What to do with the sunny Sunday of a long holiday weekend? 

Well, for starters, I had to coordinate with the workers who arrived bright and early to fix our dilapidated old picket fence and plant some privet to hide the back neighbors’ pool from view. Then I wanted to cut and bring in some lilacs before their bloom faded. Also, I needed a few flowering plants for the three ceramic pots on the patio, and that meant I had to make a run to the crazy-busy nursery — where everyone and their mother was out buying hydrangeas and roses, it seemed — to get more potting soil. And then I had to thumb through cookbooks to decide what salads I was going to make for a family birthday dinner . . . and then shop for whatever ingredients were necessary, then whip the salads up . . . then off to an early cocktail reception, and then, by 6:30, the birthday party itself.

Because of all these plans — which somehow felt like a lot to do at one time, even though it wasn’t really — I blew off my usual yoga session on Sunday morning, for the third time in as many weeks. The deep-breathing exercises, not to mention the “letting go,” just weren’t on the agenda last weekend.

I decided on pilaf, and — while taking inventory of the fridge — noticed we were lacking quite a few pantry basics, including milk and Ajax, so I started a grocery list. Roasted asparagus seemed like it might be a nice companion to the pilaf, and I also had to find fruit for the fruit salad my husband had signed on to make for the birthday. The shopping list grew.

It was no longer early when I set out for the supermarket. Trying to make the most of a dwindling day, I decided to forget the Ajax and go straight to Citarella. It was, of course, jam-packed, too. Anticipating mayhem, no doubt, the management had hired attendants to stand by the parking lot entrance, directing cars. One of them, a young man with a clipboard, encouraged me to edge into a very narrow spot. When did shopping turn into such a brouhaha? Somehow, the checkers at the cash registers were still smiling. They told me it had been even crazier there on Saturday.

Making my way home, I followed the loop past the post office to Egypt Lane and stopped in a line of traffic at the light. Unfortunately, that is when my car — to my horror — somehow slowly slid into the Jeep ahead of me! The driver jumped out and, running toward me, shouted, “What the hell are you doing?” I had jammed on the brakes in enough time to avoid any damage, however, and he seemed mollified when I answered meekly that I was sorry. 

The truth is that Memorial Day weekend has never been my favorite moment of the year, no matter how fine the weather or how sweet-smelling the lilacs. Everyone arriving in town en masse seems determined to play — I think the term is “frantically relaxing” — but, like many of us who live here, I’m not on that wavelength right now. Summer is coming, but, for us, it’s not the start of vacation season but the start of work, work, work season. Maybe we can relax in, say, October? Something tells me I should get back to yoga class. 

Post-Memorial Day, it is a little difficult to decide what to write about. There are so many choices: traffic, noise, events missed, yard work.

Among other options are a pony on the beach at a kid’s birthday party, which drew the baffled attention of East Hampton Town Marine Patrol, and a maddening Montauk Highway tie-up on Sunday evening caused by the Cyril’s Fish House parking guys.  

But the thing that I think will stick with me as far as the first weekend of the 2015 season is concerned has to do with three young bike-riding visitors and an endangered plant.

Sunday afternoon, a little after 1, I was driving home on Cranberry Hole Road and noticed a bicycle on its side at the edge of the pavement. A young woman astride another bike stood nearby. As I got closer, I saw that a second woman, who I thought was not much older than 20, had crawled under the pines and  seated herself in a sprawl of small white flowers, apparently picking something. A young man waited in the grass by the side of the road a couple of hundred feet up the way. I thought about warning them about the ticks and the poison ivy, but it was clear that it was too late.

As it turned out, my sister, Bess, had passed these three only moments earlier. As we readied the kids for a trip to Montauk to play miniature golf, we laughed, rather unkindly, about what we had seen. “Ticks up the wazoo!” “Ha, hipsters!” That kind of thing.

Loading the car, with three kids in the back and my sister in the passenger seat, I headed east, turning onto Napeague Meadow Road. Near the big curve, where a new osprey nest on a pole is occupied, we saw them again. This time, a spray of pink flowers was bobbing from a backpack one of the women was wearing.

Almost simultaneously, Bess and I exclaimed, “Lady slippers!”

“Stop the car,” Bess cried, “I’m going to give them what for.”

