Isabel was talking about the Donner party and I said that it was our family’s only claim to fame, according to my father, who, when I once told him I had no ambition, said I was upholding the family tradition, which made me feel better. 

“He told me we were eators not eatees,” I told Isabel, who asked me if I’d ever written about it. “I must have,” I said. “That line is too good not to use — at least once a year.”

She looked the Donner Pass party up on the web and there it was. Twenty wagons had broken off from the main group, following a bogus shortcut map, “and they had to cut down trees!” she said as she read.

“And here I am complaining about raking leaves or shoveling a foot of snow,” I said. “And my ‘darkest hour’ was when the Steelers lost to the Jaguars.”

“Mary Graves was ‘the belle of the wagon train,’ and her father was Whiskey Bill Graves,” I told her. “They were Vermonters who had moved to Illinois in search of better soil, and, because they were eators not eatees, they wound up in California. It all may be hearsay, but it’s hearsay that you heard here first.”

My father also told me that his given name, Cebra, had been handed down through many generations of his mother’s family, the Quackenbushes, originally from the Netherlands. The first Cebra, he said, had been in the resistance to the Duke of Alba. This was at the time of the great Spanish Armada, and he had been caught and lashed by the Spaniards, who, in viewing the whip marks on his back, laughed and said (or thaid, if you’re translating properly), “Thebra, Thebra.”

Unbowed, he is reported to have said, “Cebra you call me, Cebra I will be.”

My father reckoned my son to be about the 14th in the line — Cebra XIV.

“Cebra, you call me, Cebra I will be. . . .”

I’m told a genealogist in our extended family has strong doubts about the story, and if plain truth were more appealing to me than colorful hearsay, I might deign to investigate. But in the end, I, whose ancestors were eators not eatees, don’t want to be disabused of my illusions, as long, at least, as they’re savory. And make no mythtake about that.

I gather there are some dogs — huskies and Newfoundlands and such — who love nothing better than a good romp in the snow, but my dog, Sweet Pea, who came to the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons after the hurricanes in Puerto Rico, clearly isn’t a fan of ice and blizzards. I would be curious to hear if other ARF dogs who come from warmer climes are as indignant about the snow as mine is. 

Two weeks ago, East End dogs and their owners had a 12-inch snowfall to cope with, in addition to single-digit temperatures. When I opened the door for Sweet Pea the morning of that storm, she looked disdainfully around, and ran back into the living room to curl up in an easy chair. She must have a bladder of iron.

A courageous friend said her technique for dealing with her reluctant dogs was to shovel the snow off a rectangle in her yard and carry her two small pets to it a few times a day. Another told me his little dogs were willing to go out the front door when he opened it — but no further. They did what they had to do, he said, right there by the front door, but he wasn’t going to clean it up till the cold-weather siege had ended. (I can imagine the spring thaw will bring surprises in my garden, too. Oh, well, I guess it’s good for the roses.)

A city friend said that the snow-melt chemicals all over the sidewalks were the worst thing about taking his dog for a walk in winter. The grains got into the dog’s paws and made the otherwise pleasant experience of a twice-daily stroll feel somewhat cruel.

For the most part I’ve faced the weather by staying, quite happily, at the computer keyboard or in our well-heated kitchen, watching the birds. Sweet Pea is always close by, or settled onto my lap. No matter how much time she and I devote to reading The New York Times and the other newspapers and magazines piled up in our sun porch, we never seem to reach the bottom of the stack.

One of the nice things about having a dog again is being forced to go out a few times a day for at least a short walk. I have insisted that my husband do the same, canes and all. The first few minutes of each walk, at least, are usually great: There is nothing like the exhilaration that comes from a winter walk, especially when the sun comes out and your grandchildren arrive in high spirits, delighted to have had a chance to tromp through clean, deep snow and happy for another day off school.

To my surprise, on Tuesday, when we were treated to another bountiful snowfall, Sweet Pea showed signs of acclimating. She actually bounded outside and into the drifts, ignoring the fact that her legs were too short to keep her belly out of it. I do, however, think she might benefit from a set of little snow booties, to protect her feet (if not her dignity).

