MISQUAH — This week, for the first time in longer than anyone here can readily document, the Pilot-Independent has no obituaries to print. No deaths were reported in Misquah or the surrounding townships in the past week, and so this page, which is usually among the most carefully read in the paper, is given over instead to saying so.

We note it, rather than simply leaving the space to advertising, because in a town this size an empty obituaries page is felt as plainly as a full one. People notice who is here. They notice, with a particular and quiet attention, who is no longer, and the week the column comes up empty is, in its own way, news — the rare kind that is good. It happened, too, in the same week that brought two babies (see Around Town), a symmetry the arithmetic of a small place allows in both directions only rarely, and never, in this editor’s memory, this neatly.

We are aware, writing this, that the page will fill again. It always fills again; that is the arrangement, and we do not expect or ask to be exempt from it. The Rev. Karl Lindholm of First Lutheran, asked for a word, declined to make too much of it and then made exactly enough: “It was a good week. We’ll take it. We won’t get used to it.” The staff, having knocked firmly on the nearest available wood, and on a second piece to be sure, declines to say anything further, and will see you next week, when the column will, in the ordinary and merciful course of things, have names in it again. For this one week, it does not, and that — quietly, gratefully — is the news.