Not since Hurricane Sandy had I seen tides that flooded and then stayed high for days. The winter storm that arrived on Friday did this, and I am worried.

I am old enough and have lived in the same spot long enough to have a sense of how things should and should not be. The bay has been at odds with what should be, but scientists tell us this is the new normal.

Down South, coastal communities have seawater in the streets even on blue-sky days. A raging East River for more than 24 hours after last week’s storm closed two lanes of Manhattan’s F.D.R. Drive. Scituate and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts were flooded through Sunday.

Here, Gardiner’s Bay rose and never really went down again. Storm waves tore at the dunes and toward the foundations of several houses near the old Promised Land fishmeal factory. With the tides remaining so high, groundwater that normally would have seeped through the dunes into the bay had no place to go. The swamps alongside Cranberry Hole Road filled, turned into ponds, and then rose more, joining into one long wetland even as the rain became a memory.

Even on the ocean and with a hard north wind, it was the same. Each time I checked the beach at Georgica and Main, my eyes suggested that the tide was near peak, even if the charts insisted otherwise. Same thing in Montauk, where I stood on one of the expensive staircases the Army Corps of Engineers built over its sandbag earthworks. White water surged under my feet as I descended to take a picture of the Atlantic Terrace hotel.

There is no beach to speak of left at downtown Montauk now. Taxpayers will have to pay to truck sand in before the summer season. At ordinary high tide on Gardiner’s Bay, you cannot walk around one corner of one neighbor’s house anymore. At Lazy Point, two houses are already in the water and two more look about to join them. Gerard Drive was again overtopped by waves, leaving stones on the pavement. 

We had better get used to it, the sea is only going to rise a whole lot more before it’s done.

Not long ago, during an idyll in Palm Desert, Calif., I was doing the crossword puzzle and the first clue I came across was: “ ‘Serial’ podcast host Sarah.”

No problem. I knew that that would be Sarah Koenig, who used to work here at The Star.

Usually, I’m out of it when it comes to topical questions in the puzzles, preferring the gossamer past to the lurid present.

“Do you know who Odysseus’ rescuer was?” I asked.

“How would I know,” said Georgie, who had been reunited with her twin, Johnna, following a long separation.

“. . . You’re right, Ino!” I said, looking up after some moments of reflection.

As it turned out, Georgie and Johnna were my saviors that day because they are of a younger generation, which, at long last, I’ve begun to listen to, and could therefore fill in the gaping gaps of my knowledge of current events. 

“Who wrote ‘Hamilton’?” I asked out loud. “Lin . . .”

“Lin Manuel Miranda,” Johnna replied.

“What’s the backdrop to AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’?” I asked, at a loss.

“Zombie apocalypse,” Georgie said, laughing.

Done.

And so, back to reality, though I’d rather not. 

From wit to shit. Our other daughter, Emily, a veteran teacher, was, I learned on our return, up in arms concerning the move to arm teachers in the wake of the massacre of 17 students at the high school in Parkland, Fla. 

“Now they’re telling us we have to be police officers and security guards too?” she said when I phoned her. “We can carry a gun, but we’re not allowed to turn up the thermostat? Where were the bonuses for all the supplies we’ve been paying for out of pocket all these years — for books, markers, pencils, crayons, copy paper? I could go on and on and on. ‘There’s no money,’ that’s what the answer’s always been. But now, all of a sudden there is money! Not more money for social workers and psychologists, but for guns. We had one social worker at a school of 960 kids in an impoverished community in crisis where I taught in Chicago. One. We’re always telling the children to pick the best possible answer from among several possible ones. Well, this is the worst possible answer.”

“Everything’s always been put on the teachers,” Emily continued. “Turn out sterling scholars, lifelong learners, outstanding citizens, fix poverty . . . and now we’re to solve gun violence?! I can’t go to a math conference because there’s no money. There’s no money for education, but there’s money for guns. It’s so sick. I can’t believe people are voting for this. It’s like a wildfire. I want a bonus for the other stuff I, and all the other teachers, do.”

