Columnists

In the old days, when we were seemingly among the few families who ate in a manner that is today called “locavore” — frequently eating things like eel, duck, and venison, as well as rose hips, wild grapes, and, of course, beach plums — we were not infrequently on the receiving end of gifts from hunters who had taken more than they could personally consume.

I would love to think I’m a lover of the natural world, but it’s hard to be a naturalist when twice in recent months tick larvae have rendered me so infernally itchy, and for so long, that I’ve thought more than once of paving everything over — our lawn, our garden, our bosky woods.

On my list of favorite things, right up there with shoulder rubs, Netflix comedy specials, and strawberries in June, is Christmas.

We went recently to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, and afterward I said I could imagine his wife, Edith, saying, “Not one more polar bear rug, water buffalo head, or hippopotamus foot inkwell, Teddy, not one more.”

An attentive group seemed surprisingly not bored on Tuesday when my daughter and I spoke about The East Hampton Star, and our magazine, East, at a gathering of a group called “Women in Conversation” at Peconic Landing, the retirement community in Greenport.

Reports of the scallops’ demise are premature, at least that was true in certain East Hampton Town harbors and select locations in Southampton Town.

I did not make it to Woodstock. I mean, I did not make it to Woodstock last weekend, not the music and art fair in August 1969, though it’s true that I didn’t make that Woodstock either.

Tuesday morning before voting I took advantage of a daylight low tide to pull a mooring from the bay. Fair weather in the month of November is difficult to come by. Though there were matters to take care of at the office, the tide and wind were to turn later in the week.

Time for gathering swallows to twitter in the skies, and yet all’s not melancholy; there’s a spring in my step even as winter, inevitably, is coming on.

Before my husband and I made our move to Greenport last spring, we undertook an epic clearing out of closets, pantry, and basement. It went on for weeks, and unearthed many an interesting relic of lives lived on Edwards Lane.

The village police closed North Main Street where it goes under the train trestle on Sunday during a heavy rain. Passing by on my way upstreet, I could see the brown water swirling in the dip beneath the bridge.

Friends met us for dinner at one of our favorite East Hampton restaurants last week, and handed us a surprising small gift: a copy of an outlandish million-dollar bill. The bill — faux, obviously — had skulls in the front upper corners and a red, yellow, and cream nuclear explosion where George Washington is supposed to be. On the other side, along with an image of some children, was the message: “Let us spend this money on a sustainable world for all of our kids.”