In rugby it would have been a try, a score, but no, in football, it seems, if you catch the ball and then put it over the line with your hands — as in touch it down — it doesn’t count as a touchdown. It broke the plane and we’re in pain. You know the Steelers won the game, Patriot fans. You know we won it. And we won it even without Antonio Brown.

What is this? Football or forensic science? Where hair follicles are examined under high-powered microscopes for DNA evidence.

Those — and not all of them Steeler fans by any means — with whom I’ve talked about this are in general agreement that the Talmudic touchdown catch rule, which insists that “the process [whatever that is] must be completed” should be changed. If it breaks the plane, a touchdown’s gained.

But on to other things, to the “giant Christmas gift” to the working people of America. I have this to say about that: No Republican should ever be returned to office in this land, not one.

A writer interviewed in The Times’s Book Review recently said we live mundane lives. Actually, he said it twice. Well why then am I still freaking out about the outcome of the Steelers-Patriots game and the tax “reform” bill when my head should be stuffed into the crease of a couch pillow, as O’en’s was that Saturday night he was in my care, bored out of his squash.

No, it was not a great day for us. We, O’en and I, did nothing of note, and so mundane — though in the dictionary it merely says it is to be earthbound, which is hard to deny when you are, in fact, for the moment, earthbound — I suppose you could say it was. Boring even. Mary would have freed us from our torpor, but she was 3,000 miles away. Life with Mary, though we are earthbound, is never mundane.

Sunday, however, was an entirely different matter. I had planned it out and it all came to pass as I had planned, save for the Steelers’ “loss.” (Patriot fans, I find, are the smuggest of all, which annoys the hell out of me, but on to other things.)

At training O’en shined. As I’ve said, he knows the drill, what’s required. Once in the Wainscott Farms bubble, he’s all business. It’s a marvel. I was all over him afterward, so proud, so proud. Later, I took him to Georgie and Gavin’s where he reveled in the glee of children. That revelry no longer enlivens our house, which is as neat as a pin. Not that that is all bad. Serenity isn’t to be sniffed at, yet it’s clear that O’en misses socializing, mixing it up. We’ve thought of getting him a friend, especially in those moments when his head is stuffed into the crease of a couch pillow, as if it were a rebuke of sorts, as if he were saying, “Life is so mundane, so mundane.”

But then there was Sunday. I would like to think I fueled his spirit, just as he fueled mine.

If this is as good as life gets, I don’t mind that it’s mundane.

And, anyway, Mary will be back in just a day.

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.

It’s all the same eff-in day, man, Janis Joplin used to say, though some, as Mary would readily agree, are colder than others, such as this week’s were, but I could hardly contain myself this morning as I read that in the coming week the temperature will soar into the 30s, and perhaps even flirt with 40!

It makes you want to take your shirt off and do jumping jacks. Meanwhile, it is nice to be snowed in with the one you love. Ping-Pong is out because the basement’s too cold, but backgammon is in, and, though I’m a poor loser in general, I’m happy to say she’s winning. When she’s not beating me in backgammon, she’s reading by the fire.

“You are what you read,” she said, looking up from the week’s Times Book Review.

“Glad you’re not reading ‘The Iceman Cometh,’ ” I said. “ ‘A World Lit Only by Fire’ would be more like it if it weren’t so dark. And talk about being what you read, if in the Dark Ages you were caught with a vernacular translation of the New Testament, you’d be dead.”

As for being what you read nowadays, I’ve been reading about the universe and the unconscious recently, subjects heretofore pretty much unexplored by me, to such an extent that I think the next time I’m asked for my religious affiliation I’ll put down, Wondermentalist. (That’s it! I’ll declare myself the founder of the First Church of Wondermentalism, and file for non-prophet status. Put that in your smipe and poke it, I.R.S.)

I should add that insofar as wonderment goes it’s serendipitous that I haven’t entirely understood — at least on the first go-round — what I’ve been reading lately. So what else is new, you might say. But that’s just it. If I thoroughly understood what I read, I’d become jaded, I fear, world weary. This way, I’m in a state of wonder pretty much constantly even though I’m of great age. I think that is why Montaigne said he was happy he wasn’t so quick on the uptake. (Mary, too, I think, is sometimes in a state of wonderment, wondering, for instance, when I’ll take the garbage out.)

