MISQUAH — The population sign at the south edge of town will read 3,914 for another week, the count unchanged since spring — though the pressman, Earl, who keeps the sign as a matter of personal honor, repainted the final 4 on Saturday after deciding it had gone “a little thin,” and then repainted it again Sunday after deciding Saturday’s was worse.

Earl has kept the sign for longer than he will say, mixing the green himself to a shade the hardware store no longer stocks and touching up the digits on a schedule known only to him. He treats it less as a sign than as a kind of civic ledger that happens to face the highway. “A sign that’s right except for one thin number isn’t right,” he said, wiping a brush on a rag that has wiped that brush for years. “People read that sign coming into town. First thing they see. Last thing they see leaving. It’s going to be correct, and it’s going to be even, and the green’s going to match, because the day it doesn’t match is the day somebody decides we’ve let the place go.”

The number itself will not hold long. With two deaths this week (see Obituaries) and no births reported, the arithmetic will revisit the question soon enough, and the count will fall — a kind of change Earl has had to make more often than the other kind, and never once gotten used to. “You paint the sad ones right out of respect,” he said, “and the happy ones right out of joy, and lately it’s been mostly respect.” He says he is ready either way, and has the right brush, and the right green, and would prefer, all things being equal, the kind of change that goes up, and stands at the sign a moment longer than the work requires, the way a person does at a thing he has decided to be in charge of.