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A funny thing happened recently. I looked at the back of my phone’s yellow case and noticed it was speckled with faint fingerprints, just very faint, made from putting down my damp coffee cup, picking up the Daily News to read for a while, and then picking up my phone to put something on the calendar. Newspaper ink on my iPhone. That, I can tell you, has never happened. And man, I’ve missed that feeling of the newsprint between your fingers. I moved to little Washington (is it still okay to call it that?) in early January. After growing up in Bertie County and leaving home for the first time, going off to boarding school, in 1986, it’s surely been a while since I’ve really live lived in this area. I was 16 then. One of the first things I noticed, right off the bat upon coming back here, besides the tree lined streets and colorful homes, the coffeeshops and walkways over the water, was the Washington Daily News building. It was a December sunny day, which isn’t all the way sunny. I drove into town and that particular building just seemed to frankly look me straight in the face as I sat at the stoplight at 3rd and Market Street as if to say, “What took you so long?” I stopped reading newspapers. I had a family to raise in a slap-bam world. I stopped coming home.

My Dad passed away this year, and I think that’s part of what brought me back, closer to where he always was, where we were together. Where the way the air sits and the light falls is the most familiar of all the ways air can sit and light can fall. Which is to say, this feels like home. And that brings me back to those faint fingerprints on my phone case. It’s been a long time since I’ve held a bonafide newspaper in my hands and took my time reading every word. I sat soaking up the Pamlico Life section like a sponge. When Al Klemm talked about stomping the snake with a hoe, I felt my dad nod in agreement. That’s what you do. And the light from the south window fell right. And the birds in the tree branches sounded right. I don’t know about you, but I have this place where my elbow sits anchored against my side, as I hold a newspaper with my holding hand and turn the pages with my page-turning hand. It’s a satisfying moment when both hands come together for a second, too, and then you snap them back open to the next page and give the whole thing a shake so it lays just so before you. You mean newspaper-reading business.

It’s a little dance, isn’t it? I’ve missed that. I’ve missed feeling at home. I miss my Dad.

It’s nice here a couple blocks from the Pamlico River, which surely remembers me even if no one else does anymore. And maybe something I tried to harden in order to be out there away from home for so long, ready for whatever came at me, is softening with every sunset. Maybe loss can loosen its grip a little. I folded the paper back together and stacked it up loosely on the coffee table the way you do. All the inner pages were kind of free by then, you can’t quite put them back. I didn’t feel the urge to pick up my phone again for hours.

Libby Dickerson is a Washington resident.