It's David versus Goliath. Facing high schools backed by corporate giants such as Boeing, Chrysler, and Motorola, a team of Pierson High School students, working on a shoestring budget, has for the second year in a row entered a nationwide robotics competition called US First.

Pierson will go up against teams from 155 other schools across the country, including eight that are sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and at least one that is sponsored by the United States Navy's Underwater Warfare College -a team, incidentally, that Pierson upset in last year's finals.

Team members said Mission Impossible, the group's aptly named creation, is a vast improvement over last year's model, a last-minute entry named Inovader which finished far back in the field.

Seeking $15,000

"We've built something that is able to compete - we're not saying we'll win - but we took everything we learned last year and put it into this design," said Greg Lamarre, a senior. "It's working real well," agreed Richard Wilson, who with Tim Krazewski teaches a robotics class offered as a science elective and created, in large part, with the competition in mind. "The only thing it isn't doing is raising money."

With just a month to go before the regional competition at Rutgers University in New Jersey from March 20 to 22, with the national competition scheduled to take place in April at DisneyWorld, the Pierson team has raised only $2,000 of the approximately $15,000 it would like to raise.

The sum includes $6,000 to cover registration for both competitions and for most of the materials used. The Sag Harbor School District has advanced that amount to the team as a loan.

Not A Vacation

The class also hopes to come up with enough money to send all 17 of its members along with advisers and chaperones to the finals in Florida. The students will pay their own way to Rutgers.

Going to DisneyWorld on a class trip may "sound exotic," said Robert Schneider, the Pierson principal - but it is hardly a vacation, said Mr. Wilson.

"The kids are up at 5 a.m. The competition starts at 7, and there are matches all day long," he said. "By the end of the day, you can't wait for your head to hit the pillow."

"The whole purpose of the competition is to attract to science and math the kind of excitement that surrounds sports," he added.

In fact, the matches, featuring pairs of robots in an arena, are sportlike. Last year, for instance, robots were required to scoop up balls and place them in a goal. This year, they will score points by snaring inner tubes and hanging them on a rack in a kind of vertical ticktacktoe.

To accomplish that task, Mission Impossible, which measures about three cubic feet and looks a little like a miniature excavator or steam shovel, is equipped with a mechanical arm with a claw to pick up the tubes. The robot is operated via a remote-control radio transmitter.

Robotics team members have said they will ask the district's Booster Club, which helped the field hockey team, for support. They also plan to hold a fund-raising dinner on March 14.

Up And Down The Street

In the meantime, "the kids have been up and down Main Street," said Marianne Terigano, a middle school science teacher.

"I didn't get much," said Adam LeGrand, a freshman member of the team. "If we're a Sag Harbor team, they should support us."

Adam is not totally discouraged yet. He has proposed that the team ask the village for permission to hold a fund-raiser on Long Wharf. "We could let people pay $5 to drive it," he said of the robot. "And if they break it, they pay to fix it."

The team's advisers said they did not want to appear unappreciative of the community's support thus far. "We realize local businesses get hit for everything, so we've been trying to go outside the area to solicit larger corporations," Ms. Terigano said.

Two Brushoffs

Although Symbol Technologies, a Long Island company, has pledged $1,500, other potential corporate sponsors, including the Long Island Lighting Company and NYNEX, have failed to respond to the group's requests.

A year ago, the Pierson team was able to raise close to $10,000 to fund the trip. Barbara Lobosco, a school parent, who led the fund drive, said the group received "a substantial amount" from an anonymous East End business. It also received a sizable grant from Hertz, the car rental company.

Less money was needed last year because fewer students were involved. The advisers are prepared, if necessary, to send a skeleton team to the national competition, but Mr. Wilson said that would disappoint a large number of students who have worked hard on the project.

Tough Competitors

"This is what makes education fun," said Greg. Last year at the regionals in New Hampshire, Pierson team members became friendly with a team that was sponsored by a local utility.

"They took us to their shop, and they had everything," he marveled. "The kids helped in the brainstorming for the design, but the technicians did all the work. We worked on ours. We were in the shop after school every day and on weekends too."