Lady slippers, members of the orchid family, are protected in New York, as are the state’s other native orchids, all of which are rare. Cutting them from public land, like a road right of way, is a state law violation that can come with a fine. Even cutting them on private property is supposed to require the landowner’s permission. Anyway, in my opinion, a beautiful flower on the side of the road should be left for all to see. 

With a kid in the back of the car shouting “You are an idiot!” at the flower-snatchers, I had to roll up the windows, so I could not hear exactly what my sister said. Still steaming about it when she got back in the car, she said her remonstrations were answered by a repeated, weak, “Uh, okay.”

Judging from their blank expressions, it is  unlikely that they learned a lesson, although that is impossible to know. But they will not soon forget the encounter, that’s for sure.

And the season’s only just begun.

BookHampton sent around an email this week asking if anyone knew of any smart college students who might enjoy working in a bookstore for the summer. The Main Street stalwart is hardly alone in looking for seasonal staff. Kathy, who oversees the production of The Star, said that she never remembered so many employment classifieds this late in the season. It’s not a good sign.

Up on Martha’s Vineyard, whose excellent Vineyard Gazette is a favorite at The Star, things seem just as bad. The lead story of its Memorial Day weekend issue called it a worker shortage. Business owners there were optimistic about the season ahead but saw a “critical shortage of housing” as responsible for the absence of available help.

Annie Cooke-Ennis, a shop owner and president of an island business group, told the Gazette, “I’ve had a couple of employees fall through because their housing fell through. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me.”

Unlike the East End, where a large portion of the work force rolls in from many different places every summer, Martha’s Vineyard’s employers draw on a significantly more constrained labor pool, but the parallels are obvious, and worrisome, since that island has been a leader in public-private affordable housing.

We have heard of enticements here, such as finder’s rewards for new staff or signing bonuses like those of Major League Baseball. It is not clear at all that these have helped. Also making things difficult there, as here, is the inherent difficultly in attracting good people to work in jobs that end once the city olk head home in the fall.

Calls for seasonal, dormitory-style housing have been heard here periodically. As East Hampton and similar vacation meccas try to figure out how to help meet businesses’ needs, creative thinking about the problem will be needed.

In the spring of 2012, desperate for a change of scene, I lined up a bartending job in East Hampton and place to stay, but as moving day drew near I had still not addressed transportation. Money was tight, and I wondered if a scooter would do.

The New York Times website had been running an aggressive ad campaign for the two-seat, 106-inch-long Smart Fortwo, at just $99 per month, and I was intrigued. Smart cars had appeared in Brooklyn a few years earlier, and I thought they were fantastic. City blocks were already impossibly crowded, and it seemed that half the population drove grossly oversized and criminally fuel-inefficient sport utility vehicles.

The city-friendly Smart Fortwo fits virtually anywhere and, though the $99-per-month teaser proved misleading, its 41 highway miles per gallon would save me a small fortune.

Time was short; the due-at-signing figure to lease one was low. Thinking that I would need a car for a long summer  perhaps, I signed on for the 36-month miniumum.

Those months are in the rear-view mirror now, and I am still here. But, despite the persistent efforts of the good people at Smart Center Manhattan, the Smart Fortwo is not. My no-frills car had taken me near and far, and reliably, but I just couldn’t keep it.

It was just too damn small: I could transport music equipment, or a passenger, but not both. The previous winters had been marked by great vehicular adventures that included sliding across icy roads, searching for the (white) car among snowdrifts, and, once, frantically running alongside and leaping into it as it drove off, in reverse, in an icy parking lot.

But mostly I had grown weary of the wisecracks, the disbelieving stares often followed by laughter at what one onlooker described as a roller skate. As the lease’s expiration neared, I had a decision to make.

For months, I had been poring over the website auto.com, where a seemingly limitless supply of used cars beckoned from across the tristate area. To my surprise, many models I consider luxury were in an almost-affordable range. I searched and searched. Mistakes were made.

Late one afternoon, Cathy and I finally arrived at a “showroom,” the ancillary site of an East Flatbush tire shop, onto which scores of vehicles in various states of function were jammed nose to tail. I was to test drive a 2002 Mercedes-Benz C230. When, after much maneuvering and searching for the ignition keys, the car was finally produced, Cathy had to climb over the seat to get into the back, and, when touched, several interior components crumbled. Needing plenty of work, this once-sporty coupe would not do.

More searching turned up a few promising cars closer to home, however, and one sunny Saturday last month the Smart car delivered us to a dealer in Patchogue. And there she was.