Weekday mornings, after I drop off my son, Ellis, at school, I stop by the coffee shop in Bridgehampton. It’s more of a habit, I guess, than a ritual, but it has become part of my routine. So, too, is it for a handful of other morning regulars who linger, sitting and talking across the floor with one another about politics as customers in more of a hurry come and go.

A couple of years ago, I walked into a similar place in Ojai, Calif., at midmorning and had shock of recognition. Three or four older guys occupied chairs and were rattling about this and that at one another in the same urgent, caffeinated tone. I shivered. “This could be me in a few years,” I thought.

Years ago, when I was in high school and just starting to drive, I went out before sunrise to go surfing and would sometimes stop at the Chicken House, which occupied the site on Toilsome Lane in the village where Hampton Market Place is now. No matter how early I went, there was always a small group of ancients drinking coffee in a small room off to the side. Glancing at them then, it made no sense. I mean, who in his right mind would get up and get out of the house before the sun was up to sit around in an overly bright, fluorescent-lit room at Formica-topped tables just . . . talking? I get it now.

The morning crew at Java Nation is the present-day equivalent. There’s the mushroom farmer, a builder from New Zealand, and the guy who grumbles under his breath if someone else is in the leather chair he likes to occupy till about noon. Over in the corner, there usually is a mom and her daughter spending a few minutes before the day begins.

Other regulars, who work nearby in blue-collar jobs, come in, spend a few minutes talking or making wisecracks, and leave. There are tall men with small dogs and women in fancy black cars (usually not together), groups of landscape workers, people in the restaurant business, and those who work in the schools nearby. Sometimes I see the guy who moved a driveway for me. Sometimes I see painter friends, but only if I stay late enough in the morning that they have gotten out of bed.

The guy who runs an insulation business stops in just long enough to put milk in his coffee. People in horse-riding clothes come in, though not so much at this time of year.  There is a father, who likes to talk, and his son, whom no one has ever heard say a word. The same three guys from one of the nearby construction companies roll in and out, joking about something. In turn, most of the people who work at the auto parts store drop by, as do the folks from the propane place across the street. We know each other’s faces, if not all the names.

I’m somewhere in between those who hang around indefinitely and those who don’t, getting a cup of coffee for myself and a decaf to bring back to the office for the arts editor, saying hello to Andrew, who runs the place, and getting out before I become part of the woodwork, like the other old guys. If I put a hat or part of a coat over the arts editor’s coffee, it will stay hot until I get back to East Hampton.

Sorry to say, I did not get the name of the reader who stopped by The Star last week with a small skein of darning thread. 

I had written a lament about the absence of suitable yarn at the Sag Harbor Variety Store with which I expected to mend a hole in a wool mitten. Time was, I might drive over with an old sweater looking for material to close up a hole eaten by a moth and be able to buy a small amount in a near-perfect match wrapped on a card. I was, it seems, one of the few still looking for yarn; the store no longer keeps a supply.

By coincidence or luck, the Coats & Clark’s silvery gray darning cotton the reader brought by is close in color, if not texture, and I mean to try it.

I was surprised by a second response to my column, this one an email from Peter Fitzgerald, who suggested I stop by Black Sheep Knit Works in East Hampton Village. A kindred soul, Mr. Fitzgerald went on to say, “As someone who has a shed full of things I fully intend to repair (they accumulate faster than I fix them somehow), I commend your good intentions.”

And that brings me back to something I have written about before: the near-hoarding quality of those of us with, perhaps, the ability to fix and repair material things but not the time. Darning a glove or sock is one thing, but letting a leaky cold-water faucet under the sink go on for six months before being shut off at the valve crosses some sort of line.

Last summer, I started work on putting a favorite surfboard back into shape after a friend had driven it into the sand and snapped off the nose almost a year earlier. The board is still waiting for a final coat of resin and sanding. In my basement and workshop you might find as many as 10 antique chairs awaiting attention. There is even an old hammock from Mexico hanging near a broken canoe paddle, which I have long intended to tend to.

