Gossip is a fact of life in society but small town gossip serves as the main source of news for many people. When the local newspaper is a weekly and the Roanoke TV stations need both a map and a GPS to find the county, gossip becomes the paper of record.

Gossip also provides salacious news you won’t find in the pages of The Floyd Press and on news at 6 — like who’s sleeping with who, who’s no longer involved with who and who left town after the rabbit died.

Salicious gossip, of course, is what most want to hear and the juicier the better — even if untrue.

Current gossip centers around the breakup of some high-profile couples in the area. In the past week, I’ve been told of three county marriages that are breaking up. I can’t speak for two of them but I can correct the record on the third.

Amy and I are not, repeat, not getting a divorce.

Hell, we don’t have time to get a divorce. We’ve both been so busy lately that we see each other in passing, which is probably why people haven’t seen us together a lot and that fueled rumors that we had split.

The rumor that we are getting a divorce started, I am told, in a beauty shop where a beautician said she hadn’t seen much of Amy lately and wondered if everything was OK. From there the gossip mushroomed into a full-fledged divorce. I heard over lunch when a friend sat down and said how sorry she was to hear about our divorce and that Amy had moved out of our home. So when I got home and found her working in the kitchen, I asked: “What are you doing here? I heard you moved out.”

To which she replied: “Just like a newspaperman. You got it wrong. I didn’t leave. I kicked you out.”

I’m always the last to know.