Suddenly, I didn’t want a Mercedes anymore, or even the BMW that had lured me there. No, she was standing next to that one, top down, low and lean, all nautic blue pearl and granite leather — a Volvo C70 convertible.

As I ogled it, the relentless wail of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant filled my head: “Fully automatic, comes in any size / Makes me wonder what I did, before we synchronized.” Talkin’ ’bout love, indeed. Three weeks later, as Memorial Day weekend crowds assembled in East Hampton, I cycled to the train station and bought a one-way ticket to Patchogue.

The day before, Cathy had driven the Smart car to Roslyn, site of the nearest dealer to which it could be returned, and I had followed her in The Star’s van. While I’d seen many a Smart car before, I had never before seen my Smart car, in motion, from afar, and I was mortified. It really did look like a roller skate, one that had somehow escaped the rink, never looked back, and was now single-mindedly weaving through myriad trucks, cars, buses, and trailers on the Long Island Expressway.

“My god,” I thought. “Is that what I’ve been driving for the last three years?”

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

“He’s going to Little League?” our daughter asked somewhat incredulously, as if, I suppose, there were more important things to write about and photograph than that.

If she must know, I find it endearing. There is joy there among the 9 and 10-year-old boys, puppies leaping about, directionless but full of life, that is hard to find elsewhere. How the coaches manage to coach them I don’t know — they are unrestrained.

Most times, I think, they’re thinking of something else, their minds are wandering about — this, by the way, was something the late great basketball coach Ed Petrie used to speak of, with a bemused smile, when talking of some of his teams. But then, in rare moments, when they really bear down and concentrate, oh boy! It’s like Roy Hobbs meeting the Marx brothers.

And I think this giddiness, this joy of being a boy of 9 or 10 or 11, has a tendency to rub off on the crowd. I know parents are often accused of being overbearing, of taking the fun out of their children’s play, but those I saw seemed content just to be there the other evening at Pantigo in the sunset, and not overly concerned with the outcome.

(Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that by the end of that evening’s two games three teams, all at 9-3, could say they were pennant-winners, befitting my egalitarian view of this town.) 

And there were things, aside from that communal feeling, to marvel at: a terrific catch of a low, hard-hit line drive down the third baseline, a clout to the fence in deep center, a speared line drive near second that seemed as if it would be a base hit, relays that nailed runners trying to take an extra base. . . . There were miscues too, of course, as bases were overrun, as wild pitches, triggering a dash from third to home, were chased to the backstop, as cupcakes at times proved more compelling than the number of outs and the pitch count or a coach’s call to grab a bat and go hit for Johnny.

Why wouldn’t I want to go to a Little League game? It’s fun.

The menorah on the lawn of Chabad Lubavitch in East Hampton looks like a Han­uk­kah menorah because it has eight rather than seven branches. The eight branches represent the ancient miracle that turned oil for one day into enough oil for eight, after the Maccabees took back the First Temple in Jerusalem for the Jewish people. The ninth branch is the one from which the others are lighted.    

Christian and Jewish children know this story. What is lesser known, perhaps, is that menorahs are thought of simply as symbols of light. The Chabad menorah can be thought of this way, and as the congregation’s way of expressing the light of brotherly love. Be that as it may, its presence on the main thoroughfare into the village has made some people uncomfortable.

To me, on first reflection, it appears as harmless as the nativity scenes one sees on the lawns of churches during the Christmas season. Those are, like the menorah, on private (often church-owned) property and in no way raise any controversy over the constitutional requirement for the separation of church and state. In any event, the courts have addressed the topic of manger scenes and the like on public property over and over. For the most part, they have been permitted.

Of course, nativities — by necessity, I would think, as well as tradition — are taken down at the end of the Christmas holiday season, while the Woods Lane menorah is apparently intended to remain in place year-round. The public in general, I think, accepts it for what it is.

My husband and I got to thinking about this after reading back-and-forth letters to the editor of The Star from readers who disagreed with each other about whether the menorah was an inappropriate way to greet those entering the village. To us, the Chabad menorah is pleasantly decorative, in the way that the sculptor Bill King’s wooden heads are on Goodfriend Drive off Route 114, or as other large  sculptures have been for decades in front of Guild Hall. 