As for the unconscious, a state in which I find myself pretty much half the time — if not more — I keep wondering if I’ll ever crack the code of the symbols in my dreams. For instance, I dreamed the other night that I’d been told Mary had killed a wild boar. Or was it a mild boor?

At any rate, inside and out, there’s much that’s left to explore. Else what’s a lifetime for?

A well-wisher asked me a while ago if we were ready for Christmas.

“You mean the Steelers game?” I said, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, though not all the way. As for Christmas, I told him, we’d “escaped.” Mary didn’t have to feed the 5,000 inasmuch as we were going to other houses on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Moreover, we were treeless, our house was unlit, and, in keeping with the spirit of the season, we would stay in bed as long as we could until hounded out by the dogs — O’en and his houseguest, Marley. (O’en can do a pretty good impersonation of Jaws, rearing up over the stern of the Cricket, as it were.)

We had agreed not to go overboard when it came to gift giving, a book here, a book there, nothing too much. And yet, and yet. . . . There was something that had caught my eye as I was reading a book on dreams, “Man and His Symbols” — a reproduction of a painting by Marc Chagall titled “Time Is a River Without Banks,” a large, colorful fish in the sky with a violin and a grandfather clock above a river, with lovers entwined perceptible in the lower right.

I had finally hit it, I thought, a symbol of us at our best, at our most intimate, at our most silent, at our most attuned. 

I had been trying, trying to sum us up for years, but hadn’t quite. And then this. Out of the blue.

Interestingly, nobody had a poster of it (though they did of many, many other Chagall paintings), so I had Arthur Kaliski take the page out of the book and frame it, which he did wonderfully. She responded as I did. Christmas had found us.

And whenever we’re thinking that time — and love — is a river with banks it will be there. 

There’s something about living in the woods that brings out the stockpiler in me, and my husband couldn’t be happier. 

I’ve long poked fun at his penchant to overprepare when it comes to supplies. We had 50 pounds of white rice in advance of Hurricane Sandy, and more than five years later, we still have 50 pounds of white rice. The same 50 pounds. We don’t eat a lot of white rice under normal circumstances, but I guess if things had turned out worse for us in East Hampton and we had been cut off from the outside world, we would have been glad for all that rice. But why buy six extra deodorants when just three ought to last you a couple of months? Or 36 rolls of paper towels when 18 would probably be adequate for the foreseeable future?

My husband, in turn, has long been stumped by my reluctance to resupply until after I’ve used the very last drop of something and can no longer shake loose the tiniest bit. 

Living these past five months at the Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island, way down at the end of a long, long driveway, my husband is in his element. A Boy Scout by nature, he now has every excuse and then some to be prepared. There’s no easy popping out to the store, and once you’re home, you enter your own happy bubble in the woods and you don’t want to leave. Heaven forbid you forget something after leaving the house. Provided you’re still on Shelter Island, getting home will take 15 minutes round trip at best from the paved road. 

Each weekday I go to East Hampton for work and almost every day I find myself at the grocery store getting one thing or another that I forgot the last time I was there. A lot of times it’s rice. . . . Just kidding.

Seriously, though, you cannot arrive home at the end of a two-and-a-half-mile dirt driveway and then ask yourself what’s for dinner because some days the answer would be “nothing” or maybe “clams” or “white rice.” But my daughter is allergic to clams and she doesn’t like white rice, so I have to be prepared. I have to stockpile. 

Two weeks ago while shopping in Riverhead, we decided to do a walk-through at Costco. It was snowing and it was lunchtime and we’d been impressed before by the samples on offer to hungry shoppers. By the time we left we had a membership, five pounds of pita chips, and the biggest chicken potpie I’d ever seen.

“We’ll see if we use it,” we said to each other, meaning the membership, not the potpie. 

At the store we wondered why anyone would need a five-pound bag of pita chips, but once we got home and got into it we wondered why they don’t make a 10-pound bag, and why we hadn’t bought three of them. 