"It's a very aggressive contact sport," said Greg of most contests. "One team will race to get a couple of points and then spend the rest of the match ramming the opponent," or otherwise interfering with it.

Like last year, the Pierson team had six weeks to work on its project using a box of parts, including radio controls, gears, and a pair of electric drills for power supplied by US First.

Team Advisers

The team's advisers include Deno Bartoli, Robert Browngardt, and Robert Maeder, all engineers, and Rick Gold, who helped with the electrical circuitry. Joe Bartolotto, a Pierson teacher, assisted with the art, and Karen Muller has helped raise funds.

The team also enlisted Tony Johnson, who runs a Sag Harbor computer graphics company. With his help last year, a computer-generated animation of the Pierson project, a requirement of the competition, was judged fifth best in the finals.

"This is what we are talking about all the time," said Mr. Schneider. "We're trying to get the kids to take their knowledge from physics, science, and math and make it more relevant. This is the best example of that in the school."

It's the unexpected that makes things interesting, and, in the case of the chef at the John Papas Cafe on East Hampton's Park Place, tasty and bountiful as well.

The chef is Mohamed Kharabiesh, a native of a Cairo suburb and a "workaholic," according to Mr. Papas, the owner since 1994.

Mr. Kharabiesh, 47, has lived in these parts for about 15 years now. He misses the country where he spent half his life, but "loves" the East End. His expressive hazel eyes twinkled as he described the long beach walk he took in Montauk in Sunday's balmy sunshine.

His background is as varied as the menu he offers the eatery's loyal following of local customers. A practicing Muslim, Mr. Kharabiesh has been cooking this month all the while observing Ramadan, 30 days in the Islamic calendar when the faithful are required to fast from sunup to sundown.

Born in Belbais, about 40 kilometers south of Cairo, he recalled watching large vats of "bubbling chocolate" at his family's candy-bar factory. "I liked the heat," he said, personalizing the proverb, so "I stayed in the kitchen."

An educated man, he finished the University of Cairo in 1973 with a degree in accounting, a profession he worked at for about six years. At the same time, he kept up what he called his "hobby" of cooking, working in the kitchen of an exclusive club that had once belonged to King Farouk, on an island in the Nile, near Giza. The establishment had since become a military club for high-ranking Egyptian military officers and was a place, he said, to learn "good cooking."

Those years were a "transitional time" in Egypt, he said -- the period between 1968, when Abdel Nasser's regime ended, and Anwar Sadat's new politics. The country's population had begun to explode, and friends in the United States encouraged Mr. Kharabiesh to come here.

He did - first for a visit, and two years later to settle. He moved first to Jersey City, while working as the chef at an Italian restaurant near Broadway. But after being mugged, he decided that "New York was worse than Cairo." He went to an employment agency and requested a position "at least two hours away" from the city.

That brought him to Gurney's Inn, where he worked from 1982 to 1989, pausing for a year to run his own restaurant in Bethlehem, Pa. He returned to Gurney's, though, as sous chef, and then chef until financial difficulties at the inn forced salary reductions.

His next job was as executive chef at the Crow's Nest in Montauk. He also ran the Atlantic Terrace Hotel coffee shop and for a couple of years owned the Montauk Cafe, now Dooley's, but that property was foreclosed and he was forced out.

Soon after, he "stopped by" the John Papas Cafe in search of a job. He and Mr. Papas talked for two hours - and he has been working there ever since. "I love it," he said. "I don't even need a vacation."

Mr. Papas, who was the cafe's original chef, has taught Mr. Kharabiesh something about Greek cooking. The owner characterized his cafe as a "small diner with the quality of a cafe. We serve good, down-to-earth food."

The John Papas Cafe is open daily for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Prices are moderate, and beer and wine are served. Interspersed among the menu's classic American selections are traditional Greek favorites such as pastichio, moussaka, and chicken souvlaki served with the popular tzatziki sauce made from yogurt, sour cream, cucumbers, and spices.

