Columnists

Thursday mornings at The Star are a time to regroup. The prior week’s news and features have been neatly filed, edited, printed, and bundled. The slate is clean. And although the editorial meeting to discuss the following week is only minutes away, there is a sense of relief, ease, and release, a calm before the next approaching storm.

I remember the first Thanksgiving in Amagansett, long ago, after I was married but before our children were born, primarily because it was my first experience cooking a goose; I’ve still got a small scar on my right thumb testifying to inexperience where goose fat was concerned.

There haven’t been a lot of cranberries in the bog down our way in Amagansett lately, and there haven’t been all that many foxes either. It is probably related.

This month marks a year since I last set foot in Manhattan. A lot has happened.

A friend with a bad cold handed me a sheaf of papers the other day, and although I was pleased to receive them, I was secretly thrown into a panic. I wasn’t in a place where I could immediately wash my hands, although when I eventually did, I sang “Happy Birthday” to myself — twice.(That’s an old trick for figuring out how long you should wash for it to be effective in removing germs.)

I bought recently for our 6-year old granddaughter “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” and then started reading Robert Graves’s encyclopedic version of them, only to realize that while vastly imaginative they are bloody as hell too, to put it mildly.

If a parking ticket in Southampton Town isn’t a first-world problem, then I don’t know what is.

My husband and I live with tunes of the past. He’s worse than I am, or is it better? He wakes up almost every morning with a song and his repertoire is vast.

There is nothing new under the bun,” I said in my best Ecclesiastes manner as my sister, who’s rehabbing a back injury in Pittsburgh, and I peered down at the health care facility’s limp culinary offerings.

This week, amid juggling pre-election stories, it has been project time in the Rattray household. Evvy, our sixth grader, volunteered to make one of the party games for a school Halloween party, and so, after spending Tuesday trying to make sense of campaign finance reports, I raced home with a slab of builder’s blue foam.

It had been some time since we last thought about the Montauk Monster around the office. But on Tuesday, our memories were refreshed by a query from a National Geographic television program producer looking for images for an upcoming program.

Putter, a male cat who may not have made it, and Summer, Putter’s sister, a shy, small, not-much-of-a-cat’s cat, have both blossomed into Disney movie-like caricatures — possibly, someday, attaining cat-legend status in the Cats Hall of Fame, East Hampton, N.Y.

I ’ve been all a-twitter as the dismantling of the early-19th-century Hedges barn on our property — soon to be moved and reconstructed across Main Street, on the Mulford Farm — draws near.

A woman overtaking me as I walked up — or is it down? — Main Street the other day said in passing that it was a wonderful day.

The closing of Waldbaum’s was a long time coming. The company had been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for a while, and the growing neglect that comes with that may account for why so many of us out here were left wondering why Waldbaum’s hated us so much.

Trying to explain why I like the film festival so much, I came up with a backstory: The Star was among the first public voices to welcome its arrival in East Hampton in 1993. Many year-round residents were wary that first year, fearing the festival would bring traf- fic snarls and unwelcome crowds of gawkers, possibly even harming lo- cal businesses.

Well, I’m finished with the Pirates — for awhile anyway. I had called on Zeus to strike down Jake Arrieta with a thunderbolt, but the best he could do was hit him in the butt with a pitch by Tony Watson in the seventh inning.

Lisa said it would get worse before it got better and she was right. There is a rule of etiquette that says that it is impolite to talk about one’s health, but if describing the cold that has been working its way through our household will convince one person to go scrub their hands, it will have been worth it.

When the Republican candidates began to talk the other night about sending in the Sixth Fleet, strangling Putin, strong-arming China, and bringing Mexico’s bordercrossing legions to heel, I walked down the hall to see on our other TV the Pirates-Cubs game.

The film festival opens here tonight with a screening and party. Lenny Gail, an old college friend, and his family will arrive tomorrow to take in an impressive number of films with a little lunch and dinner squeezed in somehow.

Most of us who live and work out here often find ourselves in close proximity to celebrities. They dine in our restaurants, shop in our stores, and even run lemonade stands with their children.

Whenever th season changes, I think of a woman who worked at The Star some years back who arrived every day more than impeccably dressed. To be sure, she was fashionable, but every outfit also seemed brand new.

Salem witch trials. During the dark days of the Red Scare, in the 1950s, Arthur Miller wrote his fictionalized account, “The Crucible,” about them, and the city of Salem, in Massachusetts, recounts the terrible story in museums and in a “Witch Village.” The Salem trials took place in 1692. Nineteen people were hanged, one pressed to death, and four died in prison. You can’t visit Salem without being confronted by what the law-abiding citizens thought and did.

About a year ago I briefly had  an idea that I would like to lease a new Volkswagen TDI, one of the models now at the center of a massive fraud scandal. I decided against it, opting instead for a Chevrolet Volt.

Volt drivers, the dealer told me when I was first looking at the car, are a kind of cult. Nearly 12 months into the three-year lease I signed, I know what he meant and might add that we are a smug cult now that Volkswagen has been found cheating on emissions tests.

When an electronic thing breaks — hair drier, waterpick, fridge, or dish- washer — unplug it. How do you unplug a dishwasher? I have no idea, but I won’t ever leave a broken one plugged in for six weeks, that’s for sure.

“‘Rose, pure contradiction,joy...’”I began as Mary looked up from her porch chair on the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 15.

The fashion police are making a steady exit from the Village of East Hampton, New York, this September 2015. Also: The National Guard is being considered as a remedy for the poor post-11 p.m. behavior that took place in open view on the streets and beaches of Montauk, New York, this past summer 2015. A group of National Guardsmen may station on Montauk for the summer of 2016 as a deterrent to bad behavior.

A thick wool outdoorsman’s sweater made by Barbour of England — a gift from a family member who visited Great Britain a lot around the year 2000 and 2001 — has been my husband’s favorite for years. So as his birthday approached a few weeks ago, I decided to buy him another in a different color. A simple task given the simplicity of Internet shopping, right?

I don’t know if it’s that I’m finally getting it, but I’ve begun to feel more akin to nature, which, yes, includes rats and bats, and, of course, those wonderful languorous slugs about whose lovemaking I wrote a few weeks past.

Abby Jane Brody, The Star’s gardening columnist, came into the upstairs office this week and told us about a horde of beetles that had descended on the milkweed in the native plant garden at Clinton Academy, next door.