Back in Riverhead last weekend for a children’s birthday party, I was at Costco again browsing the dinosaur-size bags of organic kale, pallets of marinara sauce, and eight-pound blocks of cheese. Another $300 later and I’ve got a four-month supply of Ritz crackers, 10 pounds of pita chips, a five-pound bag of organic quinoa, 70 AA batteries, 18 apples, and enough table crackers to last until June. While the organic chicken thighs were a great price, I couldn’t see a circumstance in which we could use or store 12 pounds of them. 

“Our pantry looks like a grocery store,” my daughter exclaimed. 

“Mom, just saying, you did go a little crazy at Costco,” my son gently admonished, while my husband happily organized the shelves. 

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

Knowing I am Jewish, some people look at me askance when they see or hear me going overboard at Christmastime. I am choosy about my tree (white pine), and about the menu on Christmas Eve, and tend to buy a few too many frivolous presents for the grandchildren.

To be sure, I honor Hanukkah by lighting a traditional menorah decorated with the Lions of Judah, which I cherish because I inherited it from my mother, and when my kids were growing up I gave them presents on each of the eight nights when we lighted candles. Still, Hanukkah was always more of an observance than a celebration. When my brother and I were small, my grandfather gave us silver dollars, which we thought were great, but only on the first night of the holiday — and that was that. 

I certainly didn’t pay any attention to Christmas as a child, although I was awed by the tree draped in a pale-blue film that the neighbors put up. Even after I graduated from college, and was working and living on my own in New York City, I ignored Christmas; it was an event that emphatically didn’t belong to me, to begin with, and as a young woman with beatnik tendencies, I wasn’t about to start listening to Bing Crosby and wearing reindeer brooches. 

But then I married into a Presbyterian family. Ev and I were anticipating our wedding when I was welcomed to my first Christmas in East Hampton by a grand and gracious woman, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, my mother-in-law to be. I don’t remember many of the particulars of the festivities, but I recall liking the simple white-and-green china with which she set the table — perhaps it was the Old English Ivy pattern, of which we still have a few plates — as well as the exuberantly bright Christmas cactuses in the dining room. The only overdoing-it that I indulged in that first year was the unnecessarily creative wrapping of a present or two. 

After we were married, however, Ev and I met Marlys and Peter Dohanos. The Dohanoses had two young children whose ages matched two of our own three, and before long they introduced us to a glowing, fantastically festive, and delicious Christmas Eve. Marlys’s heritage was Scandinavian, and the holiday featured all sorts of Nordic decorations and treats, from smoked salmon on dark rye to the most amazingly intricate gingerbread cookies decorated with white icing, much fancier than you could buy in stores in those days of the 1970s and 1980s.

Year after year as the kids were growing up — and the adults were experiencing the various vicissitudes of life — Marlys and Peter made Christmas a sheer delight. Their friendship never waned. Years later, after Ev’s death, when I had to step into the breach and take over The Star, they would bring over a big casserole once a week to make sure the kids were properly fed. We had become so close that it seemed that they had welcomed us into their family.

Ev and Peter have been gone for many a day, but for years after the kids were grown Marlys made sure that Christmas did not pass without a gift, perhaps home-baked madeleines. 

Marlys had been in declining health for a while now, and she died on Christmas Eve. 

When we heard this dismal news, none of us were sure at first if the timing of her loss made it so much worse or somehow eased it just one tiny bit: She was to an entire generational gang of East Hampton kids the essence of Christmas, a Minnesotan Mrs. Claus. 

She didn’t just teach us how to enjoy the night, or what the best way to prepare a lemon mousse was — she taught us that these gatherings could be an expression of love. She brought joy to our little world, and we will miss her, and think of her every December as she was when we all crowded into the Dohanos living room and ate much more than was reasonable and weren’t sorry a bit.

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.

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.

They’re always saying everybody dies peacefully or comfortably surrounded by their families. But I don’t believe it. Why? Because if you’re surrounded by your family, there’s precious little air left to breathe.

Mary laughed just now in looking over my shoulder, and then added, “But you’re always talking about dying.”

