Columnists

   “Childrens’ Garden — No Ball Games, Cycling, Dogs” reads a sign published with a recent story in The Guardian, an English daily newspaper, informing readers that “the sometimes vexing question of where and when to add an apostrophe appears to have been solved in one corner of Devon: The local authority is planning to do away with them altogether.”

   “Have you seen a white skateboard?” the woman asked me, a hint of desperation in her voice.

    I had noticed her a short time earlier at the Abraham’s Path kids park run by the town in Amagansett. We were on the basketball court, and she and a young girl were taking shots, talking in Spanish and English interchangeably, while my son, Ellis, and I passed a ball back and forth.

     Across the park, two boys, the woman’s sons, I assumed, took turns on a skateboard on the ramps, while several other girls who were under her charge rode bikes.

   “It’s not fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.” This Sir Walter Scott quotation provided Peter Matthiessen with the title of his book “Men’s Lives, “on the history and decline of the South Fork’s inshore fishery — and about the men whose lives depended on it. The quote has an ominous ring, and I wasn’t surprised that it kept coming to me when I was in Nova Scotia last week.

   Yesterday at 7:02 a.m. spring began in the Northern Hemisphere. With any luck the change of season will bring an end to the seemingly relentless string of coastal storms that began on Oct. 29, when Hurricane Sandy steamrolled the region.

    Sandy was just the biggest and single-most destructive of the 2012-13 assaults. A northeaster followed just over a week later. Then, after a number of ordinary blows, came the February blizzard and a couple more storms, including one on March 6 that echoed the great northeaster of that date in 1962.

   “I want your life,” said my Aunt Pat from California upon seeing me at my nephew’s wedding on Friday night. “I joined Facebook just to look at your pictures,” she said.

    “No, you don’t,” I assured her. I don’t post an update when I struggle to make the rent, I explained. I don’t share a picture of that. But yes, I live on an amazing island and I am blessed with a breathtakingly beautiful commute to East Hampton, by land and sea, and I enjoy capturing it when I can and sharing.

   Our spirits have been rising lately with the promise of spring, though spring, as anyone who’s lived in Bonac a while knows, can be a will-o’-the-wisp, heralding the year’s truly most depressing season — summer.

    It’s not “A-a-pril come she will,” it’s “Memorial Day, get ou — out of my way.”

   April showers bring May flowers, but March showers bring peepers. These tiny frogs are rarely seen but heard every evening from now until late summer. They begin as a thin chorus, gradually growing into a stunningly loud, high-pitched din by the peak of breeding season.

   It will be a good ole time in Montauk this weekend for the Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day festivities. The fun starts tomorrow at a luncheon to honor this year’s grand marshal, Jack Perna. It’s also an opportunity for everyone to pull the green out of their closets.

   Two Novembers ago I was set straight by Jane Callan, who tends the flowers in The Star’s windows, as I was bemoaning the season that was falling into “the sere, the yellow leaf.” Winter, she said, to the contrary, was not a sad time — not a sad time for a lover of flowers, at any rate — but a time of renewal, a time for gathering strength “so that they’ll come back even stronger and bigger than they were before.”

   The flight from La Guardia to Halifax is a cinch: A small plane operated by Chautauqua Airlines for Delta gets you there in less than an hour and a half, and makes it hard to believe you are traveling to another country and have to bring along your passport. So it was with what you might call careless abandon that, in the air headed to Nova Scotia, I filled out a Canadian customs declaration. Too much abandon, as it turned out. Just exactly why I answered in the negative when ticking off the query that asks if you are bringing in food remains unclear even to me.

   “I felt so environmentally impoverished,” I said to Rusty Drumm, a Montauker, “as I drove the other day out of Montauk toward scruffy Springs.”

    “It’s God’s country,” he said.

    “You can say that again.”

    “It’s God’s country,” he said.

    “You’re not kidding. I’ve never seen such a sky. Radiant with filtered silver light cascading down through tiers of mauve clouds . . . as if the heavens were opening to receive me. How could you doubt an afterlife after having been vouchsafed such a vision.”

   The worst television commercials (IMHO) are those that hype drugs — those obnoxious, fast-talking “ask your doctor if” messages about panaceas for all kinds of ailments. They make me happy that I don’t watch much television.

    In the last two months or so, however, similar pitches (advertorials? infomercials?) have invaded my Mac’s inbox. I have clicked to request that the e-mail system filter them as junk, but so far it hasn’t worked.

   It was on a stormy Christmas Day, 1811, that field hands and members of the Gardiner family on the island that bore their name made their way to the shore where a French sailing vessel was founding in heavy seas.

   With birdsong starting to fill the air around my home and my gearing up for some heavy-duty spring cleaning, it has come to my attention that I need a wife. I almost found myself one in the fall, but after three dates I realized a divorce would be imminent. Besides, she had kids and I already have a few of my own, plus a grandson. I didn’t need any more children in my home.