The all-time favorite, however, is the spanakopita, or spinach pie. A treat for all seasons, the recipe follows:

Spinach Pie John Papas

Ingredients:

3 lbs. frozen chopped spinach, defrosted

1 large Spanish onion, finely diced

1 lb. feta cheese

1 lb. cottage cheese (or a little more depending on saltiness of the feta)

3 eggs, slightly beaten

1 lb. phyllo dough

White pepper

Pinch of dill

Melted butter

Method:

Saute onion until wilted in a small amount of high-quality olive oil, add spinach and dill and cook until mixture is partially cooked. Remove from heat. Add feta and cottage cheeses, eggs, and pepper and combine well until mixture resembles marble. Set aside.

Brush melted butter on each of the phyllo leaves. Layer half the phyllo on the bottom of a large baking pan, draping the excess over the sides of the pan. Pour in the spinach mixture.

Fold the edges of the phyllo across the top of the spinach, then cover the entire pie with the remaining leaves of dough, tucking the top layer into the sides of the pan as though to form a pocket.

Bake in a 325-degree oven for about half an hour, until the dough is browned and crispy. Serves eight.

The LongHouse Foundation in East Hampton has just been awarded $40,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation to support its initiative to develop a classification system for the decorative arts.

Jack Lenor Larsen, renowned textile designer and the founder of LongHouse, long ago recognized the difficulty of cataloguing the decorative arts without a common classification system, such as libraries use.

Each of the American decorative arts has an unusually diverse vocabulary, according to Mr. Larsen. Both historically and today, different terms are used to describe similar processes, materials, or construction.

He proposes a classification system based on method of fabrication and/or embellishment. Using the decimal system, catalogue numbers will be followed by a code of provenance and date of execution, similar to the library system.

LongHouse will use its own extensive collection of pottery, glassware, textiles, metalware, and other decorative arts as a case study. Mr. Larsen will direct the project and Matko Tomicic, LongHouse's director, and Sonja Nielsen, consultant librarian, will organize the cataloguing effort, which is already under way.

A night of Irish humor and harmonies on Friday, Feb. 28, at Southampton High School will raise funds for Our Lady of Hamptons School. The fund-raiser, "A Musical Taste of Ireland," will begin at 8 p.m.

The Irish comedian Noel V. Ginnity will kick off the evening, which will also feature two musical acts and Irish dancers. The vocalist Red Hurley will perform, along with the Paddy Noonan Band.

Tickets for the show are $20 for adults and $10 for children. They can be purchased in advance at the Southampton Chamber of Commerce office, and at Doc's Grill or North Fork Bank in Hampton Bays.

P.O.'s First-Class Party

A celebration of Black History Month with music, dance, and more has been organized by Cynde Mack of East Hampton and Ruby Barrow of Water Mill.

Ms. Mack and Ms. Barrow, who both work in the post offices of their respective hamlets, had requested (by mail, of course) U.S. Postal Service funding for a simple tribute to an aspect of black history. What they received was an offer to sponsor a full-fledged celebration "of the first class," which will take place at 6 p.m. on Saturday at the Riverhead Polish Hall.

"Expressing Our Priorities . . . First Class!" will feature music, dance, poetry, song, and tributes, as well as a buffet. Admission is free, but reservations must be made by calling Ms. Mack at the East Hampton Post Office or Ms. Barrow at the Water Mill Post Office.

It's Salsa Sunday

A celebration of Latin music in New York, Salsa Sunday at Boys Harbor, will mark the opening of the organization's exhibit on the history of Latin music at El Museo del Barrio.

Free events - Afro-Cuban folklore lectures, dance classes and demonstrations, salsa, mambo, and a Latin tea dance - will take place from noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday at the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

In the evening, a concert celebrating Tito Puente's "50 Years of Magical Music" will feature Mr. Puente, Celia Cruz, Johnny Pacheco, Santos Colon, Gil Lopez, the Harbor Big Band, and special guests.

Tickets for the show, at $35 and $50, may be purchased through Ticketmaster. The $100 tickets, for both the concert and a reception afterwards, may be purchased by calling Boys Harbor in New York.

