I was washing dishes when I had to stop, pause my audiobook, and sit down. A tiny bird I’d never even heard of until a few days earlier — the jenny wren — was singing to me, delivering an important message that I didn’t want to miss.

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For a few years, I’ve published a Substack newsletter about the history of people and places in Berkeley County, West Virginia. What began as a simple family tree on Ancestry.com ten years ago evolved into a passion.

For a long time, I regarded this as a cute little hobby, something to pass the time outside my real job as a professional journalist. But recently, I had an epiphany: This work isn’t frivolous. It’s a rich, ongoing historical research project. There’s a reason this work engrosses me so much, why it never tires or bores me. Why I remain devoted to it despite modest financial returns.

This work — to weave together interlocking stories of humble Appalachians in the insular Shenandoah Valley — nourishes my writer’s soul because it’s writing that means something, writing that endures beyond the 24-hour news cycle.

This realization seemed to arise out of nowhere on a recent afternoon, although I’m certain there was a long underground process — mycelial, invisible — that came before its fruiting.

I publish that newsletter every ten days, and my next publication date was two days away. I needed to choose from among the dozens of drafts I had squirreled away. I opened the folder on my Google Drive and randomly chose a story about The Lace Store, which I’d researched and written a year earlier.

The Lace Store was a Martinsburg, West Virginia, institution for several decades of the 1900s. The business started out selling only lace — hence the name — but expanded so much over the years that it became like a small-town Walmart where families went to buy coats, train sets, school textbooks and more.

The “hook” of my story was a man named Billy Clohan, who’d started out as a clerk in the store after high school, but took over managing the whole place after its owner died suddenly in his 50s. When I published the article, it represented a shift. It was the first of my newsletter’s 228 articles in which I presented the work for what it’s always been: enduring historical research.

The same afternoon that the Lace Store newsletter hit my subscribers’ inboxes, I was washing dishes while listening to an audiobook. As my soapy cloth passed over forks and plates, I encountered a passage about an elderly woman who’d abandoned her house decades earlier in rural Kentucky. The narrator visited that old house and noticed a jenny wren had built a nest on a shelf in the shed.

Jenny wren.

That’s when I turned off the tap and pressed pause on the audiobook.

In the Lace Store article, one small detail I’d included was that seventy years ago, the store manager had built a house near his place of business so he could walk to work. The home where he and family lived was on Jenny Wren Drive.

I didn’t immediately understand why, but I knew this synchronicity was significant.

A sign to keep going

For decades, I treated synchronicities as instructions: signs showing me which way to go, messages telling me what to do next.

But lately, I’m realizing synchronicities are confirmations. They show up after I’ve already decided, saying: Yes, keep going.

The audiobook I was listening to that day was Braiding Sweetgrass. The memoir by botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer is a meditation on indigenous wisdom and plant ecology. Throughout the book, she braids together three strands: scientific knowledge from her botany training, traditional ecological knowledge from her Potawatomi heritage, and personal narrative. The book asks: What if we saw plants not as objects, but as teachers? What if we approached the land with reciprocity instead of extraction? She documents how indigenous practices — often dismissed as primitive — contain sophisticated ecological wisdom that science only later began to understand.

It fascinated me that I had chosen this 12-year-old book to read now, and that it told me a story about a jenny wren on the same day a jenny wren appeared in my newly published history article — the first one of over two hundred articles that I presented with the gravitas it deserved.

No wonder Kimmerer had stepped in to be an ideal mentor for me at this crossroads.

Two months after my layoff, instead of plunging immediately into a job search, I decided to thoughtfully plant seeds for my future work. Kimmerer does exactly what I’m learning to do: bridge institutional credentials with sacred wisdom and story.

For years in the world of newspapers, I watched as the focus became increasingly centered on gaming algorithms for clicks. I didn’t love this, but I adapted to it and learned to play the web traffic game very well.

I was part of a digital team that helped pitch in to attract digital eyeballs with ephemeral and sometimes silly stories. Two alligators fighting on someone’s front porch. A hot cop who jumps in a river to save a woman. The top 10 coolest weapons in U.S. military history.

In probably my most viral moment, I came up with a headline that got copied by news organizations across the state and got me invited onto someone’s podcast: Five Guys Arrested Over Fistfight at Five Guys.

I later moved on to another role that allowed me to help cover the military and veteran community, a contribution that meant a lot to me as my partner Logan is a disabled combat veteran who served in Iraq.

When my most recent employer went through a bankruptcy and was sold to a venture capitalist firm, the new owners laid off most of the legacy staff, including myself. I began refreshing my portfolio, adding some of my old articles that I was most proud of.

These articles were among the richest writing of my career, articles that shone like a refinished pine floor after flimsy vinyl laminate is peeled away. These are the articles I wrote when I had the chance to slow down just a little bit, to choose topics that meant a lot to me, to get a feel for the personality and vibe of the people I wrote about. To take the time to notice textures and details, a tone of voice, the way the light hit. To reflect on what one small story says about the larger human condition.

After years inside metrics-obsessed modern newsrooms, it felt nourishing to reacquaint myself with some of these deeper and more layered stories.

I wrote about a tiny old church that felt increasingly unwelcomed in a gentrifying neighborhood. About a hospital chaplain who grabbed a TropiGrill sandwich in between comforting families on the worst day of their lives. About a forgotten spring hiding behind a tall condo building. About an underestimated secretary whose vision and creativity surpassed the high-paid executives she reported to. About a veteran who served honorably and is navigating re-entry into everyday civilian life.

Disappeared stores on quiet streets. Braiding Sweetgrass came into my life just as I was rediscovering them.

In the chapter where the jenny wren shows up, Kimmerer documents an elderly woman (Hazel) whose life reflects the history of a place. The author visits an abandoned house to witness the evidence of its past life. In the nest, she sees physical evidence of life continuing in forgotten places. She preserves memory before it disappears.

The jenny wren nests in overlooked places. A nest is a home built from scraps. A shelter constructed in a tight space, made from materials others might overlook. A safe place for new life. My work feels best when it weaves ideas from words to build metaphorical nests, creating protective containers for otherwise overlooked stories.