The only other specifically religious incursions into public consciousness here that we could come up with are the recorded hymns broadcast from the belfry of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church (or, perhaps, if you think of it in a certain light, the very spires of various Christian denominations here and there, which hold symbolic religious meaning, too). Like the menorah on Woods Lane, we find the hymns benignly pleasant and not an obnoxious religious imposition. My husband loves hymns; he grew up with them and can sing many with all the words at a moment’s notice. And I am also known to enjoy (and sing) religious music, even though I do not practice any religion. 

The crux of the issue here is expressions of faith that — while done on private property — are intended for public viewing (or, as the case may be, hearing). This touches on several issues at the heart of our democratic ideals: not just the separation of church and state but the almighty principle of free speech. Then, too, none of us likes to feel proselytized to. 

According to Google, communities across the country have grappled with all manner of incidents, both similar and more — how shall I put this? — amusing. According to the Pew Research Center, a Festivus pole of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans, in celebration of a holiday invented by the writers of “Seinfeld,” and a display dedicated to the Flying Spaghetti Monster made it into public religious displays in Florida last December. Perhaps we should all just accept the menorah on Woods Lane as I’m told it is intended — to shed light  — and lighten up.

My husband and I have a domestic disease. Let’s call it recipe-itis. My personal collection of recipes goes back to having been a counselor at a camp where outdoor cooking was a daily routine. We made dishes with names that were often more appealing than the food. Not just the old, familiar Egg on a Rock but, for example, Blushing Bunny, a mixture of tomato soup and American cheese over Saltines.

Mmm.

 My mother never took cooking seriously, and I can’t think of anything I still make today that she handed down. She didn’t pass along her penciled recipes for the carrot or spinach soufflés that were her favorites when I got married, or the fund-raising cookbooks of the organizations she belonged to.

 But my recipe-itis did begin in the ’60s, when I was a young bride. I started clipping recipes from newspapers and buying cookbooks and, years later, inherited a fascinating collection of cookbooks from my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Rattray. My collection only grew vaster when Chris and I got married.

Here it is about 20 years later, and we have more recipes than anyone could use in a lifetime of dinner. Chris not only joined the Yotam Ottolenghi fan club (turning again and again to Mr. Ottolenghi’s “Jerusalem,” “Plenty,” and “Plenty More,” and seeking out rare ingredients like sumac and dried barberries), but has become an inveterate watcher of recipes posted on the New York Times website.

It was probably 30 years ago that I hired a young family friend to organize my recipe clippings. She gotmost of them categorized and placed in two plastic bins, which, hidden under a small desk in the kitchen, have, naturally, sat there undisturbed for three decades. This week, for whatever reason, I decided to rummage through a plastic bag of miscellaneous recipes that had remained unsorted. My vague idea was to decide what to keep and what to ditch, but I got sidetracked by the trip down memory lane.

One of the nicest finds was a recipe for stone soup, written and illustrated by my daughter at the age of 7 or 8. Another was a recipe for malted milk in a child’s large capital letters. I found a commendable recipe for sea scallops and green linguini, written by an old friend years ago. And then there were amusing reminders of how sophisticated, or should I say snobbish, we have become about food.

My daughter, also a near-maniacal cookbook collector, long ago laid claim to her grandmother Jeannette’s entertaining cook booklets (those brightly illustrated little pamphlets put out by, say, the Jell-O company or the Robin Hood Flour Co.), but there in the long-forgotten plastic bag under the small desk in the kitchen was a 1963 relic from the magazine Better Homes & Gardens. It really got me laughing. Catsup and monosodium glutamate are prevalent ingredients, and Liquid Smoke and meat tenderizer are called for, too. Mmm! (Even the “Taste of Home” crowd — who still cheerfully included cake mixes and canned goods in their simple meals — have long-since said good riddance to chemical additives like those, I’m sure.) And how about “Tomato Salad Mold”? Better Homes & Gardens, undoubtedly, would be ashamed to be reminded of that one: It uses an eight-ounce can of seasoned tomato sauce as the only tomato in it. Another recipe in the same book claims “kids will clap their hands for” a fully ripe banana mashed together with a half-cup of peanut butter and a squeeze of lemon juice, all spread on a hamburger bun. Perhaps I should gather the grandchildren and test whether they would clap their hands.