Ticketmaster will also provide tickets, at $10 each, for a live simulcast party that will begin when the musicians do, at 8 p.m.

The New York Host Committee for the 39th Annual Grammy Awards, El Museo del Barrio, and Lusana Productions are all sponsors of the event along with Boys Harbor, whose activities include a summer camp for disadvantaged youth, the Harbor for Boys and Girls, on Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton.

Proceeds of the event will benefit the Harbor Conservatory, a division of Boys Harbor that sponsors Latin music study and maintains a Latin music archive.

Cole Porter Anyone?

Open auditions for the CTC Theater Live's seasonal finale, the musical "Anything Goes," will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Men and women of all ages are needed to fill roles in the large cast of this Cole Porter musical, which will be directed by Serena Seacat. Tryouts will begin at 7 p.m. both evenings, at the East Hampton Middle School on Newtown Lane in East Hampton.

No special preparation is necessary; scripts and music will be available at the auditions.

Performances will take place at the John Drew Theater of Guild Hall on four weekends beginning April 25 and 26.

This is the time of year when those of us who haven't made it to a tropical place for some or all of the winter typically feel cabin fever, talk about seasonal affective disorder, and wonder if winter will ever end.

Instead, we are watching the snowdrops and crocuses come up, playing tennis outdoors, and thinking about getting the boat ready. Some Shelter Island residents even report sighting the return of three osprey - usually a reliable herald of spring - on Feb. 7.

The usual winter germs have been more active than ever, undoubtedly because there have been so few frozen days, and the snow shovels, cross-country skis, sleds, down parkas, and boots have barely stirred.

Normally we East Enders can be found dreaming of the hot Caribbean sun at this time of year; instead we have visions of skiing in Vermont and warming ourselves with hot chocolate in front of a fire.

The calendar may say winter, but everything else is saying spring, spring, spring. (At least so far.)

The Springs School Board is deliberating whether kindergarten and first-grade students should be asked to sit for three hours a day for an entire week filling in little boxes on standardized tests with number-two pencils. Seems like a no-brainer to us.

As anyone who has had or been around 5 and 6-year-olds knows, they don't take kindly to sitting still for half an hour, let alone three hours - except, perhaps, in front of a really good video. How much faith can school officials put in standardized test results from kids who are no doubt squirming to be set free? It's no wonder parents and teachers report that the kids have upset stomachs and are anxiety-ridden during test week.

Let's let kids be kids. They'll have years of standardized tests ahead of them. If the district absolutely feels the need for some form of scholastic assessment at that young age, it should consider alternatives used in other schools that are less rigid and more reflective of the students' overall capabilities, such as verbal evaluations by their teachers and "portfolios" with samples of the children's work.

If the district is deadset on going ahead with the tests for this year, however, it should, at the least, allow parents to exempt their children from the testing and offer an alternate activity for them during test time.

Anne Porter, widow of the artist Fairfield Porter, mother of five, grandmother of six biological and five "courtesy" grandchildren, former majordomo of a big house in Southampton, and nurturer of stray poets and painters, burst suddenly upon the literary scene in 1994 as a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry after what seemed a life of mousy domesticity.

"This is a shocking book, for all its seeming diffidence, economy, and quietness," the poet David Shapiro wrote in his foreword to "An Altogether Different Language," her volume of 115 short poems gleaned from 60 years of writing in obscurity.

" 'We were built for heaven, like a boat,' she once said, and her poetry has both a childlike flow and a rugged confidence. . . . An American religious poet of stature, [she] reminds us that the idea of the holy is still possible for us."

At 84, Mrs. Porter seems as modest and sturdy as a small catboat herself. Ensconced in a cottage behind her big house on South Main Street, now owned by others, she had set out mugs and cookies on her kitchen table for a recent visitor.

From a wide clay pot on the flowered tablecloth, leaves of narcissus "flowed high and filled themselves with green," just as she had written; at their tips, "immaculate white flowers."

