Simon Winchester's smallest beat was a town of 900

Writing about the whole world is easier than writing about your neighbors, because the world never runs into you at the dump. Simon Winchester did both. He died of a heart attack on November 3 at his farm in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, at 82. His reporting ran from Bloody Sunday and Watergate to three months in an Argentine jail during the Falklands war. Then came the books, including The Professor and the Madman, the bestseller about how the Oxford English Dictionary got made.

Most of this week's obituaries skip the Sandisfield Times, which he started in 2010 for a town of about 900 people spread over 53 square miles. The schools had moved away, and an asphalt truck had run into the general store, so the dump was about the only place people met. He and some volunteers put out a monthly on $12,000 a year. It had columns on bees and stargazing, and a story he "absolutely could not turn down" about a cat named Jellybean, shot with a BB gun, though not seriously. "Behind every front door, there's a story," he said.

Jeremiah wrote to people who had landed somewhere they never chose. Around 597 BC, Babylon hauled Jerusalem's king, his court and its craftsmen into exile, and prophets among them kept promising a quick trip home. Jeremiah sent a letter telling them to stop waiting.

Jeremiah 29:5Build houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them.

Then he told them to pray for the city that took them, because their peace was bound up with its peace. His word for peace is shalom, a place made whole for everyone in it.

Winchester found out how hard that is. He was a Londoner who became a U.S. citizen in 2011, and some locals first took him for a know-it-all with a second address in Manhattan. His paper came out swinging. Early on it opposed a candidate for selectman, and the man lost, which felt like a win for good government. Then, in the months after, the man's baby died of a long illness, and then his wife. The paper caused none of it, but the man it had campaigned against was still a neighbor, and now a grieving one. When the Berkshire Edge profiled him in 2018, it was still painful for him to talk about. What he took from those years, he told the Edge, was that in a town that small you have to be "a bit more kind and gentle."

The peace of a town includes the man who lost the election.

By 2018 he had handed off the editing, but he still wrote columns and stories on school budget debates. The Edge called them "the sort of story usually covered by a cub reporter," done "with genuine interest." Turnout at town meetings went up. "People feared it was going to be very snobby at first," said Margaret O'Clair, who wrote the bird column until, she said, she ran out of birds. "But now everybody reads it."

So what do you owe the place you end up? Jeremiah's answer is your work and your prayers, long before it feels like home. Winchester gave Sandisfield the one skill he had, and then he learned the gentler half of it. The neighbor you were sure was wrong, even the one who lost, is part of the peace you are there to seek.