There is joy in making broken things work again, which is why we hold on to them, I suppose. And yet from their dark, cobwebbed places in the corner of a basement or the back of a shed they call to us, mocking us for not letting go. If the worst thing anyone can say about Mr. Fitzgerald and me is that we keep too many things for too long in the hope that we can resurrect them, I guess that is not all bad. I am sure he, like me, believes that he will get around to them eventually.

I am always looking for cool stuff. I have what you call the acquisition gene. To spin on the Latin: Veni, vidi, Visa. Lucky for me, my acquisition gene is nurtured through an additional kind of “shopping”: taking pictures for The Star. Veni, vidi . . . voro? It’s not the same kind of shopping, but it’s easier on the pocketbook and that hungry gene can be fooled.

I am a born hunter-gatherer and vintager. As a bohemian girl in the early ’60s, I was always happy to wear nifty hand-me-downs as long as they went with black tights and sandals. But it really started in the 1970s, when cool stuff was everywhere and I was getting a paycheck. Antique stores and thrift shops were ubiquitous and all you needed was a good eye. Who remembers the Ridge Trading Company on Great Jones Street?

When I first set up apartment-keeping, rent control existed and gas was cheap and shopping for stuff was entertainment. My live-in boyfriend and I prowled the shops on Bleecker Street every Saturday night after pizza at John’s and an ice cream cone at the place on Christopher Street. We went to antiques markets at Farmington and Brimfield. We subscribed to The Newtown Bee — the bible of antiquing — and Maine Antique Digest. On one vacation, he and I drove from Orient to Nova Scotia and back (no bluenose ferry for us), stopping at every antiques shop on old Route 1. We piled up the car with what we called “props” and filled our large rent-controlled apartment with our finds. After a river trip in Utah, we drove the blue highways (Thank you, William Least Heat-Moon) from Ouray to Manhattan, shopping all the way. This time the car was filled with Acoma pots and Zuni fetishes, and of course the requisite Georgia O’Keeffe-ish old bones, patchwork quilts, and souvenir snow globes. Much of that stuff I still have and cherish. 

That man friend and I went our separate shopping ways but the skill set we honed over 10 years together stuck with me. As a single dame, I scoured Manhattan for vintage clothes. After I married John Berg, my collecting focus came to include advertising thermometers, of which he already had a collection. 

Life for John and me eventually became more East Hampton oriented. As year-round weekenders we would spend Saturdays checking out the antiques shops and garage sales. My husband would drive and I would navigate, and along the way we bought a little of this and some of that . . . mostly, it turned out that the “that” was little paintings that looked “local.” Barbara Trujillo Antiques was an excellent source for little paintings. She curates well for my taste. I once bought a painting from her that had been signed by the artist three times in three different places. It has a train and a lily pond and that makes it local enough for me! 

Even though I hung things salon-style we began to run out of wall space (small house, lots of windows), so I rotated things in and out to make room for the swell paintings I kept finding. (Thanks, Springs School Mystery Art Sale, for the endless temptations.)

After my husband died two years ago, in a need to resettle in my nest, I had the inside of our house painted. Anyone who has ever emptied out a room for painting knows at least two things: 1) After the paint has dried you are loath to put a hole in the newly painted walls, and 2) What used to fit in the room or on the walls will no longer do so. Even with the most careful planning, it all just doesn’t want go back the same way. A painting collection that had grown organically just did not want to be forced. 

Suddenly a little seascape no longer looked good next to a little pondscape or fieldscape. Reinstalling would clearly be copying the original hodgepodge and would no longer have the same serendipitous overlay. 

So, I left the Ikea bags full of little framed paintings around for months. I guess I was waiting for a snow day. That day came and I began “shopping” the bags. Slowly the walls are beginning to fill up with paintings that I am looking at in new ways. This is the fun part: going to my own yard sale.

Last week I re-looked at a seascape I had bought at an estate sale quite a few years ago. Oddly, I pretty much remember when I encountered it and actually where it was on a shelf in the house where the sale was taking place. The house was south of the highway on the east side of the street, likely on Dunemere but maybe not. The painting was on a shelf of a white painted bookcase with lots of molding. There was a window to the left of the bookcase. I bought it on the spot. 