“Frankly, it terrifies me. I don’t want my sons going to a school where there are guns. I’ve never allowed guns in our house. It was all I could do to say yes to a lightsaber.”

“Can you imagine a teacher shooting a former student? Are teachers going to wear holsters? If a gun is locked away, might not a student find a way to get at it? What about teachers and students being shot in crossfires? Have they really thought all this out? Maybe some teachers might be good at this, but the school would not be a safer place if I had a gun. I didn’t sign up to be a security guard. I don’t want to shoot anyone. I’m not wired that way. I just want to do what I love to do, which is teach.”

Midafternoon on Tuesday, as the snow seemed to be tapering off in East Hampton, I headed out from the Star office to have a look around. Though the roads were clear, few drivers were about. A couple of cars were parked at Main Beach but only one at Georgica when I stopped to watch the surf.

Main Street was empty, too, as was Newtown Lane. All the boutiques were closed. So, it appeared, was the hardware store. The food market across the street was open, but that was it; Mary’s, Villa, the lumberyard, Hampton Country Market, the new beverage place, the electric supply store, the library, Guild Hall, and everything else was dark.

Two village plow drivers pushed snow around at the beach; another cleared the Chase bank parking lot. It was quiet. I passed very few other trucks. Ice broke free of the branches above and hit my windshield with a loud thwack.

It’s hard to know if my memory is right, but I recall that a snowstorm like the one we had this week would not have shut down East Hampton quite so much. If you could get around, you would work. Now we hear about bombogenesis in the North Atlantic. Ordinary winter storms get cutesy, post-millennial sounding names that bring to mind contestants on “The Bachelor” or something. We stock up, hunker down, and catch up on shows we missed.

The kids, though, know better when the ground is white and there is no school. Ellis and his cousin and a friend got together around lunchtime at my sister’s place on Accabonac Road and made what I gather were record-size snowballs and rolled boulders although the heavy snow was too sticky for sledding. They shrieked and ran around until they were too wet and out of breath to go on.

Maybe we had it wrong those decades ago when we showed up almost no matter what. If we nestle down on the couch in a soft blanket with a book while the dog sleeps nearby, the world will nevertheless spin on. The work can wait for another day.

If you haven’t seen Guild Hall’s “Romeo and Juliet” yet, let me recommend it. 

By the time the paper comes out this week, there will have been four morning performances for school groups, in addition to last weekend’s regularly scheduled shows, and it will be staged again on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Judy D’Mello has reviewed the play for this week’s paper, but I wanted to make a few points before the (ahem) lights go out. 

First, even though Shakespeare’s tale about the star-crossed young lovers is sad, this production is a lot of fun. And don’t be put off if you happen to hear the show is three and a half hours long. The length is because there is lots of imaginative stage play, and the action and high jinks will keep you engaged. 

If you are reading this, you surely know the story of “Romeo and Juliet” — so well, in fact, that if you got tired and had to leave at intermission, it would still be worth checking it out (after all, you know the ending). A totally unexpected element of this most familiar of plays, however, were the technical aspects of this production, which broke new ground. Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater is illuminated with huge visual projections, and all corners of the theater, including doors and boxes as well as aisles, are transformed, almost becoming part of the proscenium.

The projections and lighting were the work of the theater’s assistant technical director, Joe Brondo, and his assistants. Instead of relying on an artificial tree onstage or the projection of trees on a scrim at the back of the stage, for example, the forest — as well as the walls at the Montagues’ and Capulets’ villas — surround the audience, which is brought right into the scene.  

Josh Gladstone, Guild Hall’s artistic director, directed the play and appears in it as Juliet’s irascible father. He put together a cast featuring a wide range of actors, young and not so young, veterans of the stages of New York City as well as several high school students. 

