There was a blue moon over the weekend. While many might think a blue moon just means the moon looks blue, there’s actually more rhyme and reason to it than that – a blue moon is when there is a second full moon during a one-month period. Because August was a five-week month, a full moon fell at the beginning as well as on the 31st, making the full moon on the 31st “blue.” Because they only happen every so often, the phrase “once in a blue moon” came about. Another one is not due until 2015.

The blue moon means quite a bit to me. It was on a blue moon that I signed the paperwork to purchase the Polk County News from my parents several years ago. We knew ownership was due to change, and when I realized a blue moon was coming on the last day of the year in 2009, I felt that was the day it should all happen. After all, it’s only once in a blue moon you get the chance to become a part of history – living it, sharing it, promoting it, reporting it.

Now here I am, a blue moon later, and whether I was ready for it or not, I have taken the reigns of the paper full throttle. I expected my mother, Ingrid, to hold my hand and have my back for many more years to come. Unfortunately we never really know what can happen once in a blue moon. Those of you who have kept up with the paper know she was diagnosed with cancer earlier in the year. She has been unable to work at her beloved newspaper for several months. I’m doing everything I can to hold the place, as well as myself, together.

I don’t know how to fully express my feelings for this newspaper. While all the world goes digital and predicts the demise of print media, I shrug my shoulders and explain that small towns are different. I tell the world that our local paper gives them something they can’t get elsewhere and hope it will sustain me for the rest of my life. Time will tell.

Last weekend’s blue moon reminded me, too, of a picture my mother once took of a blue moon over Parksville Lake. She was on her way home from a meeting in Ducktown, saw the moon and pulled over to snap a picture. It was long ago enough that she actually did it with film, not digital. A copy of it hangs in my parents’ house on Towee right now. And now it seems it is me driving home from county meetings while the blue moon looms overhead, illuminating the gorge.

I’d debated off and on for years when would be a proper moment to whip out a personal column. I never knew what my first topic should be, so I never did it. I figure it can’t hurt to give people a little insight into who I am, and I think I am only recently figuring out who that might be. I’ve found in this business I seem to have lots of friends and lots of folks who don’t care so much for me, regardless of whether they know me or not. But I will do my job just the same. And once in a blue moon, perhaps I will have something to say.