Before the wineberry vines behind the barn leafed out this spring and became difficult to remove, I thought I might take a shot at clearing them out. The side yard once was useful for storing boats and kids fooling around, but it had become thick with spiny growth in recent years. 

Like many people with tall weeds to clear, my first thought was to get my hands on a brush mower and have at it. Then on Sunday, while I was continuing to set my woodshop to rights, I noticed a rusted scythe resting atop a pile of life jackets and a golf cart seat. Its shaft, about five feet long and snakelike, looked like hickory; two handles jutted at right angles, about a chest width apart.

Though the blade edge was dull and its surface brown as a muddy brook, there was nearly no resistance as I took a first swing into the briar patch. Not that it was easy work, mind you. The twisting motion, counterclockwise, came as if by nature, and there was no missing the fact that the scythe would serve well. 

I hacked in quarter-arcs for a while, then went back to what I had been doing inside, with a mind to sharpen the blade when I got a chance. By then, I had cleared about a third of the yard, stopped only once by a hidden section of discarded wire fencing.

Since the early days of human metalworking, scythes have no doubt been part of farming. Before that time, smaller stone-edged reapers of wood or bone did the work, albeit about half as effectively. The use of scythes made grain harvesting efficient and led to fast changes in agriculture.

I am of two minds about sharpening the antique scythe from the barn, however, and going after the rest of the vines. A new, gleaming edge would seem out of place. I might break the shaft. But on the other hand, it was made for this and calls out to be put to purpose.

I find it remarkable that this kind of implement, unchanged for 2,500 years except in the smallest detail, could perform a task as well as if not better than our modern conveniences. I once tried chopping at high weeds with one of those one-handed swinging things with serrated blades — a stroke or two, and I gave up. Borrowing or renting a gas-powered mower seems too much. A scythe made sharp by a few licks with a stone may be the best of all.

During a blackout in Fort Lauderdale one dark and stormy night last week, while we were having the best Italian food this side of Firenze at Noodles Panini on Las Olas Boulevard, I thought of New York City and the first blackout there, in 1965, a night in which a communal spirit famously reigned.

There was in the air that night 54 years ago a palpable feeling of good will. Everybody remarked on it and has continued to since. 

I lit a candle on returning leisurely by bus from The New York Times, where I worked as a copy boy, to Alphabet City — to my one-room apartment on East 12th Street whose cement courtyard gave out onto a funeral parlor vent. 

An apartment in which, I told a fellow Fort Lauderdale diner, I could warm my feet in the gas oven while sitting on the pot. 

The first column I ever wrote for this paper was about that $65-a-month apartment whose walls I painted in many colors, and about how the landlady, Mrs. Messina, told me to save my money when it came to buying a bed, glassware, and cutlery (there was no room for a couch) inasmuch as the lady downstairs was just about to check out.

I characterized myself as a “desperado” then, like everyone else in the East Village, though, since desperation was our daily portion, a commonplace, I don’t recall feeling all that desperate at the time. In fact, I felt a certain satisfaction, I think, in just being able to survive, typing being my foremost skill. The other, acquired painstakingly during a three-year stint in the Army, was bed making, a skill that Mary marvels at even unto this day.    

On a holiday visit back to the stolid Midwest, my mother said that I looked like a dope fiend. 

My prospects, of course, were to improve insignificantly as time went on, and now, self-satisfied and full of years, and buoyed by the camaraderie that comes with blackouts — whether in New York or Fort Lauderdale — I can say, “Those were the days, my fiend, those were the days. . . .”

A quote from Thomas Jefferson, which has been pinned to the bulletin board over my computer at The Star for as long as I can remember, defines journalism as essential to the well-being of the American citizenry. Here are Jefferson’s words:

“The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Readers of this newspaper know we try, and always have tried, to meet the highest journalistic standards and have, for years and years, offered the public as much space to say what they want without charge. That we publish every letter is part of our creed, and we are proud of it. One of my tasks at the office is to tend to The Star’s letters pages. We do not edit letters, exactly, but we do need to read them to correct spelling mistakes, make sure there is nothing libelous in them, and occasionally make a small change so that the text of the letter conforms to Star style (for example, we do use the Oxford comma around here). Compiling them, reading them, and proofreading them — sometimes dozens in a single week — is, to me, a form of community service. The whole thing is very time consuming. Devoting several broadsheet print pages to letters has probably cost this family business hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more?) over the decades, in manpower, print, and paper pulp. 

It is basically thankless work at the best of times; at the worst of times, apparently, the sort of occupation an enemy of the people can be expected to do.