On the night I saw the production, the audience was relatively young. Many seemed to know the actors; one person filmed part of the action on an iPhone. And that, too, might be called groundbreaking. Audiences at cultural institutions here are often gray-haired, and although the museums and theaters try hard to attract younger audiences, it can be hard to get many 30-somethings and 20-somethings to show up. My guess is that Mr. Gladstone had this in in mind as he experimented with his dynamic casting and settings. I’d wager that the resulting embrace by young audiences might be even more enthusiastic than he anticipated. 

I’m thinking of taking my 10-year-old granddaughter this weekend. Her favorite babysitter, Frankie, an East Hampton High School junior, has a starring role, and I can imagine her waving from her seat and trying to get his attention. Word among some of her schoolmates, who came by bus to be treated to a morning performance last week, was that some of the kissing and carrying on was, in their 8 and 10-year-old eyes, rather too risqué. Of course, they say Shakespeare’s Juliet, as written, was probably only 13 or 14 years old herself. Some of what goes on onstage may be grown up for my granddaughter, but it sure beats the stuff she sees on YouTube.

Copies of The Star’s 100th anniversary edition were dug out recently for the edification of several new staff members, and we found ourselves reminiscing about people who worked here over the years. 

Our centennial issue was published on Dec. 26, 1985 — the actual anniversary date, to the very day. Some of the memories the centennial issue brought to mind were wistful, some humorous. 

One indelible memory was of a man named Chester Browne, a former U.S. Marine who had been wounded in France in World War I and who worked as a Linotype operator and proofreader at The Star from 1923 until the late 1960s. When he died in 1977, he was remembered in his Star obituary as a real American archetype, a character you might read about in Dos Passos: 

“As a printer of the old school, he deplored the appearance of vulgarisms in type, and on one occasion fought long and hard, without success, to prevent the use of the colloquial verb ‘skunked,’ in the sense of having been held scoreless, in a sports story. He was equally affronted by improper hyphenation, and perhaps fortunately had left the business before the advent of electronic typesetting, in which word breakage is sometimes left to an illiterate computer.”

In a photo from 1930 reprinted in the anniversary edition of 1985, Brownie, as we all called him, is seen in the building at 78 Main Street where the paper used to be composed.

One of our favorite stories, back in the old days, was of Brownie. One day, he arrived at work before every one else and was surprised to see folks gathering across Main Street at Guild Hall. He couldn’t figure out what they might be doing at Guild Hall at that hour, but as time passed and no one else showed up to work, it slowly dawned on him: He had fallen asleep after dinner that night and, waking up to glance at the clock, saw that it was 7:30, and rushed off to work. It took a while for him to realize that it was 7:30 p.m., not a.m., and that he still had a long night of sleep ahead. 

We laughed about this for years. The deadlines of newspapering do make a person anxious.

Looking at our special edition also made me nostalgic for the processes and equipment that went into putting The Star together many years ago. Even the 1985 anniversary edition itself seems like a relic at this point. When we said “cut and paste” in those days, we actually cut and pasted! 

“When we think of small-town newspapering as it was,” the 1977 Star obituary for Chester Browne continued, “Brownie will be there, wearing a clean white shirt, a brown apron, and a small smile, and bearing a galley-proof.” Those of you who, like me, enjoy a good trip down memory lane might appreciate knowing that the East Hampton Library has already scanned and digitized every copy of The Star from its inception through 1968, which is as far as they got before the grant that made the project possible ran out. (Perhaps new sources of funding will be found sometime soon to complete this expensive project; I have my fingers crossed.) 

If you go online to nyshistoricnewspapers.org, and click on The East Hampton Star, at right, you will see how easy it is to look up old friends, old football games, old birth announcements, with a simple key-word search. You not only see the text, but can zoom in on high-resolution images of the page. Try it, you’ll like it.