“But dying is a big part of life,” I said. 

I liked the way our cat did it. He just went off by himself, and when, finally, he dragged himself to our back lawn he had no strength to resist when Mary gathered him up in her arms and gently placed him on our bed. 

We tried not to surround him — we tried to give him room so that he could instruct us, which he did. He reached forth, let it go, leaped into the vastness — as we will someday, I hope, without picking at the coverlet. I’d prefer death to be what happens to me when I’m making other plans. I’ve always liked the way they used to say “death overtook him. . . .” (Actually, in my case it wouldn’t be a great feat.)

But back to life and liveliness and to making plans, which we still do, though we agree we have no goals other than to continue loving, laughing, and, in my case, lifting quotes so this column can continue to move forward, as they also say, and frequently, these days, primarily by people who’ve been caught with their pants down, which makes it difficult to move forward until they’re cinched up.

We were asked specifically what our goals were the other night, in connection with estate planning, and, as I say, other than to continue living, working, and toasting one an other as the sun sets on having made it through yet another day free from sobriety’s icy grip, we couldn’t think of any.

Just keep on sailing, the old lover says to the ferryman — or words to that effect — in “Love in the Time of Cholera.” Just keep on sailing. Mary’s actually flying as I write — on a mission of mercy (as are most of her missions) to Southern California. She is needed there, an accident having happened when our daughter and son-in-law weren’t expecting that they’d have to make other plans. 

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could beam you here?” she said the night before she left to one of our grandsons in Ohio. “Whoosh!”

He agreed that she was being a bit silly, but I like it when she is, when she is lighthearted. 

So she is being beamed to California. Well, not exactly. I think she has to stop in Salt Lake City first, and on the way back, 11 days hence, there are to be two stops — off-putting for one who prefers directness in her dealings. “Whoosh, whoosh.” She’s here, she’s there. . . .

We parted at Mary’s Marvelous (where else?) this morning, she with an avocado sandwich in hand and I with a cup of coffee. A kiss and she was gone, on her way. 

Later, while waiting at the gate, she apologized for the abruptness, but I told her it was just as well, that I was spared the tearing up. 

“I went and drowned my sorrows in tennis balls,” I said, which drew a laugh. 

Later, while walking O’en along Main Street, I saw a silver Prius turning into the parking lot and, for a moment, thought that it might be her. No such luck. That’s life. Death too.

In the early days of the East Hampton settlement, then known as Maidstone, no fence surrounded the South End Burying Ground.

This would not be particularly notable, except that in those days the area on both sides of Town Pond was the main thoroughfare, for people and livestock alike. David Gardiner, who had lived nearby and reflected on this in 1840, found it odd that over the years the graves had been exposed to the intrusions of cattle and to depredations of all kinds, as he put it.

Gardiner published his “Chronicles of the Town of Easthampton” in 1840 in The Sag Harbor Corrector, and the series was assembled into a small book in 1871. The book was reprinted in 1973 at Isabel Gardiner Mairs, one of his descendant’s, expense. Copies of that edition are free for the asking at the Amagansett Library, Nellie’s, an Amagansett antiques shop, and we have a few copies here at The Star office.

That the burying ground was actually in the public highway interested Gardiner greatly, and got him to speculating that it could have been explained as the product of the early residents’ stern religious views.

“What the object could have been in thus locating it, at a time when land was of little value and all equally accessible can only be conjectured,” he wrote.

“Burial grounds are considered holy by the Romish church, and the zeal and bigotry of that day was so intolerant of all papal customs, that the puritans were generally disposed to adopt the reverse of what they considered the superstitions of that church.” Burying their dead in the road, Gardiner supposed, might have been intended as a show of contempt for popish rituals. 

 At some point before 1840, when Gardiner’s account of the early days appeared in The Corrector, the town trustees had decided enough was enough and that the cattle that came to Town Pond to drink or that were being driven past it on their way to the meadows on Montauk were no longer welcome among the graves.

Today, a picket fence surrounds the burying ground with wooden steps at either end, which you have to climb to visit the graves. Small signs indicate that dogs are now not welcome. The cattle that do pass by do so aboard trucks.