"Somebody remarked recently that someone's poetry was light, as in L-I-T-E," she said with a laugh. "I think mine is very lite: It has a low threshold that makes it easy to get into, and it's clear. I mostly work very hard revising it. The other day I felt like a figure skater practicing the same figure over and over again until it came out right."

Her language is plain to the point of homeliness, and yet polished as a skater's arabesque:

Our poems

Are like the wart-hogs

In the zoo

It's hard to say

Why there should be such creatures

But once our life gets into them

As sometimes happens

Our poems

Turn into living things

And there's no arguing

With living things

They are

The way they are. . .

And always they are improvident

And free

They keep

A kind of Sabbath. . .

They sing

In breaking waves

And rock like wooden cradles.

Childhood Poetry

"This is poetry of observation sustained by a rapt inner awareness," wrote Barbara Guest. Said John Ashbery: "Her work is timeless, or, in Emily Dickinson's beautiful phrase,

'toward eternity.' "

Like most artists, Mrs. Porter began doing her thing as a child; her book is dedicated in part to a great-uncle "who wrote down and illustrated my poems for me before I learned to write."

Nee Anne Channing, she is descended from the founder of Unitarianism, Channing William Ellery, and Edward Tyrell, father of the North American Review and an early leader of Transcendentalism.

These twin 19th-century religious and literary movements stressed reliance on intuition as the only way to apprehend a reality in which spiritual truths are embodied in natural facts, and believed in the essential unity of all things.

Aristocratic Ideas

"Trust thyself," was their motto, along with a caveat to dispense with "ornament in style."

The youngest of five children, Anne grew up in a town house in Boston. Her father was a partner in the old family law firm of Channing and Frothingham; she attended the elite Windsor School.

"My parents considered themselves to be aristocracy, marking on the curve of what was in Boston," she said. "They were lapsed Unitarians but good people. We lived with a lot of servants, dressed in black, who appeared, waited on us hand and foot, and disappeared."

"These mostly Irish immigrants had no last names, and we knew nothing about them. When I became a teenager, this began to trouble me."

God's Thin Places

Unlike most of us who feel an occasional flicker of compassion for the numbing toil of the motel maid or the subway-token clerk, Mrs. Porter was haunted by this anonymous underclass.

"God is in everything, especially the poor," she said. "A former chaplain of Harvard wrote that there are 'thin places' where you can get closer to God. He named the poor, minorities, outsiders, and the despised. He also named women."

After two years at Bryn Mawr, where things got "too cliquey -- no men, children, or old people; just us and books," Mrs. Porter moved back home with two of her sisters, and went to Radcliffe.

Emily Dickinson

"I was described as very antisocial. I took long walks alone. I'd started writing as a child, and it never occurred to me that I wasn't a poet, any more than it occurred to me that I wasn't a girl."

A stern taskmaster of her own work, she was "disgusted" by an early sonnet with a deficient rhyme scheme. She liked Shakespeare, read his plays aloud and memorized passages. "I stood on the balcony in front of our house and declaimed speeches, but only for about a year."

A great-uncle gave her a little white leather book with gold Indian pipes embossed on it: a first edition of poems by Emily Dickinson, "enchanting and exciting."

Through her sister's college roommate, the photographer Eliot Porter's fiance, she met her future husband when she was 16. "I'd heard he wanted to become a painter from neighbors who said that was strange because he had no talent. I decided I would like him."

In The '30s

She knew that ladies powdered their noses and, primping for their meeting, doused hers with talcum powder, the only kind at hand.

"Fairfield said later he remembered me as a little girl with a big white nose. He was the most totally unaffected man I've ever known; I was just glad there was such a person."

They were married in 1932 when she was 20 and he 24, and lived near Washington Square in New York City while he attended the Art Students League. She published her first poem in Poetry magazine two years later, and has had poems in the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

Rambling Household

Five children followed: Johnny, who was mentally handicapped and died at 46, Laurence, a professor of literature at Michigan State, Richard, who lives with her and is revising a book of essays, Katie, a pediatrician turned psychiatrist in Atlanta, and Liz, a social worker, who also is living with her while studying for a master's degree at Stony Brook.