Even though I don’t consider myself particularly susceptible to trends in the kitchen — I never did get into sriracha, for example — I am, like all of us, susceptible to flavor fads. I’ve cooked my way through the great goat cheese glut of the 1980s, and the mania for sun-dried tomatoes. I can remember the days before balsamic vinegar, and the decades when we all called it just plain old coriander instead of cilantro.

Lately, what we’ve been cooking with a lot is fennel. Like anise, fennel has a licorice tang, which suits me just fine. I love real licorice, enjoy licorice tea, and have been known to buy licorice candy at the movies, just because the package says “licorice,” even though I know full well that that stuff isn’t actually licorice but is sweet junk and mainly corn syrup. 

The other day, when nothing had been planned for dinner, I devised a dish of chicken sausage from Iacono Farm with onions and fennel, and it came out with high marks. I started by sautéing chopped onion in a little olive oil, which 9 out of 10 recipes seem to start with, then added the sausage. After it had been broken up and thoroughly heated, I added quite a lot of fennel, which had been cut into long slices. It was a swell meal, and there was hardly any effort involved. To gild the lily, we sprinkled some fennel seeds on it, which made ultimate sense since a jar of fennel seed has been sitting in the pantry for so long that I don’t recall why it was there.

I’m not sure why I haven’t used fennel much until recently. Culture, I guess. Fennel was not familiar to my grandparents, its having been a perennial in the Mediterranean region of southern Europe rather than the countries from which they emigrated. I vividly remember my grandfather complaining about his wife’s cooking, however, which he would say amounted to “zip.” She could have used some fennel!

In the words of the Indian writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, fennel “is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people . . . smelling of changes to come.” 

That’s very poetic, and if I use my imagination I do think I know what she means, but I prefer this explanation of its appeal from East Hampton’s own food guru, Ina Garten: “In the summer you want fresh, light, and sort of quick things; in winter you want things that are comforting, so your body really tells you you want to go towards potatoes, apples, fennel, things that are warm and comforting. And loin of pork.”

The internet says that in medieval times fennel was employed, together with St. John’s wort and other herbs, to ward off witchcraft and other dark influences. It was supposedly hung over doors on Midsummer’s Eve to keep away evil spirits.

I’m not sure that source is particularly reliable (isn’t that what they said about garlic?), but I do know that fennel is good for what ails us. Have you tried it with pork chops? 

Thirty-two years after the fact, they’ve come up with a name for what I have been doing since the winter of 1986: Digital Nomading. 

According to a piece called “The World Is Your Office” in a recent Sunday Times Magazine, digital nomads are people who “travel the world while working remotely over the internet.” Entire industries are growing up around these wandering telecommuters, from international housing complexes to shared office spaces with gyms, spas, juice bars, and other Googlish perks, all built on the advances in communications technology — the article cites smartphones, roaming data plans, and cheaper air travel — over the last few years.

In the year I’m thinking about — which I remember well because it was one of the last jolly ones on the island of St. Croix before Hurricane Hugo destroyed an up-and-coming economy that never recovered — we went down for Christmas vacation with three kids, me lugging an Altima (not a Nissan sedan but an early make of laptop). It weighed maybe nine pounds, with a slot that took a 5.25-inch floppy disk and another where you could plug in a state-of-the-art umbilical cord called a modem.

Ah, the modem. It was the late Stephen Hahn of East Hampton, a gifted physicist who, had he lived long enough, probably would have figured out how to turn lead into gold, who introduced the Star staff to the modem, that magical dial-up data transmitter that worked, back in the day, only over a phone line. (If a call came through while you were using the modem it would break the connection; you couldn’t use them both at the same time.) Steve, an escapee from the Holocaust who never lost his German accent, called the thing a mo-DEM, so, knowing no different, everyone else here did too. 

I was his guinea pig the night he first tested the modem connection, he in East Hampton, me in Manhattan staring at the Altima’s blank screen. I’ll never forget it. First came a hummy little wait-for-it sound, then green words racing across the void: CAN YOU SEE THIS IRENE? 

