The newspapers were strewn about the floor in various states of disembowelment, like misshapen corpses of weeks and news gone by. Their deaths may or may not be in vain, depending on your outlook. They were carved apart in the annual newspaper ritual —entering the state newspaper competition.

It was the second time in as many days that papers had covered the floor and left life in disarray. I guess you could say it was one of those weeks.

The first was when the staff had to return all the contents of the office back to its original place after it was removed so that new flooring could be installed.

The old flooring was getting rather ragged after many years of use and abuse and had become an allergen for the staff.

In first removing the carpet, all of the office's contents had to be taken out to the hallway and other parts of the building. As the furniture, papers, tables and equipment were moved back into the rooms, it soon became apparent that we had kept some items of no value and misplaced several items of great value. But I'll explain that further in just a minute.

As for the contest, the newspaper has been entering stories, photos and entire newspapers for several years. This year, it took the better part of half a day for me to go through my entries and the ones for the newspaper at large. Each news staff member goes through and tries to find examples of his or her best work, while I have the task of selecting the best editions of the paper as a whole.

Typically, The Alleghany News has done pretty well, winning awards several times for design, photography, news coverage and, in a separate contest, many more for advertising design.

However, each entry requires time to pull out the old newspapers and then to try and figure out which one a judge from some other state might think would be worthy of an award.

Now and then there are easy choices, like the photo that exemplifies perfection or the edition in which everything seemed to go right. However, with the contest, there are only two random choices for the months which may be entered. This year, the best news coverage had to be issues in either November 2006 or January 2007. No other months need apply.

As most of you know, the entire county is huddled next to their wood stoves (or central heat vent) for most of January, so there is little opportunity for us to show off our stellar coverage of public events. So that left only one month to consider. It all comes down to picking two of the four or five monthly papers to enter and hoping it turns out well.

In the end, there really doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to which entries actually win. In one recent contest year, the newspaper took a 'general excellence' award, making it one of the top three newspapers in the state for overall quality. However, none of the other entries individually took awards.

Sometimes it makes you wonder how things work. Contests in and of themselves are really hard for me to understand. Since so much of judging the merit of what we do is in the eye of the beholder, it's almost impossible to figure out which item may or may not be excellent in the eyes of a judge.

When staff members have gone to the awards ceremony and display of winning entries, often we have wondered how or why certain entries ever got past the gate. Other times, the excellence of the work was so far and above the other entries it really would have been easy to judge.

As for cleaning up from the new flooring, I found items that I hadn't seen for years, including parts of old files long abandoned, books and magazines (some of which dated back to the 1990s and prior) and broken equipment, desk organizers and dusty pictures of days long gone. Among them were files on everything imaginable, ranging from officials and local government to clubs and businesses that no longer exist, along with a smattering of lost photos. Some of the items have been in the files since before my tenure here, while others I have placed there myself. As I sorted the items in an attempt to put them back in order, I started to realize that I was, in fact, handling local history. Of the photos and information that has been accumulated, no doubt much of it exists only here. In this electronic age, filing cabinets have taken on the look of dinosaurs, with most photos and files stored for a short time in electronic formats and then discarded. Digital pictures, files of stories written and information gathered and typed into documents are all in 'virtual' formats and seldom exist in hard-copy form.

While that may sound nostalgic, I can say I don't miss those days at all. The abilities we have now weren't even possible 10 years ago. The newspaper is better for it, as are our lives.

There was a time when every photo had to be placed individually on the negative at the time of printing, when each picture was developed and printed individually in a musty darkroom by staff of the newspaper. Each 'leg' or column of copy was hand cut and inserted onto grid sheets for printing and every headline had to be written separately and sized to fit based on a 'best guess' scenario.

In cleaning up, I threw away some of the red squares that we used to put in the places that photos soon would occupy, along with a few sheets of mylar that would have been used for color paste-ups way back when these things took hours instead of minutes. That's why they weren't done as often.

It took me an entire day to get my office back in order and to get the biggest part of the files and folders in their appropriate places. It was tedious, but nice to take a little stroll through local history.

The pages of dusty newspapers and files may indeed one day be my own only testament to my passing through this life. I can only hope that whomever comes across them shares my sense of nostalgia and looks back with a smile—or that he or she just happens to be a packrat.