Then, amid all this, was a clipping I will set aside to preserve more carefully. It’s a July 3, 1969, New York Times article by Craig Claiborne about a pot-luck dinner at a converted barn in Amagansett then owned by Gina Beadle. It shows her cutting into a cake, the late Peter Dohanos preparing fish for a ceviche, and, among other elaborate dishes, it gives a long and complicated recipe  for “Everett and Helen Rattray’s Eels in Beer, Herbed and Jelled.” The recipe called for nine eels and nine egg yokes and made 40 appetizer portions! At that time, we were probably the only family on the East End making a regular effort to “eat local,” as they now so trendily say, and frequently served the kids things like venison, squid, and raw fish (bay scallops, for instance, dipped in soy and ginger). People didn’t think we were food snobs, exactly, just a little crazy. It was the ’70s. We let the kids eat Spaghetti-Os, too.

It is no longer a secret. Nicknamed Lip, he’s involved. Man knows some moneyed types. The mayor and town supervisor won’t say — they have guaranteed use of the old rescue boats stashed at undisclosed locations.

Why let perfectly good East Hampton rescue boats sit unused, then get stuck in yet another local museum? Let the lifeguards, the young at heart, the disabled, the striped bass pole wackadoodles, the aging delusional lifeguards command the boats to the oceanfront, launch them, sink them, retrieve them.

It is a crime to deny the young ’uns a ride in those old wooden boats. Enough with the stupid Jet Skis, plastic-composite goof paddleboards, the BZ so-called soft surfboards. Every man, woman, young ’un, maybe a dog or two should get something wood-planked under their feet on open Atlantic waters. Get out and live for once in your boring lives! The ink’s not dry! Some of the ink could be invisible? No doubt it’s a deal!

A couple of stealth lawyers are involved — people you know! To get on the movie or pilot TV payroll an East Hampton car registration must be presented. For those without car registrations — lots of people lose their licenses round here for driving offenses — two bona fide residents must vouch, “Said person lives here.”

A couple of 1960s surfboards will be needed, pre-2005 Ford trucks, a couple of older Chevy trucks. No Toyotas, GMCs, Mitsubishis, none of those awful trucks allowed in the production area camera line of sight. Traditional sunhats are required, no CVS or Waldbaum’s $10 Panama Jack hats are allowed. Bathing suits the East Hampton lifeguards wear will be de rigueur. Bathing suits that do not meet athletic requirements will be banned from all sets.

The “Baywatch Gone Bonacker” film extravaganza begins. First scene! Village of East Hampton lifeguards rowing past the second jetty at Georgica Beach headed for Main Beach in one of the surviving antique East Hampton rescue boats. A whale surfaces nearby: They’ve seen them before and don’t care. All kinds of bluefish gnarl around 30 yards from rescue boat. It is early fall and the guards are due back at school. It has been one of those fishy summers: Bluefish eating everything in sight was common this summer past.

Other fish surface. The lifeguards, male and female, don’t care. Their tans are dark enough; a couple of the lifeguards are slightly sunburnt, wearing pasty white sunscreen and large hats. An outsider might say, “What are they from ‘Gilligan’s Island’ or something?”

A few of the young adults are thinking back to critical rescues they pulled off under hurricane conditions. The water temperature is warm, 70 degrees. The young lifeguards row along, picking up the southwest drift headed north on the incoming tide toward Main Beach. “Stellar beauty” could best describe it.

The second sandbars are visible under the boat 120 yards offshore. The low tide is turning to incoming. Clear visibility 12 feet down to the offshore sandbar under the rescue boat. It’s a lunar tide. A bonita makes a showing; oddly enough a parrotfish swirls by under the boat. One of the lifeguards says to his female friend, “Saw one of those last week.”

A lot of stuff happened this past summer, from the first jump into the frigid last-day-of-May waters off their hometown of East Hampton until this September day. Thank God no one was seriously injured! Five tropical depressions and one hurricane made swirl off Long Island — Atlantic-bound July and August storms. An 18-year-old lifeguard was called on to make a complicated rescue of a pregnant 29-year-old who got pulled off the beach by a freak tidal surge. He had to make a fast 50-yard sprint-swim and grab onto her; she was panicking, the surf was eight feet, one tumble through the nasty shore break and the ambulance would have been called — a miracle it was.

On the other hand, amusing situations arose on the rainiest days early in June. “Ha-ha, you’ve got to be kidding.” Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls. “O.M.G., did you see what Francine and Thomas did? Ha-ha, oh no.” It was the song: “We’ve been through some things together . . . we’ve found things to do in stormy weather . . . rollin’ down that empty ocean road, gettin’ to the surf on time. Long may you run.” Sing it, Neil!