I can be found at the computer every Monday working away on the letters. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes infuriating, sometimes tedious, sometimes thought provoking, sometimes they move you to tears. On occasion — more often than you might think — we still have to actually transcribe them, because a correspondent has written us in longhand or typed his or her missive the old-fashioned way, with a typewriter, on that antiquated stuff we used to call paper. 

The weekly deadline is 5 p.m., by the way.

The world of news has become very confusing in the last decade, as we are all aware. Once upon a time, journalists worth their salt took great pains to draw an inviolable line between editorial writing and news reporting, and there were similar great walls dividing the advertising department from the newsroom. We still follow those rules in this office, but, clearly, cable-television personalities these days serve up a mishmash that is part news and part spin and opinion. I sometimes think “news” stations should be required to run a disclaimer at the bottom of the screen when the program is editorializing rather than providing an honest attempt at unbiased news-news. 

Meantime, social media has changed the delivery of news beyond recognition. Actual, factual news — news gathered according to the old tenets and rules and standards, with the journalist at least giving ethical practices the old school try — is now part of a nonstop gush of information and outright nonsense that flies across our consciousness like water from a high-pressure fire hose. 

According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of Facebook users get their news there. That translates to about 44 percent of the adult population of this country.

I’m told that the number of college students who are majoring in journalism has risen dramatically in the last couple of years, and that is, indeed, good news. I think most Americans probably do still believe newspapering is a respectable calling, and that honest news can be found, if you check your sources and don’t just believe every screaming headline that pops up between cat videos. Learning how to discern a solid source of information from a dubious one should be on every middle school curriculum. Don’t you agree?

With slightly warmer days, I have made it back into the woodshop after a long hiatus from sawdust and my tools. 

It is a mess in there; part of the barn in which the shop is housed was dismantled last year to be recently reassembled at the Mulford Farm. All sorts of items too interesting or nostalgic to take to the dump ended up on the workbench. One of my iceboats rests on an old golf cart that I used to use as the base for parade floats. A friend’s surfboard, which I promised to repair back in October, awaits attention on top of an ancient wheelbarrow and a Sears jointer that I picked up at a yard sale years ago.

Barns are like that — big spaces that if you are not entirely rigorous get filled to the rafters with one’s own and other people’s things until clean-out seems as daunting as crossing Antarctica clad only in boxer shorts and carrying a toothbrush.

Though there is hope. I got my hands back into some sawdust and cedar shavings while building a wooden longboard at Grain Surfboards in Amagansett in the waning days of winter. And, for me, once I get a whiff of freshly cut wood, I am like a fly on, well, never mind.

So back into the woodshop I went, scrabbling off a little space to cut the end off a long fir plank and beginning to pick up the floor and move things around so I could get some work going. Then it all took a detour. 

I had spotted an ad. Someone was selling a ridiculously appealing stack of old audio components for $100. My old Realistic stereo just did not have the oomph to fill the cavernous shop. It would be just the thing.

Several days later, I was still fiddling around with the connections on the new gear, brushing away the cobwebs to plug it in and trying and failing to get an FM antenna to work. Finally, I got some music out of it. Then, as I waited for the surfboard patch to set, I leaned back and reflected on the simple joy of puttering.

There is a spring in my step this spring for it seems as if sports-wise all will be well, to wit, that while the teams I cover may not win out, they promise to be beguiling, which is all one can hope for if one is a local sportswriter — that and balmy weather.

Baseball, which won only three games last year and none the year before, has already “won” three scrimmages — I count them as W’s — and boys tennis bageled its archrival, Westhampton Beach, last week, the same day the softball team that Annemarie Cangliosi Brown, Melanie Anderson, and Mylan Eckhart are reviving outdid their Sag Harbor neighbors in a scrimmage.

“We’re very happy, very pleased, I only have a couple of notes, which we’ll go over tomorrow in practice,” said Anderson, as I wished her a happy birthday. 

“Any walking steals?” I asked, knowing that that chaos-creating tactic would remind Cangliosi Brown and Anderson of their exacting yet avuncular mentor, Lou Reale, now retired to The Villages near Orlando. Not that day, but soon, the coaches said, smiling.

Everyone’s smiling these days. They certainly are in the baseball dugout, owing certainly in part to the team’s three batboys, Hudson Meyer and Kai and Finn Alversa, the coaches’ young sons. It’s great to see. 

And while it’s plain to see also that there is both good and evil in the world — an inordinate amount of the latter it would seem at the moment — I prefer fixing my gaze on the good, on the amiable, and on the camaraderie that buoys teams and lifts spirits in general. In fact, if all of us concentrated our minds that way we might go far toward lessening the amount of evil that’s dragging us down.

