He was standing at the counter, talking to Tracy, the postmistress, and in the way common to small post offices around here, anyone who walked in was welcome to join the conversation.

In keeping with the sunny but chilly day, he wore a light jacket over his blue button-down shirt. He steadied himself with a cane, but it was a little surprising when he said he was 89.

Disney it ain’t.

I think you know what I mean: all those lovely Walt Disney cartoon movies, in which the birds flutter lovingly around the sky, and the fawns gambol in the meadows, the butterflies flit about like ballerinas, and the ever-so-cute bunnies and squirrels and chipmunks scurry — the word probably was invented to describe cartoon rodents and lagomorphs — nearby.

My little scribbling this week comes to you from a 20-year-old, pristinely restored Northgate OmniKey keyboard.

Back when the crust of the Earth was cooling and computing was young, the Northgate company was one of many upstarts that made very good personal computers. What set them apart, though, were their keyboards. They had a pleasant, clicky feel that many users loved. Northgate sold their keyboards separately, but apparently few people then bought their computers, too, so they went out of business. This made having a Northgate keyboard even cooler.

It was the first gray, windy, wintry day, a day that could be in November or February. Such days can chill one to the bone, physically but spiritually, too.

The kind of day, it was, that reminds us that much of nature shuts down for months each year.

On such days, we must dig deep to find hope; the promise of a brighter tomorrow is not always as close as we’d wish.

They simply could not believe it.

During my recent trip to New York, a friend asked why I so like the rural life, the small-town existence of southeastern Ohio. The answer is so obvious to me that I had to think for a minute before answering. It doesn’t get put into words all that often.

There was a time when one went to the butcher shop — or the back yard — and fetched back something called a “stewing hen.”

Modern chickens go from hatching to the grocery store in a matter of weeks, but not the stewing hen. It is what gave us such phrases as “a tough old bird” and “no spring chicken.”

Sitting on a back porch in upstate New York, having coffee and enjoying a beautiful morning, I feel like I’m on a different planet.

The drive here was unremarkable, except that the nifty new GPS gadget blew up about eight hours into the excursion. I have another one, but as with a lot of technology, GPS machines — OK, devices — have gotten far more feature-rich while becoming a lot cheaper. This one is (well, was) very nifty, with a screen the size of a postcard and a far better way of giving directions than my old one.

The story has it that Townes Van Zandt, the folksinger, was asked how many kinds of music there are. “Two,” was his reply.

Asked to name them, he said, “The blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”

I’ve thought about that story over the years and can never quite decide whether I agree with the late Van Zandt. It seems to me that he was at bottom saying that some songs are sad and other songs are happy. If he’d said it that way, though, it wouldn’t have been a memorable story, would it?

Out here in the woods, if you’re going to watch television, chances are you’ll get it via a satellite dish.

This has its annoyances — the “local” stations the satellite company chooses are in West Virginia, for instance. I wonder what television news covered there before they had meth-lab explosions to lead the newscasts, but never mind. There’s no television at all when it’s raining.

Pity the poor person who doesn’t live in or near a college town, who lives in a place where autumn arrives and all that changes is the weather.

In a college town, there is an air of excitement. The energy level increases. It’s exactly the opposite of the normal order of things, where spring is the time of rebirth. For a college town, it is the fall when everything, yes, springs back to life.

It’s hard to imagine, but it’s been 35 years this September since the great American rap artist Walter Brennan died.

He crossed my mind the other day. Funny how the mind works. Overdue mowing of the back yard had revealed a nest of something that stings, though many of the insects were masticated by the mower. That led me to remember a line Brennan uttered in the movie “To Have and Have Not” (in which his character was named, I think, Grandpa McCoy): “Was you ever stung by a dead bee?”

As a public service, I would like to let everyone know that the source of all dust in the universe is apparently somewhere near me.

No, I did not happen to move to the mountain of motes. It has always been the case. No matter where I am, there, too, is dust. I sometimes feel like the “Peanuts” character Pigpen.

The shape was tiny but unmistakable to anyone who has spent years watching for turtles while driving.

I do not know whether the identification of roadside critters, alive and dead, is a skill that everyone develops. It came to me early on and is now so automatic that I couldn’t stop it if I tried.

Somewhere, deep in a box someplace, I have an original, unused ticket for all three days of the “Woodstock Music & Art Fair,” held 40 years ago this coming weekend.

I think I still have it, though I haven’t seen it for years. I hope I do, because I paid for it.

The summer of 1969 was an interesting one. It is remembered primarily for three events: The first moon landing, the Manson Family murders, and Woodstock.

The e-mail message was entirely unexpected and entirely welcome.

It came from my agent in New York (I’ve tried to find a non-pompous way of saying that, but there is none): “Long time no speak. If you are free and open to an idea for a new book, give me a call.”