   I’ve written of love recently, and of death. Is anything left? Ah, yes, Downton Abbey!

    We were without it for 24 hours during the blizzard, our Cablevision wire having been downed by heavy limbs, and I’m telling you the wait was torturous. There’s only so much reading you can do.

   If you are like me and do not have many friends or family between the ages of 18 and 25, it is possible that you aren’t entirely aware of the Selective Service System, in which 20 million young men are now registered — and therefore signed up to be drafted should a draft be instated.

   Sometimes my mind wanders. In completing the often dreary task of typing up notes from another local government meeting, a kind of careless dyslexia sets in. “Dogs on the beach” is transcribed as “Gods on the beach.” “On” is typed “Om.” And so on.

    To a semi-recent arrival — albeit one with some roots here — the debate over whether and how much to allow man’s best friend on village beaches while that man’s so-called ruling class frequents said shores can seem like so much ado about very little.

   This day, with the sun glistening off the snow, is all the more beautiful because of the storm we’ve been through, a storm that was as punishing as the forecasters had said.

   Complaining when it snows is strong evidence that you are growing older. What? You don’t look forward to how enchanting the landscape looks in fresh snow? What? You don’t get excited about a chance to watch kids, especially your grandchildren, sled down a hill? What? You’d rather sit by the fire than help make a snowman or a bowl of real snow dripping with chocolate syrup?

    I am beginning to understand why some folks, after they retire, become snowbirds or, even more drastically, actually move permanently to places like Florida.

   The Great Backyard Bird Count observation period ended Monday, and as I have since 2007, I tried to do my part. The count is run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon Society and helps researchers get a three-day snapshot of bird populations in North America and, to some degree, around the world.

I know one thing, having been married twice: It’s a crapshoot. That you have succeeded the second time (I’ve read that most second-timers don’t) has a lot to do with luck, though experience teaches you what to want.

   It is difficult to imagine that a building as substantial as the Montauk Bathing Casino, which once stood on the ocean beach, was gone within 30 years of its opening. The sprawling set of buildings and covered pavilions was part of Carl Fisher’s Montauk Beach Development Company’s grand plan to build a sparkling summer resort at the far eastern tip of Long Island.

   I’m not a big fan of heart-shaped jewelry. I find it juvenile, so I wasn’t too upset when a heart-linked gold bracelet my husband gave me one year for Valentine’s Day went missing while I was wearing it. I might wear my heart on my sleeve but never around my neck, on my wrist, or ring finger.

   Lulu, an old cat, is still resident in my late mother-in-law’s sunny house, and we’re dutifully paying calls to feed her, though Mary worries that she might be lonely.

    It was unlikely, said Jane Callan. Cats aren’t like people. “Their number one question is ‘Who’s feeding me?’ Number two is ‘Do I have a soft, warm place to lie on?’ You might be number three. If you see to their food and comfort, you might be privileged enough to be tolerated.”

   Things were certainly simpler back in the days when it was good old Eames Taxi or bust. My husband and I had an experience on the weekend with a cabbie who acted like he was auditioning for the Robert De Niro part in “Taxi Driver.”

    There are so many cab companies in town these days that I don’t even know which one was involved. If I had paid attention to the service’s name or phone number, I might have complained, but I hadn’t and I didn’t. Instead, I thought, “I’ll write a column!”

   The logo of an angry, two-fisted bee on the padded wall beneath the basket was a nice surprise. It put me in mind of the pugilistic hornet on the screw tops of Mickey’s Big Mouth malt liquor, one of which I’d last drained not long after I’d last set foot in the Bridgehampton School — graduation day, 1985.

   We are in flux. Though we’d love to hold on to those whom we love, it can’t be done. That much of them lives on in us is the most we can hope for. The body is gone, though the spirit, to the extent that it was transmitted to us and to the extent that we received it, remains, and, in the end, it is only the spirit that is real, I think; as real as the grass, the trees, the rocks, the hills, and the sea.

   Do people who live in hot climates get into the concept of comfort food, as we do here where winters can be harsh? In my mind, comfort food should be warm, and generally also soft, sticking to the ribs —  with a spoonful of nostalgia stirred in, of course. With temperatures having been unexpectedly low recently, I’ve found myself keeping warm over the stove.

   Last week, when I was writing about the poignant story of Yoco Unkenchie’s final journey from Shelter Island to his Montauk burying ground, and the spot between Sag Harbor and East Hampton where his funeral bier was briefly laid, I thought how sad it was that knowledge of where his body was finally placed had been long lost.

   The very first attempt I made at  journalistic writing was a fictional obituary as an academic exercise in an evening course at the Columbia School of Journalism. It never occurred to me at the time that I would go on to write and edit hundreds (and hundreds) of them.

    Not long afterward, I married into the Star family and began writing obituaries for real. Ev Rattray, whom I met at the journalism school and who had come home to edit the paper, set the standard: Obituaries were not to be written by rote, and they were to celebrate the life of those who died.