And, with that, I’m off to the fields again, to see the girls lacrosse and baseball teams play. The sun is shining, and the weather is bearable, as is the lightness of my being.

Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren are my kind of candidates. They both gave long interviews on TV the other night, and I was glued to the set — convinced either could take the country back to having an intelligent and thoughtful president instead of the carnival barker who holds the office now. (Although, if we’re using circus terminology, it might be more appropriate to call him a clown. After all, it isn’t just Krusty the Clown in “The Simpsons” who is in disrepute these days: Today, everyone talks about being scared of clowns. But they have always been, it seems to me, as menacing as they are amusing. Children seated around me alternated between screams of laughter and just plain screams when a family friend introduced me to the Barnum & Bailey Circus as a child. But I digress. . . .)

We had first heard of Ms. Gillibrand decades ago, when she was a candidate for the House of Representatives. East Hampton’s Judith Hope, who was then among New York State’s political leaders, told us about her. And, after all, she not only was a Democrat, but — like my son David and his late father, as well as, in four years, fingers crossed, my eldest granddaughter — a Dartmouth graduate.

It was probably always obvious that I had Democratic leanings throughout my 20-year tenure as the editor of The Star, although then as now we hew to what might be considered the antiquated and very rigorous rules of journalism, and  I always eschewed formal party registration. The idea is that it is vital for a journalist to retain political independence. 

Many readers over the years would think this all was a ruse, that we were trying to trick them — people’s capacity to believe in elaborate tricks and conspiracies rather than the simpler truth has proven, over the last two years, quite astonishing — but to this day I am not a member of a political party. Perhaps that’s a good thing, given today’s internecine fighting among local Dem­ocrats, squabbling that has propelled one man and his friends to establish themselves as the Reform Democrats. Anyway, I am unable to take part in primary elections, which are often at least as significant as the main show; this seems to be the case this year, when the East Hampton Town Board is already 100 percent Democratic. 

Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren have similar ideas about what the country needs today. Ms. Gillibrand’s aura is feminine, even when her speeches are in high gear. Ms. Warren’s language is straightforward and hard-nosed, befitting her professorial background. She leaves no room for you to question her credentials.

Now that I am what might be called editor emeritus at The Star, the time may have come to speak for myself. The actual editor’s opinions are consistently expressed here on the editorial page of The Star, as are those of The Star’s most long-lived writer, Jack Graves, who tends to wax exoteric. Neither David nor Jack has committed himself to Ms. Gillibrand or Ms. Warren — yet. Frankly, I hope they do.

Spring might have arrived, or so the calendar says, but I have yet to see an osprey. Nor have the peeper frogs in the swamp nearest to the house begun to chirp; it was cold this week, so, perhaps wisely, they remained in the mud. As for the fish hawks, they are around — if one knows where to look or has the time.

Bruce Collins phoned on Friday to say he had seen a pair on a pole nest alongside ScuttleholeRoad. Jane Bimson was able to get a photograph of one, a first-year adult, I think, on a tree limb at the edge of Fort Pond in Montauk. Tim Garneau went looking around Alewife Creek, and while he did not find any, the peepers were in full throat. 

From this limited sample, it seems the early birds go where the fish are. The still very cold bay has scarcely come to life yet, save for the shell-eaters, long-tail ducks, and other divers that can get by in the depths of  winter. Osprey looking around at freshwater places like Mill Pond in Water Mill and Fort Pond are more likely to scare up a meal.

Why fish hawks matter can be ascribed to a number of things, not the least of which is their size, soaring habit, and spectacular dives. But there is more, I believe. Arriving suddenly as they do here in mid-March, they are a harbinger of nicer days ahead. And at another level, their annual cycles tie us into something greater than ourselves, patterns that have endured over tens of thousands of years. We are reassured when they arrive once again that despite all the crises of life, the world spins on.

It is indeed a fat country in which we live, and, fittingly, our president, obesity’s poster child, showers more money on fellow fat cats through tax cuts and yawns whenever anyone reminds him of the ballooning trade and budget deficits.

We are told not to worry, and yet — especially given his most recent budget proposal, which would give the Pentagon even more than it has asked for (imagine that!) while eating away at education, environmental protection, scientific research, Social Security, and Medicare — we do.

I was reminded, in this connection, of the bumper sticker you used to see: “It will be a great day when schools will have all the money they need and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale.” Let’s bring it back, the fact of the matter being that the strength of a nation owes more to an educated and socially conscious citizenry than it does to the number of bombs it has. 