In addition, lots of heavy stuff happened. One of the lifeguard’s parents took ill and died. One lifeguard’s parents lost steering on his 28-foot sport boat — flipped it — and managed to swim away unscratched. “There’s a light over my head, my Lord, let it shine, let it shine”: Neil Young. Nieces and nephews were born to families. A few lifeguards fell in love: storied days of summer.

A couple of super-strange characters showed up at a Village of East Hampton beach one week in late July. The F.B.I. paid the lifeguards a visit to ask about a couple of things concerning these visitors. Of course this was all hush-hush! The agent said wait two years, and if you want to make a movie about it, go for it.

He told the lifeguards, “Keep it under wraps with a lawyer and a movie guy. In two years our end of it will be totally wrapped up. You kids deserve to make some real money. We’re not going to interfere.” The F.B.I. man continued, “Thanks for the help! You’re all good kids. Try to do well enough in school and keep your day jobs. Ha-ha. Summer lifeguard jobs.”

He smiled, gave spin to his tires a bit, and off he drove in new dark-colored Ford Mustang.

Morgan McGivern is The Star’s staff photographer.

By chance, my son, Ellis, and I became East Hampton 7-on-7 soccer fans last week. With time to kill before meeting the rest of the family for a dinner out that never happened, my 5-year-old suggested going to the playground.

We arrived a little after 7 p.m. There was a little chill in the air. I pulled on an old sweatshirt from the back of the car. Ellis did not want his, and ran in short shirtsleeves toward the climbing equipment and swings.

Ellis’s attention was quickly diverted to the game just ending on the big field just behind the Waldbaum’s supermarket, however. We watched as the winning team, which I found out later was Hampton F.C.-Bill Miller, wrapped it up.

One of the next sides to come onto the field  wore blue uniforms, Ellis’s favorite color, so they instantly were his team. I told him I was taking the guys in black and white stripes.

Not that I know all that much about soccer, but the level of play looked good enough to me. Seven-on-7 is a fast game, and plenty physical.

Ellis, seated on a bench behind my team’s goal, yelled, “Go blue!” every time a team member touched the ball. He was right in his choice, of course, and, as the evening sun turned everything golden, the blues, Bateman Painting, took the win.

On a somewhat astonishing website devoted to the local 7-on-7 six-team league I later found a photograph of Ellis and me watching the Bateman game. I look far too serious, frowning in my wife’s old college sweatshirt. But Ellis is on the edge of his seat, excited and en

“Why are the flags out?” I asked Russell Bennett.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, if you don’t know,” I said, “it must be John Howard Payne’s birthday.”

And so it was! On June 9, in the year of our Lord 1791, in New York City. His grandfather’s house, where he spent his early years, has been preserved as Home, Sweet Home, a landmark down the street from this one.

With no further ado then, the lyrics:

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home;

A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,

Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere.

Home! Home!

Sweet, sweet home!

There’s no place like home!

There’s no place like home!

And that’s the song — “that one touch of nature which makes the world kin,” as Harper’s magazine put it in 1883, when the actor-dramatist-lyricist-poet’s ashes were returned to America from Tunis for reinterment in Washington, D.C.

What would Payne think now. . . .

Mid ghettoes and famined lands though we may roam,

Be it ever so massive, there’s no place like (our second) home;

A charm from the market’s rise seems to hallow us there,

Which seek thro’ the suff’ring world, is ne’er met elsewhere.

Home! Second Home!

Tax-sheltered home!

There’s no McMansion like home.

There’s no McMansion like home!

There are not all that many be-they-ever-so-humble homes left here anymore, and in the not-too-distant future, presumably, with the exodus of more members of the middle class, either to a less expensive place or to what Sydney Carton called a far, far better one, they may be very rare indeed.

And that has just given me an idea, though perhaps it’s a little ahead of its time. Why not, instead of the usual upscale house tours of summer, give the well-heeled a chance to see how the other half lives, offering ticky-tacky treks, perhaps plumping ticket sales with the prospects of pest sightings. Who knows? You might even see a roach! “There! There! I’m sure that’s one, there, by the sink drain!”

And because they had become as rare as hen’s teeth, and thus by that time would have acquired a certain cachet, someone with foresight, someone with an interest in East Hampton history, would propose that a dedicated fund be established so that these few remaining rotted-shingle, lapstreak three-bedroom, two-bath flophouses of the fabled Hamptons — no more in number probably than you could count on the beringed fingers of your hand — be preserved, dustballs and all.