The family moved to Southampton in 1949, Mr. Porter doing the house hunting and buying the big rambling one because it was near the ocean, and because the school at that time taught Latin.

"He thought that in this rich community the schools would be good, but they weren't that great. It was very hard for the kids because they were from another culture and their friends' mothers naturally were afraid to have their children visit my eccentric household."

Eccentric Household

"They wished their daddy drove a truck instead of shutting himself up in a studio and making our little girls wear sensible shoes. They suffered a great deal."

The Porter household included the poet James Schuyler, who came to visit after a breakdown and stayed for 11 years. Other poets - John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Mr. Shapiro - came and went, along with assorted writers and painters and their friends and lovers.

Amid the bustle of family and the flocking of semipermanent houseguests Mrs. Porter somehow stole time to write, and kept her eye on the God she wanted to know better.

"It wasn't easy to take up Catholicism. Atheism was very important to my in-laws, whom I loved, so I tried my best to be an atheist; it didn't work."

Conversion

"My family thought Catholics simply were not what people should be; my mother cried when I converted. Fairfield could be sarcastic, but basically he was supportive and very interested."

The saintly life and crusading work of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, were inspirational. Mrs. Porter said she wrote to Miss Day after deciding that "believing in God isn't something you just think about." Amazingly, Miss Day answered, recommending a priest in New York for instruction. After long thought, and a final acceptance that the best tenets of the church were compatible with her socialist soul, Mrs. Porter converted at 43.

She is now a secular Franciscan, attending mass every day, and working with the poor and disenfranchised.

"Like A Coral Reef"

"I'm much happier in the community now. At first I didn't know anybody except painters and writers, and only got to meet a limited range of people. But now I have dear local friends from all walks of life. I think the most important thing I've learned in recent years is that nobody is ordinary."

While Mrs. Porter doesn't know if she'll have a second book published, she just goes on writing poems "one after the other, like a coral reef."

Some are ecstatic songs of gratitude for God's creation, and some arduous litanies of the sorrows of the outcast. A mindful humility runs through them:

"Whatever harm I may have done

In all my life in all your wide creation

If I cannot repair it

I beg you to repair it. . . ."

Anyone who ventured into the A&P in East Hampton Village on Saturday, say at about 4 p.m., was overwhelmingly aware that its future is "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

Harassed check-out clerks tried maintaining civility as the lines, even the fast ones, snaked into the grocery aisles blocking shoppers and safe passage. Whether the A&P should be encouraged to remain in the village, whether it should be permitted to build a 34,878-square-foot superstore on Pantigo Road, or whether, as the Town of East Hampton has decided, it should be limited to a store of 25,000 square feet, was on everyone's minds last summer.

The issue has fallen from attention as it has moved from Town Hall into the courts, where the A&P is pursuing a lawsuit challenging the town's adoption of a law that caps the size of supermarkets. But the problem of how to accommodate the needs and wants of shoppers persists and will only get worse unless government makes some significant changes.

In June, the consultants who prepared the town's superstore study noted: "The trend is for East Hampton Village to shift from a community center to a recreational retail center only." This shift is well under way. At the same time, the consultants noted, "East Hampton's demand for retail is growing, and growing faster than the town's official population counts."

Furthermore, the consultants said, "The desire of retail of all types to locate on Montauk Highway is already extreme, promoted by an average traffic volume that is far greater than the town's year-round population."

As a result, they warned, "East Hampton's 'town and country' landscape is at jeopardy, unless a means can be found to retain convenience stores and anchors in East Hampton Village, or to accommodate development outside of the village in a manner that puts priority on land use, image, landscape, traffic, and other concerns."

If, in the words of the consultants, East Hampton Village is " 'tapped out' in terms of its ability to expand," and if continued retail development along the Montauk Highway is not in the town's best interest, then what?

Last September, noting that the potential population of the town is four times as great as its present size, The Star urged the Town Board to form a bipartisan commission to undertake a major planning effort, under the guidance of professionals, to review existing conditions and delineate more suitable locations for retail development than the neighborhood business districts which now border most major roads.