If Trump really wants a Nobel Peace Prize, why doesn’t he convene a worldwide summit of nuclear states to at least discuss the issue of worldwide incremental, verifiable nuclear disarmament? It is crazy to spend so much money on nuclear stockpiles, which if resorted to, however gingerly, would — talk about climate change! — end civilization. 

So, number one, let’s at least begin belt-tightening when it comes to nuclear weaponry. He could knock heads while claiming the moral high ground. What fun! And just think, if countries — ours in particular — reduced their death-dealing capacity, there’d be more money for such life-affirming things as education, health care, infrastructure repair, and scientific research that could if adequately funded yield untold benefits to humanity.

Instead, what do we see? No to education, no to social programs, no to scientific research, no to ameliorating climate change, no to immigrants willing to work, yearning to be free, no to just about anything worthwhile. But yes, a thousand times yes, to the Pentagon.

It may in the future — in the far distant future, of course — be said of us, as Oscar Wilde was said to have said, “I die, I perceive, as I have lived — beyond my means.”       

We are in a funny place right now, having moved back home to East Hampton after a medical sojourn in Massachusetts, but not quite able to properly settle into our old ways, because while we were away much of the house was painted, and things are still at sixes and sevens, boxes piled on the sunroom table, furniture askew.

Everything in the kitchen and pantry — every spoon, every ancient juicer, every lidless Spode sugar bowl — was packed away in a Pod storage unit in the backyard during this long-overdue paint job, and we can’t put it all back in place until the cabinets are cleaned and their drawers relined (with pretty William Morris wallpaper, if all goes to plan).

Who knew the digital age would come to our rescue once again? I told you all about my adventures with Lyft ride-hailing in a previous column, and now I am going to tell you how gung-ho I am for apps that bring you a hot dinner with the press of a button.

The truth is, despite thinking of myself as an analog kind of person, I have come to rely on my cellphone for all sorts of things, including the accumulation of information. My memory for numbers in general, and for phone numbers in particular — FE-9-1230 was what one dialed to reach my childhood house —  is no longer worth boasting about. Having a smartphone at the ready makes me feel smarter.

Apps have entered my daily life only over the last month. My daughter, who tends to be even more curmudgeonly about screen time than me, is the one who told me about DoorDash. The proverbial cupboard was bare when I decided to try it; it was also pouring rain, and no one was in the mood to go fetch takeout sushi. But in no more than 10 minutes, I had ordered some fabulous dosas from Hampton Chutney in Amagansett, and within another few minutes an intrepid driver-deliverer was ringing the doorbell, cilantro relish and mango lassis in hand. 

DoorDash is an on-demand food delivery service founded in 2013 by four Stanford students. Will Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, Tony Xu, and Evan Moore become as famous, or as rich, as Mark Zuckerberg? That seems unlikely, but to an old-fashioned person like me, a simple meal-delivery app seems like a revelation.

If you watch some of the television programs that I do, you have seen ads for GrubHub, a nationwide company that is in hot competition with DoorDash. This morning, I read that DoorDash has surpassed GrubHub and is the fastest-growing food-delivery service in America. 

I’m often heard praising the pleasures of village life, where one has access to the library or the next screening of “The Favourite” just by strolling out the door. Still, I am beginning to see the light when it comes to apps, especially for people with mobility issues. 

I’m not an expert yet, of course. Maybe someone better versed in these things can tell me know if it was good etiquette to have entered his tip on the electronic order instead of providing one in cash. . . ?    

There are to-do lists, and then there are want-to-do lists. For many people on Long Island, mid-March means keeping an eye and ear out for the arrival of certain birds. 

In this week’s “Nature Notes,” Larry Penny writes that osprey are due back about now. I keep an annual tally of the earliest fish hawks, as they were called locally in the old days, on a basement wall. There, too, I mark down when I hear the first spring peepers. This year, I added a column on the wall for the first red-wing blackbird, heard but not seen on March 8. 

These are driveway observations for the most part, made on a short walk to or from the house. The oldest pencil markings are faded now, and I really should try to make a more long-lasting copy somewhere.

March seems to be all about the want-to-do list, and what I want to do is drive around the usual osprey haunts to make more accurate observations for my basement wall. Though it is not a competition, someone else always seems to spot them first. In my case, there is always something else to take care of, and bird-spotting has to wait, even though the winter’s unwinding does not. I crack an upstairs window to listen as I open my computer to write. It is better than nothing.

Here on the south shore of Gardiner’s Bay, sounds give first notice of the coming spring. On a cold morning before dawn on Tuesday, a bird called briefly from the knot of bull briar near the road. As day came on slowly, all was silent again.