. (I don’t count two other decades when I didn’t care about the news. There’s better things to do as a child and teenager.) 

During those five decades I had absorbed a lot of how journalists do things, or so I thought, and so started practicing with op-eds and letters to the editor when I’d get exercised about some issue or other. Eventually, sixty-five came along and I could devote more time to being indignant and blowing my stack. Enough years of that plus a heart attack and it was time to cool it down. And with that realization I became a citizen journalist.

I applied to an ad in the Spirit looking for freelancers.The Spirit is published in Charles Town, the county seat of Jefferson County, the easternmost county in the state. The county borders on Maryland and Virginia, separated from them by the Potomac River and the northern tail of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s an interesting place, best known maybe for its history. For instance, the Charles of Charles Town, is Charles Washington, the brother of George Washington. But it was John Brown who put us on the map, figuratively, for his unsuccessful raid on Harpers Ferry in the cause of abolishing slavery, thereby helping precipitate the Civil War.

We’ve come a long way since then and our issues have been less fraught in the last century. We’re still an agricultural economy, but we’re transitioning gradually into a tourism economy. There’s a lot for people from outside to come here for-–the history, the rivers, the arts even. Many who come, return, some even to live. We’ve also become a community of long-haul commuters (to D.C. and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs) and retirees. West Virginia as a whole is losing population, more so than any other state, but in Jefferson County our population is growing and it’s growing more diverse.

We in Jefferson County are lots and lots of different kinds of people, with different political slants and different likes and dislikes. But we are neighbors, all of us, and neighbors in my view should know one another. They should know one another well enough that they can find something to appreciate in one another, and overlook or at least tolerate the points on which they disagree. And that, simply enough, is what I decided to do when the editor of the Spirit took me on as a contributor. For almost two years I wrote the Neighborhood Watch column which is about documenting and appreciating our diversity, equity, and inclusion, I just gave it away that I’m a diehard liberal. 

The Neighborhood Watch stimulated a lot of other mind rumblings and I expanded my scope to include other kinds of writing, including more thoughtful opinion pieces about society and politics, as well as personal recollections, and courses I put together for the Lifelong Learning program at our local college, Shepherd University in Shepherdstown. Much of this I also put out for a larger audience at Medium.com, a writers’ collective online. The writers there help hone my writing craft, ground me in what’s relevant, and feed me good ideas to riff on.

The long and the short of this is that there’s a large pile of stuff on this blog and more coming, though on no fixed schedule. By the way, the blog itself got its start with the immensely important help of my niece, Lisa Paskewitz, an emerging writer in her own right. She also taught me how to do some of the mechanics on the site itself, so I’m also learning on how blogs work under the hood. That’s fun too, when it’s not frustrating.