It was the tail end of the sale and I cannot to this day see why nobody else had snatched it up, but sometimes things are behind things waiting for the right person to send out their little beacon: “Here I am, buy me!” I got the message, bought the painting, and hung it up next to a window where it stayed until everything came down. 

Looking at it again last week, I decided to put a picture of the picture up on Facebook and to ask my buddies if anyone recognized the location or names of people connected to the painting. It is called “Dudley’s Flag,” and the inscription on the back says, “To Dudley, thanks for all the great fishing trips off shore and on the rips.” It is signed “Jim, 1999.”

It only took 20 minutes for some details to emerge. First from Lys Marigold: “Think it was done by the owner of that English thatch-roofed mansion next to Maidstone Club. He was Jim Johnson and a painter; his wife Gretchen. Dudley Roberts lived next door or one over, on the ocean. Nice find.” Then from Irene Silverman: “ Dudley Roberts was the man who saved the Dominy workshops from demolition during WW II and used them as a guest cottage. He did live on Further near the Maidstone; he was its president for years.” Laura Donnelly and Richard Barons weighed in. And there is more from Lys: “Then Dudley Roberts gave the beautiful Dominy accessory building to his neighbor who last year donated the old wooden structure to the Village for the museum on the corner of North Main and Cedar.”

So here I am with a wonderful piece of local history, on so many levels one of the coolest things I have ever bought. And thanks to the internet for solving the who and the where, and to friends who helped, and to Jim Johnson for painting this nifty work in 1999.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.

I recently read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s little book on astrophysics, probably the smallest book ever written about such a vast and ever-fascinating subject. 

It’s a pity all of us can’t be astrophysicists, for then we’d never be bored, and thus we’d not spend so much time thinking of ways to kill each other or of ways in which to puff ourselves up, often at others’ expense.

I would like to think, though it may be wishful thinking, that as the universe continues to expand, my ego will continue to deflate, as certainly it should given the immeasurable (thus far at any rate) immensity in which we find ourselves, which counsels humility and wonder. 

Temporary residents on a water spot in this vastness — a blue marble when seen up close — you’d think we’d be more inclined to reconciliation than to beating our chests.

Still, wretch that I am, I can’t help but beat mine after winning a tennis match. 

Yet, as I’m about to unveil the full panoply of my tail feathers in strutting before Mary, I consider that one of my opponents recently underwent open heart surgery, that his partner not only has two knee replacements (as do I), but also a new hip and shoulder, and that my partner’s ripped rectus abdominis must be bound by a girdle, even when he’s not playing tennis.

Such thoughts tend to tampen the ego, as happens too whenever I think of solar winds and asteroids and light-years and gigantic black holes, such as the one upstairs here in the attic into which many of my negatives and contact sheets have disappeared forever. Try finding 1982, for instance. It doesn’t exist, or, if it does, it’s in a parallel universe.

Do I feel at home in our galaxy? You know, as I do on Harbor View Drive? Sometimes. And I’d like to more and more, which is why I’ve begun to read “Cosmos” again, which is wonderfully well written, by the way.

But my main preoccupation at the moment, earthbound as I am, is to learn how to keep score in pickleball. 

Winning in that sport, in contrast to tennis, seems to be less of a concern than having fun. 

Yes it’s fun. Fun all the way down.

One cold winter’s night about 26 years ago, two friends and I shivered on West Third Street, craning our necks and peering in the large window of the Blue Note Jazz Club, straining for a glimpse of Ray Charles. We were barely employed musicians then, sharing a small apartment in Hoboken and busking in the subway when times were especially tough (they usually were).

On Saturday, I nodded hello to the shadows of those three poor scruffs as I strode into the club, now flush with 40 dollars and then some, to sit at the bar, sip wine, and listen to Jools Holland bang out rhythm and blues and boogie-woogie on a grand piano.

I’d seen a blurb about Mr. Holland, an original member of the band Squeeze, and his show at the Blue Note, “Piano, Vocals, and Drum Frenzy,” in the “Goings On About Town” section in The New Yorker. Learning that Ruby Turner, a wonderful British-Jamaican singer, would accompany him at the Blue Note, I had to attend.

