Getting up early is always a good idea, but it was especially enjoyable this week after I spent a night in the family house in the village with my daughter and her kids and Sweet Pea, our little, red-haired ARFan dog.
As frequent readers will know by now, my husband, Chris, and I now own a cottage across the pond at Peconic Landing, a retirement community near Greenport, but I am back home with the family a few nights a week. On most mornings in our now communal East Hampton household, the children and the dog create a cozy bustle, as my granddaughter gets out the Honey Nut Cheerios and carries it into the bathroom, where she does her hair, and my grandson lobbies for the right to watch some inexplicable Japanese cartoon on Netflix, lounging in his fuzzy red robe on grandma’s bed.
This morning, however, I was up and pottering around while everyone else was still asleep. By 6:30 I was outside checking on the rosebushes, which are usually not much to speak of but are in fine flower this month, following the recent heavy rains. I clipped a branch from the mock-orange tree, which had never seemed particularly special before, but is absolutely perfect this year — crowded with star-shape, white, waxy flowers — I guess for the same damp-weather reasons. I put the branch in the backseat of my car, to take it back to Greenport after running some errands — although I wasn’t at all sure it would survive, because I had to make stops at Chase bank, once it opened, then at Roeloffs East Hampton Optical, before doing some work at the Star office and then heading to the ferry.
East Hampton Village in early morning is alive and well and still wears the bright coat it wore back in the 1960s and 1970s. Before 9, the stores and sidewalks aren’t as crowded as they become as the day wears on and the traffic gets unpleasant. Does anyone remember the fashion among fishermen and workmen back then, in the old days, for green pickup trucks, always with a Labrador retriever riding in the back? You used to see them at Bucket’s Deli, getting their egg-and-cheese sandwiches on hard rolls.
Bucket’s, of course, is long gone so I popped in to Starbucks for a decaf latte. A line of customers curled past the counter; and a handful of early risers had already taken most of the tables. And so, with coffee and a warm Danish in hand, I was the first to arrive at the Star office before the day officially began. I even beat Jane Bimson to work, and she gets up at 5:30 a.m. for her daily walk on the beach at Montauk, with her dog, Archie, at her side.
Because the rest of the staff hadn’t yet arrived, there wasn’t much for me to edit, but my early-morning energy kicked me into action. I started cleaning out years of forgotten papers from my desk drawers. I also found a few interesting old family photos in the top drawer (like one of my late brother-in-law, the poet, reading at the Ear Inn in Manhattan). I propped these against other framed photos on the desk and felt glad to have gotten rid of some of my old clutter. A cool, sunny morning in June, after the rain, is about as good as it gets.