The town must meet this challenge if the citizenry at large is to control its destiny. We have watched as the marketplace changed the core of East Hampton Village from a year-round social and economic center to a center for leisure shopping.

To fail to redesign the where, when, and how much of retail development beyond the village would be to leave the future to those entrepreneurs and corporations whose priority is to turn a profit even at, again in the words of the superstore consultants, "the quietude and scenery for which East Hampton is known."

Let's not let that happen.

AMAGANSETT

Kernell to Peter and Diane McCann, Pepperidge Lane, $350,000.

O'Shea to Joel Zychick, Bluff Road, $671,000.

BRIDGEHAMPTON

Zebrowski to Anne Davison, Job's Lane, $298,000.

Glick to Jay Lubell, Job's Lane, $750,000.

Maurice B. Cunningham Inc. to Alva Hellstrom, Sagg Road, $209,000.

EAST HAMPTON

Kerschner to Richard and Kathe Serbin, Gould Street, $435,000.

Pantzer to Martin and Michele Cohen, Main Street, $1,800,000.

Kurzweil to Jean Kunzelman, Springy Banks Road, $187,500.

Zuckerman to Daniel Farash, Jonathan Drive, $335,000.

Kennedy to Jane Humiston, Middle Lane, $1,000,000.

Vochis to Craig Wright, Conklin Terrace, $230,000.

Kennedy to Raymond Humiston, Middle Lane, $2,250,000.

Fessenden to Carol White, the Circle, $425,000.

Schutz estate to Edward Krug, Wireless Road, $275,000.

MONTAUK

Fiorentino to Donna Berger, Fleming Road, $200,000.

Economou to Bryan Lotufo, Farrington Road, $229,500.

NORTH HAVEN

Coulter 3d (trustee) to Victor Palmieri, Robertson Drive, $900,000.

NORTHWEST

Ferrera to Edward Goldberg, Colony Court, $260,000.

Alwive Woods Assoc. to Renato and Maria Reali and Nathaniel Ziolkowski, North Bay Lane, $176,000.

Manzi Const. to Sarah Ferguson and Traci Daugs, Clamshell Avenue, $320,000.

SAG HARBOR

Grgin to John Taylor, Millstone Road, $235,000.

Haas to Ella Westphal, Harbor Drive, $326,500.

Munder Jr. to Christian and Barbara Molsen, Clearview Drive, $445,000.

Jenkins to Leo and M. Fuentes Vanderpool, Milton Avenue, $163,000.

Epstein to Josephine and Irving Weiss, West Water Street, $320,000.

SAGAPONACK

Gridley to David and Sara Stone, Sagaponack Road, $3,250,000.

SPRINGS

Weissfeld to Verna and Harry Denny, Claire Ciliotta, and Cathleen Conway, Hildreth Place, $165,000.

Grigor to Laurie Frick, Copeces Lane, $150,000.

Grubman to Don Donnellan and Judith Berke, Harbor View Drive, $200,000.

WAINSCOTT

Matzen to Lars Svanberg, Hedges Lane, $170,000.

WATER MILL

Ford to E. Donald and Merle Shapiro, Flying Point Road, $782,500.

Seeds, that tiny subject on the minds of so many gardeners right now, will be the subject of a talk sponsored by the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons on Saturday.

Beginning at 10 a.m., Marie Donnelly, a longtime member of the Alliance and the Olde Towne Garden Club in Southampton, will discuss propagation, her specialty. The presentation will take place on the ground floor of the Bridgehampton Community House, and cost $5.

How about seedlings instead of seeds? This year will bring the 125th anniversary of Arbor Day, and a campaign by the National Arbor Day Foundation to "plant trees for America."

To help volunteers to assist in that effort, the foundation will send 10 free blue spruces to those who become members by Feb. 28. From 6 to 12 inches tall, they come with instructions for planting now through May 31.

To join, a $10 contribution should be sent to Ten Free Blue Spruces, National Arbor Day Foundation, 100 Arbor Avenue, Nebraska City, Neb. 68410.