Squeeze was a marvelous band that crafted superb, Beatles-esque pop in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Since 1992, Julian Miles Holland has hosted “Later . . . With Jools Holland,” a BBC program on which new and established musicians perform and are interviewed by the host, who often joins in. 

My introduction to Ms. Turner came on “Small World, Big Band” by Mr. Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, a sprawling, 22-track release featuring blues and pop artists including Paul Weller, Stereophonics, Van Morrison, Taj Mahal, and Mark Knopfler. George Harrison’s final performance, completed shortly before his death in 2001, is one standout track. Ms. Turner’s contribution, the elegiac and deeply stirring “Nobody ut You,” is another.

But Saturday: Curse you, Metropolitan Transportation Authority! Fifteen long minutes ticked by before the F train pulled into the station, and by the time I got to the Blue Note, the bar, which accommodates just a dozen stools, was full. But, unlike that frigid night 26-odd years ago, fortune smiled. The nice lady at the door said that if the show wasn’t sold out, I could upgrade to a table seat for an additional 15 dollars. After an hour of lurking uncomfortably behind the bar patrons, I received the welcome news and was led deeper into the venue. 

How about this one, she asked, pointing to an empty chair. We can do better, I thought, though by now the joint was jammed.

And then I saw it: amid the dense crowd, an open seat, not three feet from the stage, directly in front of that grand piano’s keyboard! I was the new companion of a family of three, who had flown from Orlando so that the ninth-grade pianist among them could see Mr. Holland. They had apparently been the first arrivals, and I silently thanked them for their enthusiasm, their punctuality, and for not having had a second child. 

And then it was show time, and Mr. Holland and the drummer, Gilson Lavis — another Squeeze alumnus, smartly attired in three-piece suit and tie — were fantastic, surely living up to the show’s title with a flurry of rollicking, stomping duets.

On a frantic, boogie-woogie rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the pianist himself took flight, his left hand pounding an insistent bass as the right danced up and down the keys. Taking an odd, delightful turn, the musicians segued into, and then out of, a most uptempo take on Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C major as the crowd sat, spellbound.

Finally, the gregarious Mr. Holland announced, “It’s time for our last very special guest of the evening, one of the most famous people in the whole of England.” No, he said, it “isn’t Her Majesty, the Queen.” Making her debut at the Blue Note — “apart from last night and the night before” — was “the living boogie-woogie queen of England.”

Ms. Turner, with her accompanists, brought the house down, belting out “Rock Me,” made famous by Sister Rosetta Tharpe; “To Love a Child,” and, finally, “Peace in the Valley,” the latter two featured on the 2015 album “Jools & Ruby.”

The lights came up, and so did the soundtrack, and the crowd made its way to the door, and as I thought again of those poor scruffs straining for a peek at Ray Charles so many cold winter nights ago, the unmistakable sound of a Wurlitzer electric piano sounded and the late legend’s “What’d I Say” filled the venue:

“Hey mama, don’t you treat me wrong

Come and love your daddy all night long

All right now, hey hey, all right!”

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

Driving along Long Lane before the freeze broke a few days ago and looking out of the left side of my truck over the corn stubble, I noticed a large number of crows in among the Canada geese. 

It was late in the day, and in the yellowing light, flocks of geese winged in from the direction of Hook Pond, where, presumably, there had been a few remaining open patches of water. 

Most of the time the geese around here spend their days in the fields and the nights on the ponds. With the ponds frozen, the geese settle down in the evening on solid ground. It is sunset on a Tuesday in January as I write this, and I can see from my office window long black strings of them moving in the opposite direction over the Village Green, so who knows.

Crows seize whatever opportunity presents itself, even if it means bedding down with the geese — or eating them. Harvey Bennett, who runs the Tackle Shop in Amagansett and spends much of his time outdoors, told me that he saw a group of crows dining on a goose carcass by the side of the highway up at Ken Schwenk’s place in Sagaponack. They will eat hard rolls, too, like any good Bonacker, Harvey said. For years a goose would come around his place in Amagansett if Harvey threw it some of his breakfast. “It got to that he would almost take it out of my hand,” he said.

Crows were something of an Amagansett thing at one time, Harvey said. Stuart Vorpahl Sr., who was an accomplished trapper, was the first person Harvey knew of who took a fledgling crow from its nest and raised it as a pet. 