STEVE I SEE IT! I typed. STEVE I LOVE YOU.

Because what he’d just done, after months of tinkering, not only made it possible for all of us to write and edit from afar, but for me to work year round, not just in summer as before. Crosstalk, a lightning-fast file processor the Star used for the next six or eight years until email came along, could condense entire stories into a single word and zip them across the miles via the simplest of commands — “send a:robbery,” for example. The story would arrive on the screen full-blown as from the brow of Zeus, and depart, edited, the same one-word way. Like those early years of the web, when AOL had barely a thousand subscribers, Crosstalk was too user-friendly to last.

Anyway, about that Christmas in the Caribbean. I remember, one beautiful sunny St. Croix morning, writing something along the lines of “Another snowstorm is predicted here this weekend, to be followed by a plunge in the thermometer that will likely leave local roads in dangerous condition. Beware of black ice!” 

Helen Rattray accused me of writing it under a palm tree with the laptop on my lap and a glass of Cruzan rum and Coke nearby. She was dead right.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

It would be great publicity for all involved, if anyone reads it. That was part of my thinking this week on a story about a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis whose ownership is disputed in a federal lawsuit.

One of the indisputable truths about media in these times is that readership is fractured into innumerable discrete groups. Television news, which once was confined to the big national networks and their local affiliates, matters far less than it once did. Newspapers’ monopolies on the public’s attention ended with the rise of radio. On the internet, social media spoon up news your friends “like” and little else.

The Jackie O painting story was first reported by The New York Post and Daily News on Saturday. Other news outlets picked it up, and by Monday it was everywhere, or so it seemed. The story, I assumed, was interesting enough that, at least locally, it would cross over into general consciousness.

In short, the suit alleges that a small painting of the future first lady was stolen from the Beale house, otherwise known as Grey Gardens, in the 1960s or early ’70s. What is not disputed is that Terry Wallace, who runs a gallery in East Hampton Village, bought the painting from an unnamed antiques dealer in about 1988.

A Beale nephew, who lives in California and who has not been shy about trying to cash in on the family name with a line of fashion accessories, wants the painting for himself and has sued in federal court seeking its handover.

That the suit is with the feds is notable in and of itself. T.E. McMorrow, the reporter who wrote our story, pointed out that there is a $75,000 threshold to bring a property claim before a federal judge. The nephew’s lawyer says the painting is worth at least that much. T.E., or Tom, as we call him, is skeptical; none of the portraitist’s works has gone for more than $850, he said.

But federal court is federal court, and it makes for better headlines and a greater likelihood that, as happened, multiple news outlets pick up a story. Still, at my usual Java Nation stop on Tuesday morning, none of the news-junkie regulars had heard of it. Even Andrew, who runs the place and knows everything, was in the dark.

So the question was what The Star should do. Should we wait for it to appear in print before putting it on our website or just go for it? We put it up, pushing the story out over Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Interest was steady, if modest. A small item we had posted a few days earlier about the New York City restaurant chain Il Mulino held an insurmountable lead, followed closely by our coverage of a seal pup found scooting along a road in Amagansett in January. Everybody had heard about that.

As to the publicity value of the Jackie O painting, the nephew wins either way, by seeing his name go cross-platform from New York to London’s Daily Mail. And Mr. Wallace, who says the portrait is his legally and not for sale anyway, does too.

An Idaho lawmaker uncomfortable with climate change being taught in the state’s schools — or perhaps simply uncomfortable with education itself — said kids ought to be able to determine on their own, for instance, whether the globe upon which we live is flat or spherical. 

We were hoping the reporter would suggest the legislator read up on Eratosthenes, or, in the alternative, that she and he go outside and put two sticks in the ground somewhat apart from each other so they could observe the different shadow lengths they cast, or that they look at a ship coming up over the horizon, or that they sit down with a laptop and Google the many photos that have been taken of Earth from outer space, or photos of lunar eclipses. But she held her tongue as our personal surface temperatures rose, my baseball cap creating a greenhouse effect.

