I take long walks in the morning, a mile or two at least, sometimes three or four. It’s a peaceful walk at dawn down the rural roads of upper New London County.

Not one to waste time mono-tasking, I pick up litter along the way. I keep almost 10 miles of road clean.

I find all kinds of stuff. Mostly it’s beer cans, snack bags, fast-food containers, little nip bottles and assorted rags of styrofoam. Like everything else in the universe, each item is a sign of something. Most of the signs indicate that a lot of people are driving around drunk, and that Connecticut still has a substantive population of people who weren’t raised very well.

Now and then I find a gem, not something worth money but, to me, worth thought, little mysteries of litter, signs pointing into the unknown and inexplicable. You won’t see these signs if you’re driving by, and you sure won’t find them on the internet. You need to walk, and you need to poke around where other people don’t poke.

One bright morning I saw a dull green glint under dead leaves. It was a 7-Up bottle, an old one with the label printed right on the glass. It was dirty but cleaned up real nice. Not a scratch on it. I gave it to the historical society. They did some research and learned it had been made in 1948.

Now how did that happen: a bottle lying within six feet of a road for 72 years? Or had someone recently driven by in a Studebaker and finally finished off the last of a very flat soda and chucked the bottle out the window?

I was wondering about that when I started finding golf balls, one or two a day, miles apart, on various roads. Each ball was unique, either a brand unlike the others or bearing the name of a conference or tournament. Some were lime green, some florescent pink. Never the same ball twice.

This was a sign of what? Someone disposing of a golf ball collection by tossing one or two a day out a car window? If you have an explanation, please contact me.

Likewise, if you’d like a golf ball collection, I have more than a hundred and no particular interest in golf.

Nor do I have any particular interest in opossums, but a small one lying in the road caught my attention. I was driving at the time.

Like most opossums, it was dead. But not flat. It lay curled up like a fetus, its tiny front paws crossed just below its chin. Playing possum? I doubted it, but in a moment of pointless mercy, I swerved around.

The next morning, I walked past that same spot. The opossum now lay in a grassy area beside the road, still unscathed. Someone had actually stopped and moved the poor little thing to a safer place.

I was comforted to find a sign of a person like that. Some throw their fast-foot trash out the window. Some drive around drunk. And some will stop to do a dead possum a favor.

Some are a little too careless with their mail. I found a damp and wrinkled letter from the Bureau of Child Support Enforcement addressed to a certain William. William had an outstanding balance of $49,657.01 in unpaid child support.

The child, a girl, did not have William’s last name. William’s last name just happened to be the same as the name on a mailbox just up the road. The mailbox also bore, rather boldly, the title of a position in our state criminal justice system — a sign of hypocrisy and pride.

Being a person of felonious instinct, I immediately sensed the potential for extortion. But I restrained myself. The signs weren’t all pointing in the same direction. The car in the driveway was a Prius with a Hillary bumper sticker.

Was William a feminist dead-beat dad with an environmental conscience? It didn’t make sense. (Then again, neither did the 7-Up bottle, the golf balls or the opossum.)

Months later I found a large damp and wrinkled envelope addressed to a woman with William’s last name. The address was a state office in Hartford.

She, it seemed, was the person with liberal inclinations and a job in law enforcement. And William was, in all likelihood — I’m just guessing here — divorced.

In an unrelated discovery a few miles away, I found another sign of familial distress. It was a travel mug in perfect condition. It had just one word on it: Mom.

How sad is that? Sadder than a dead possum. Sadder than abandoned golf balls or a cold and lonely old 7-Up bottle. Sadder than drunk litterbugs. Almost as sad as a dead-beat dad. So many signs of sadness, and no one sees them but me.

Glenn Alan Cheney is managing editor of the literary press New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@cheneybooks.com.