Well I have to tell you I kind of feel at home.

I worked at a sister newspaper of the Roanoke-Chowan News Herald quite a few years ago. I came to the Ahoskie office once a week to get the newspaper to press.

Lots of things have changed at the newspaper since then, but Cal and my son Thadd are two of the people that I worked with that are still here. Learning to write and put together a newspaper would have been very difficult without their help.

Cal was always the go to person if you wanted to know anything about taking photos. I like to think I learned to take pretty good pictures under his teaching. He is the person who never raises his voice, has all the answers and makes you laugh.

Thadd was the one person I could ask questions I was embarrassed to ask anyone else. You always feel some questions are dumb when you start a new job. I felt sure he wouldn’t reveal my ignorance if I didn’t.

There has been a lot of progress made since I worked on a newspaper. Technology is now a big part of putting the paper together. The paper is laid out on computer and pictures are taken digitally. All of that was done manually when I worked at the paper. We used a manual camera, developed our own pictures and cut and pasted to put pages together.

My life is marked by progress too.

I now live by myself and am retired. I can recommend the retirement to anyone. The living alone is good for some while others cannot deal with it. I have enjoyed it very much. After spending most of my life looking out for others, I can now do whatever my whim of the moment dictates. I can visit relatives who live in other places and stay as long as I like. I can go to bed early or late, rise when I choose, cook or not as I please, go off on vacations or shopping trips with friends.

I must admit I have gotten progressively older and more forgetful somewhere along the way. Don’t ask how old. A woman who would tell her age would tell anything.

Speaking of people telling things, there are those who say you are not getting older, only better. They’re the people you need to watch. They definitely are not people you can trust.

I don’t understand the term &uot;over the hill&uot; either. If you have gotten over the hill, it should be smooth sailing down the other side, kind of like going down a sliding board don’t you think?

Here are some of the things I have noticed about aging.

Your children get to laugh at your antics now.

You smile at people and talk to them while your mind is scrambling furiously for their name.

Your noun of choice is whatchamacallit.

You go into a room to get something and walk back to your starting point to see if you can remember what it was you wanted.

You do the same things you laughed at your grandmother for doing.

All the people you went to school with are old.

You feel hung over in the morning, but haven’t had a drop to drink.

It takes as long to get started in the morning as it used to take Billy Kilmer to warm up for a football game. (I can hear people saying, Billy who? He played so long for the Redskins; it took him four hours to warm up.)

You need a list when you leave the house or you’ll forget what you were supposed to do.

Um. What were we talking about?