Keeping crows and other wildlife as pets is forbidden by the state now. It probably was when Harvey was growing up, too, but the authorities did not care as much at the time. 

Back then, Harvey said, one crow in particular would follow Stuart Junior to the Amagansett School and in good weather could be heard through open windows cursing from its perch in a tree. Crows are exceptional mimics, Harvey said, and this one learned how to say “God damn it” and a whole lot more from hanging around the fish market.

Harvey laughed at the thought of some fifth grader going home and asking his mom what “son of a bitch” meant and then having to explain that he had heard it from a crow. 

Think of that the next time you see a flock of crows harassing a hawk or picking at something furry and indistinct on the side of the road.

There is no darning yarn at the Sag Harbor Variety Store, as I discovered the other day after making a trip there from Amagansett. I had found a hole in one of my gray wool mittens while shoveling the driveway during the last big snow, and, knowing I  had only beige yarn in my sewing box, had planned my day around getting to Sag Harbor for the right stuff. Some time ago, though I can’t say how long, the shop stocked a good supply. No longer.

Who darns things anymore anyway, seems the right question. The back-counter clerk at the store told me that most customers bought colored embroidery thread when they needed to stitch something up. I almost did, but having spent several minutes holding packets of thread up to my mitten, forgetting about weight and texture and finding nothing that matched the color, I gave up, put the sample back, and climbed into my truck, feeling a little blue and stupid for even wanting to try. Maybe I should just buy a new pair of mittens, like everyone else.

Repairing things around the house may be a dying art, but I enjoy it. It gives me no small degree of pleasure to know how to clear an ice jam in my refrigerator drain, instead of waiting for the repair company to arrive, for example. As everything has gotten more complicated, however, there is a limit.

I did engine work on my first car (a 1970 Dodge Dart) and the second, an International Scout whose model and year I have forgotten. Messing around under the hood of the Chevy Volt I drove until recently was unthinkable. Mittens, though, I can do, and I still want to. If I can find the yarn.

The words “celebration of life” are used rather over-optimistically sometimes, when plans are being made for a funeral or other memorial observance. To be sure, the phrase always conveys an honest desire of the bereaved to commemorate the person who is gone, but these “celebrations” are rarely what you could really call a party.

We were lucky enough to participate in the exception to the rule on Saturday when we attended a celebration held in memory of our dear old friend Marlys, who — as avid Star readers will know — died on Christmas Eve.

At the Lutheran funeral service earlier that day, tears poured. But later, when Marlys’s daughters, Nina and Daisy, staged a genuine, no-holds-barred party at the Bell and Anchor in Noyac, we all were lifted up by the warmth and cheer. It was Christmas in January, and Marlys would have loved it. 

There was a big spread of all Marlys’s traditional Christmas dishes: Swedish meatballs, baked ham, smoked salmon with capers, Norwegian lefse, and huge trays of cookies and rum balls. The wine flowed, and another dear friend, the folk singer Tom Paxton, sang in a voice that was as clear and strong as it was when the kids were little and we all gathered in the 1970s and 1980s. We raised our voices to join in Christmas caroling, and we looked long and hard at all the wonderful old family photos that had been placed around the room, which was decorated with Nordic elves and sprites made of wood, straw, and wool. 

The family members who had traveled from Minnesota to say goodbye made it obvious that while they had come to mourn they were, like all of us, both moved and pleased to feel close again to Marlys, feeling her presence in these rituals of music, good humor, drinks, heartfelt conversation, and generosity. The highlights of the evening were recorded via cellphone for other relatives back home. 

Some of us hadn’t seen one another for 10 or 20 years, or more. There really are only two occasions that have the power to bring together far-flung friends and family as we came together last weekend: weddings and funerals. The mood at weddings is, of course, generally bright and the conversation light and humorous, as guests trade stories about the happy couple just starting out together in life. But while the mood at Marlys’s party was bittersweet, it was mostly sweet, sweet as the mulled and spiced glogg wine. We all felt her spirit there. She was a joyful person, someone who positively twinkled when she smiled, which was frequently. It was a celebration of life — hers and ours.