Presumably, when it’s become abundantly evident that coastal flooding because of melting polar ice and the consequent sea rise has displaced legions of people around the world, when the coral reefs have all died off in acidic oceans, and when extreme weather events such as hurricanes, deluges, wildfires, droughts, heightened air pollution, heat waves, and insect-borne diseases have produced incalculable damage, he will acknowledge that it’s time for the subject to be taught in school, provided, of course, that the kids are encouraged not to jump to any conclusions . . . about climate change, or a heliocentric universe, or the laws of motion, or any of that.

It takes a while for things to sink in, a couple of thousand years, say, in Eratosthenes’s case. Of course there were — nay, still are — naysayers when it came to the teaching of evolution in schools too. If we are the pinnacle of an Intelligent Designer’s experiments, beginning with slime mats four billion years ago and moving onward and upward from there, it’s pretty sad.

And since not everyone can be a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Galileo, a Newton, or an Einstein, who were able to figure things out for themselves, I’m glad there are teachers there for the rest of us, to acclimate us to the world in which we find ourselves, to pique our natural curiosity, and to nurture in us the ability to reason — the ability, once set on our way, to think things through.

We have a teacher in our family, a very good one, who does all the above, and I hate to think that she might ever be hindered in her work, the most essential in society. 

The right to life, free inquiry, free speech, and the pursuit of happiness trumps the right to bear assault weapons in my book. It’s not even close.

The animals and birds at the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens in Palm Desert were not all that lively the day we went to see them. Aside from the birds, who drew our greatest sympathy, they didn’t appear to be cramped, they had some room, though you wondered if they wouldn’t be happier freed from us.

I tried, without success, to get the laughing kookaburra to laugh, reciting catchy Rodney Dangerfield jokes: “I was so ugly when I was born that the doctor slapped my mother!”

“I’m telling you, ugly, I was ugly. My mother used to feed me with a slingshot.” I was constricted, though he just sat there on his perch, apparently unamused.

I fantasized about Mary freeing the vultures, until I read that sometimes they made away with small children. That gave me pause inasmuch as we were visiting two of them, ages 2 and 1 — the 1-year-old, Lucy, being an Aquarius like me. Mary is not a great believer in astrology, by the way, especially since I told her that we were “givers.” Make that “a giving taker,” then, in my case. 

We celebrated Lucy’s birthday a day early, on Super Bowl Sunday, an occasion made all the more merry by the fact that the Eagles won.

We wanted to free the bald eagle and the golden eagle they had at the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens too — all the birds, in fact, though it is worth the visit to see the native desert plants if nothing else.

There is nothing much left of the desert now. Mary said she wished she could have shown it to me in the 1970s, when she lived there, a single mother in Morongo, with infant twins, one of whom is the mother of the aforementioned 1-year-old, who has that dimpled wide-eyed look Johnna herself once had. Instead of tumbleweed, it’s house house house now, and malls, many, many, many of them. 

It seems as if millions live there. Johnna said she wasn’t sure. A million maybe in high season, in all the desert cities ringed by mountains, some with snow on top — Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, Bermuda Dunes, and La Quinta among them. 

She and her husband, Wally, and the children live within a gated community in Bermuda Dunes, though it’s not as easy to get into as the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens. 

I’ve railed against gated communities in the past, though I see her point: Its relative isolation and the constantly patrolling security service assures her pretty much that the kids will be safe when they are playing and riding bikes.

Even at that they’re never far from the madding crowd. The traffic’s horrendous, The Times is scarce, and it was hot for this time of year, in the high 80s and low 90s, not auguring well for the summer, when, as we do in the winter, the natives hunker down. But the margaritas they were good.