Opinion

The second round of dandelions has begun. Their bright yellow heads are close to the ground for the moment, as the seed puffs bob, waiting for a gust of wind.

May 17: Maybe that can be another “new normal.” It’d be good to get Tax Day a bit away from a risen Christ and the Easter Bunny.

This week, East Hampton Village and the Village of Sag Harbor both implemented a pay-for-parking system that required users to download a smartphone app. This seems a lot to ask of both residents and visitors alike.

One summer evening in 1943 I ran to Dad with a big request: It was time for a Daisy air rifle.

The high school prom: fun or fraught?

School district elections are Tuesday, and we encourage residents to take part. While there is a dearth of contested school board races, important ballot measures are proposed in Springs, Sagaponack, Sag Harbor, Montauk, and Amagansett.

Memories of heavenly dates at Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlor in Queens trigger thoughts of the recent loss of Scoop du Jour here in East Hampton.

Have you seen the commercial for Extra sugar-free gum, set “sometime in the not too distant future,” in which — as Celine Dion sings “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” — citizens freed from lockdown rush giddily into the streets, pop a spearmint slice into their mouth, and leap into the arms of strangers to make out?

Even in a slow year, there were 12,500 flights in or out of the airport — an astonishing number in itself that should tell you that our kind-of quiet skies are about to get a whole lot louder as Covid-19 restrictions ease.

While it would be nice to write off all state income and property taxes, as we used to, I’m willing to stand the gaff if it means that President Biden’s broad spending plan will pass. The New York legislators who have said they won’t vote for the bill if our state income and property tax write-offs remain capped at $10,000, should abandon that stand in favor of the greater good.

I had a feeling that Tuesday morning was going to be weird. When Weasel, the Lab mix, rousted me around 4:30 to go outside, the peeper frogs in the swamp were especially worked up and a whippoorwill sang from a tree in the driveway so close that I could hear a clicking he made between choruses. Click. Whip-poor-will. Click. I went back upstairs and put my head down on a pillow.

Time spent on the beach with a father, and the details a daughter remembers.

My son, bless his cotton socks, is of a scientific mind.

We can only hope that the more than 1,200 people who signed a petition demanding fast action for the eroded Montauk ocean beaches now begin to understand the folly in waiting for the federal government to save the day.

A fellow tennis player said the other day that he assumed I’d not been very busy lately, though I assured him I had been inasmuch as the high school teams had been pretty much in full swing since the end of February.

Nothing screams “suburban streetscape!” quite so loudly as Belgian block.

A soaring vertical space broken up by horizontal catwalks, railings, and landings. This is what preservation can look like . . .

Sag Harbor Mayor Kathleen Mulcahy put it well during a public forum last week when she said that the village has the power to control the use, size, and character of development.

History runs deep on the South Fork, and well recorded is the spelling Noyack, not Noyac. With the all-important K.

This is a good time to bring up the longer-term question of sharing superintendents among the South Fork’s smaller districts.

I think my interest in history, as in the history of the Presbyterian churches in Springs and Amagansett, is an extension of looking into my history. Who am I?

The only good use for a fence, in my opinion, is for leaning on while watching your kid play team sports in the sunshine in a field behind a school.

When East Hampton Town first floated the idea of running its own vaccination clinics, we were skeptical the town could pull it off. And now we are happy to have been proven wrong.

This may not be the best advertisement for the book of “Point of View” columns I intend to publish, a book to be known as “Essays From Eden,” but Mary nearly keeled over in proofreading them this past week.

A volcanic eruption on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent highlights the difficulty of living without electricity.

The East Hampton Independence Party’s support for a slate of candidates this week is important because it instantly injects a hearty dose of democracy back into the race.

Science can’t prove or disprove God, but I nevertheless believe that its findings can contribute greatly to our quest for meaning.

Linguists and writers of a certain pompousness (ahem, me) like to debate the relative euphoniousness of words at dinner parties. Have you heard this thing about the most beautiful phrase in the English language being “cellar door”? What about "defenestration" or "lollygag," "twilight" or "jubilee"?

Early on in an effort begun by a Star intern to document the history of slavery in East Hampton, one of the project’s advisers said he could draw a direct line from omission of enslaved people of African heritage from the American founding story to police killings of Black men today.

And so, we too have acceded — inevitably, it would seem — to the fact that Afghanistan is “the graveyard of empires.”