Youd never guess to look at her that my Aunt Lucille was a hoarder. Happy and cosmopolitan, she was a civilian personnel officer for U.S. Coast Guard District 13 in Seattle.

    Her towering ocean storm of perpetually red hair was refreshed weekly in a salon downtown at Frederick & Nelson department store. Her closet was sardined with stylish F&N suits. Elegant clothes toppled from her dresser as if it was an overfilled popcorn popper. Mountains of lovely blouses grew upward with an inexorable tectonic force on her bed, forming a snug valley where she slept. And so on. A child of the old Depression, Lucille was determined to never run out of anything, ever.

    Uncle Frank curmudgeonly, secretly generous and boasting a baby-like complexion despite a lifetime of cigarettes made truce with the teetering piles of unopened Bon Appetit magazines and the attic impassibly clogged with a Snoqualmie avalanche of cookbooks. He taught me to read the Daily Racing Form. Our laughing summer days together betting on the ponies at Longacres him successfully, me less so are rose-garlanded memories.

    Twenty years ago this month, staying in their cavernous West Seattle basement among five decades of Christmas ornaments and my grandparents pump organ, I was looking for a job. Ever the contrarian, I was determined not to pursue more-obvious career options in law or politics. My sights were set on a newspaper editorship in some picturesque waterside Washington town.

    Lucille, my dad and other siblings grew up in working-class Fairhaven on a hill above Bellingham Bay and the sawmill where Grandpa Winters worked. From the time I was 12, Fairhaven was the prototype for juvenile fantasies about a house in a forest with an expansive view of rich waters. There I would live out my life, chronicling our complicated Northwestern lives and futures.

    Back in those blessed ancient pre-Internet days, the Sunday Seattle Times ran pages of help-wanted ads, including one from Steve Forrester seeking an editor for Pacific Countys Chinook Observer. He was looking for someone who could apply author John McPhees poetic prose to covering the drama of small-town life on the Washington coast.

    As it happened, a few years earlier McPhee had profiled our familys friend Dave Love, a geologist. Like most McPhee work, it was a stimulating marriage of science reportage and human interest. I greatly admired the book and learned from it. Anyhow, despite my 33 tender years, I talked Steve into letting me have the Observer.

    Before the big corporations threw away even a thin veneer of stewardship in favor of fast money, mature second-growth forest hugged U.S. Highway 101 most of the way between Montesano and Long Beach. Glimpses of Willapa Bay came as a welcome relief from trees, trees and more trees, which were simultaneously inspirational and claustrophobic. Arriving at the Long Beach Peninsula, illuminated by pure and gleaming water, was like slipping across a border into a bright, free country.

    I soon discovered that it is a place with a fairly thick backbone of productive long-term citizens, along with a lot of others whose life choices sent them bouncing westward until they reached the sea and had nowhere else to go. Despite my obvious and enduring flaws arrogance, impatience, pretentiousness, naiveté, mediocre spelling and occasional tailgating all spring to mind they made me feel at home. My office was only picketed once in the early years, and that had to do with my cartoonists painful jabs at politically activist national churches. On the other hand, I was the lucky recipient of many oysters, huckleberry pies and juicy conversations.

     After meeting and falling in love with a West Seattle girl, I took her to meet my friend Edith Olson. Edith covered Oysterville for the Observer in the mid-20th century, and after a career in Alaska retired to Surfside where her main hobbies were writing historical stories for me, and being a thorn in the side of county government. Edith told my wife-to-be, Now, dont you take him away from us! We all grinned, and probably figured that was exactly what was going to happen that I would shortly move back up to the city.

    But as an old friend used to say, fate wears many hats. Here I am, coming right up on 20 years. My mom moved to the coast in 1992. West Seattle girl Donna Magnuson and I got married, raising our daughter here. The job and the place remain fascinating.

    Uncle Frank died in September 1997 and Aunt Lucille in February 2005. Frank lived long enough to see me become a father and Lucille befriended my daughter, who still has a stuffed unicorn toy Lucille gave her during our last visit to her assisted-living apartment. She was one wonderful hugger and remained jolly to the end. Their love and support at the right times are why Im the editor here in one of the worlds best places.

    In my next couple notebooks, Ill be reflecting on what the past 20 years have meant to our area, and pondering our future.

    Observer editor Matt Winters lives in Ilwaco with his wife and daughter. An archive of his columns is available at http://mythtown.blogspot.com.