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Suddenly, I was standing in a newspaper office with black ink coating my fingerprints, a gray silk I hadn’t felt on my skin since precisely July 31, when I lost my job at a Greer newspaper due to business closure. Standing there in a middle-Tennessee town, I was suddenly sitting in on a meeting, getting a feel for how a different newspaper does things, how it might feel to work here when I move in April, learning their process. 

During the meeting, I heard a stream of sirens screaming down the road and then saw the flash of red lights breezing past. My first thought was if I had time, I’d chase the firetrucks to the scene. I’d write the story. I’d tell the public. 

I looked back down at the freshest issue of the newspaper in my lap, brushed my thumb over a picture on A1, and rubbed the grit into my skin. 

I remembered how the Tryon Daily Bulletin had groomed me when I was an eager 19-year-old writer and how they showed me how to be persistent––a journalist. I remembered how I’d been assigned my first interview, a Q&A with a local couple for the Bulletin’s monthly magazine, Life in Our Foothills. I’d remembered my nerves, how I’d forgotten to ask basic questions. 

After the meeting, I dove into the publisher’s office to further discuss my experience and my thoughts on the meeting, at which point I told him it felt very homey. Exactly like what I was used to. 

Then we talked about my experience with crime writing, and I remembered the many times I had––as a Bulletin reporter––called the Tryon PD or Polk County Sheriff’s Office about a case or investigation, and I felt my foundation in journalism quake beneath my feet. Not like a fault line cracking open, but like a mild disturbance, a reminder of where exactly my path had started and who exactly had paved it. 

I told the publisher, “I’m still a columnist at the Bulletin,” to which they responded with an approving nod––to which I responded to my own words with a twinge of guilt. 

“Shoot,” I thought, “my column was due last week, and I got carried away!” Admittedly, I forgot this biweekly priority because I got busy waiting tables and planning for my wedding next month. But that quake in my foundation––that rumble that whispered, “Don’t look so far into the future that the past becomes blurry” ––gave me all the motivation I needed to come home from Tennessee and write all this down. 

I’ll use this column as a chance to blatantly say: Thank you, readers, and thank you, Tryon Daily Bulletin, for raising me to be the journalist I am today. I owe it all to you for being the cornerstone of my career. 

So I got up to leave the Tennessee newspaper office after a long and promising meeting and shook the publisher’s hand. 

“Also,” he said, “I like that you like ink on your hands.”

I held out my palm as a display of the mess a newspaper makes on press day. 

“Me too,” I said. And I did not wash them.