If the U.S. Postal Service closes up shop on West Chestnut Street in downtown Lancaster, as it has suggested it will do as part of the continued scaling back of its retail operations, some regular customers are bound to grouse about the inconvenience.

Those not inclined to trek over to Ganse Apothecary on West King Street — the lone remaining postal substation in the city — would have to find transportation out of the city to weigh their packages and buy their stamps.

Beyond the physical logistics, closing the office would tear away another small piece of the fabric of Lancaster. The post office has always been a setting for happy accidents, where people connect or reconnect by chance in the course of a day's business. Like the coffee shops, bakeries, galleries and markets, the post office is a hub of daily life.

In Talmage, a sneeze-and-you-miss-it village spread out along Route 772 between Brownstown and Leola, there are no restaurants, shops or convenience stores. The post office sits alone at the heart of the community.

The "country" post offices in Talmage and Drumore are also on the chopping block as the Postal Service tries to claw its way out of the financial pit opened up by Internet technology, which has driven down mail volume.

From a business standpoint, it makes no sense to maintain rural post offices that lose money and serve only a couple of hundred residents. Many of these offices should have been shuttered years ago.

With the Postal Service hemorrhaging several billion dollars a year, an 11 percent reduction in its retail outlets — 3,653 of its nearly 32,000 branch offices — is clearly in order. The move will save an estimated $200 million a year.

Those numbers probably don't matter much to the residents of Talmage, who traipse up the steps, through the hedges, past the flagpole, across the porch and into the post office every day. That office is the last well-traveled public space in a town that once boasted, among other amenities, a tavern, a gas station and trolley service.

It's a place where neighbors meet, and where Talmage Community Association hangs notices for its annual summer picnic and its Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

Where will the signs hang now?

In many ways, the essence of Lancaster County is its more than 50 unincorporated burgs. Surrounded by cornfields, anchored in some cases by little more than a crossroad, these villages foster a sense of community and belonging. The rural post office has long played a vital role in that dynamic, and that role is coming to an unceremonious end.

How long will it be until the Postal Service closes the post office in, say, Penryn, where the handful of Penn Township residents who use it regularly stop in as much to chat up the postmaster as to retrieve their mail?

Penryn has had a postmaster since the 1890s, and the office's 19th-century facade still resembles the general store it once housed. The place is a functioning antiquity, and it will soon be outmoded, along with many, if not most, of the rural post offices across the county.

While it would be foolish to rail against the changes brought on by advances in technology, it would be equally foolish not to mark with a certain degree of solemnity the passing of a cherished way of life. Some of the bricks and mortar that the Internet is tearing down have held firm for generations — and they've held together more than buildings.