Columnists

Perhaps you have wondered while making your way around why there appears to be next to no poison ivy in our fair village. That is not likely to be an accident, as this marks the 68th anniversary of the first annual Poison Ivy Eradication Week.

“All of a sudden, it got more exciting — don’t you feel that too?” I said the Friday of Memorial Day weekend to Jen Landes, our arts editor.

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.

About two years after my mother died, at the unfair age of 58, my dad, who was in his early 60s, found himself pursued by a phalanx of age-appropriate widows.

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.

I am dying, Egypt, dying — of the pollen and the ticks — but life, at least as I find it today, is wonderful, now that the sun is out and we’re in the trees’ embrace.

I feel like I spent most of the month of April in Tom Field’s basement. This may sound like an odd statement, I realize, but if you have any connection to the network of emergency medical providers on the South Fork, you get it.

It was surprising at the beginning of the week to find myself in an art gallery in a small town in Northern California looking at photographs calling attention to that community’s housing crisis.

My cousin Harriet tries to keep her father’s side of the family together even though she lives in Dallas and most of the relatives live on the East Coast.

It is time to talk of the outdoor shower, that blessed sanctuary among the trees and birds and light in which one can revel six months long before driven inside to the fire, a pleasure of a different kind.

My brother-in-law, presider over an annual Kentucky Derby party, couldn’t pronounce the horse’s name, and so, of course, I went for it — Mubtaahij.

My own collecting has no particular form, unlike, say, people who scour the markets for cast-iron tractor seats or frog figurines. Still, I am fascinated by those who develop passions for whatever it is and pursue them.

One of the first questions I’m always asked is, “How can you stand the smell?” I invariably answer, “What smell?”

Although the jokey nickname is often used, calling Montauk “The End” doesn’t really catch the spirit of the buzzing community at the tip of Long Island. It has always felt like a place apart —

Had I known that scones were relatively easy to make, I would have begun baking them years ago. I like to cook and consider myself pretty good in the kitchen, but that said, like almost any simple art, scones take work to get right.

Since my son is working on Sunday and one of my daughters lives quite far away, I don’t expect much for Mother’s Day. So I’ve given myself a gift — the gift of meditation.

This old house, pardon me, I mean office building, is full of surprises; you never know what will be unearthed in the archives, or a filing cabinet, or an old desk. What we need here is a resident historian.

My son said recently he thought I’d live to 100, submitting an article that found a link between longevity and vigorous exercise, though if there’s a danger point beyond which you shouldn’t go they haven’t ascertained it yet, nor have I.

I’ve seen my wife worshipful, utterly transported, a few times in my life. Once in the cathedral at Chartres, and now, many years later, again, at the Baltimore Aquarium, where, beckoned by her hands, which she’d pressed against the glass, a dolphin gliding by faced around and came ever so slowly toward her, smiling, her eyes seeming to say, “I know you.”

The phone rang from home early Tuesday morning. I was at the office, and Lisa was home getting Ellis, our 5-year-old, ready for school. The subject of breakfast had come up, and Ellis was adamant.

Constant readers, especially those with a flair for gardening, would have seen and I hope enjoyed The Star’s gardening supplement, which was part of last Thursday’s edition.

Sometime during this winter past, quizzical surfers considered a long-asked question: If the saltwater in the Atlantic Ocean is close to freezing temperature, technically partially frozen, can one still surf?

The last time I looked, I was getting 100 miles to the gallon. This is not entirely fair to the purely internal combustion vehicles on the road, though, since we are talking about my Chevy Volt.

Everyone loses things. Right? So why was I in such a tizzy when my purse, containing a wallet and the usual appurtenances, disappeared last week?

It seemed reading the paper the other morning that all was chaos, and yet . . . and yet the baseball season had begun!

And, somehow — for that moment at any rate — everything seemed all right, everything seemed natural, and fitting, and harmonious — just as it should be.

And, what’s this, the Mets won!

And what’s this, the Yankees lost!

On opening day. The lowly raised up and the mighty fallen — just as it should be.

To be fair, Leo the pig did not actually try to burn down the house. I was not there at the time, but the evidence suggests that it was an unintentional act born of utter need.

Nearing the end of a hard winter with little in the budget for luxuries, my husband and I decided to take the family on a day-and-a-half side trip to Disney World while visiting my grandmother in Florida.

I was leery of it and practically begged my husband to put it out of his mind until another time, and then I caved. Ever budget-conscious, I figured we’d just have to bite the bullet, get out the plastic, and nurse the spending hangover later.

Robert Frost would, I think, find it ironic that the most often repeated line from his poem “Mending Wall” is his neighbor’s insistence that “good fences make good neighbors.” The poet, you see, doesn’t really seem to agree. He says:

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder    

If I could put a notion in his head: 

Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it 

Where there are cows? 

But here there are no cows.

Columbia Journalism Review’s lengthy analysis of “A Rape on Campus,” a 2014 Rolling Stone article that was largely based on allegations that could not be verified, is an education for everyone who works in the news business as well as for readers.

I visited the Wainscott School last Monday, and just like its 19 students do there every day, I learned something new.