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.

Readers this week will notice a fresh focus on travel in The Star. Two projects, a culinary tour of Greece with Florence Fabricant in September and a brand-new Travel quarterly are in this week’s issue. How and why we are taking this new tack here is worth explaining.

The Greece tour came about after our partner, Thalassa Journeys, asked Florence Fabricant of The New York Times to lead a small group on a winding food-and-wine arc from Kavála to Thessaloniki. Wine will lead the way, with near-daily visits to vineyards in the less-touristed northern corner of Greece. There will be an outing to the Vikos Gorge, which is thought of as the Grand Canyon of Europe, and visits to ancient cultural sites.

Ms. Fabricant began as a food writer here at The Star when my father was the editor. Her very first “In Season” column for us was about the joys of corn in August. Today, in addition to The Times, she writes cookbooks and in the summer hosts the hugely popular “Stirring the Pot” series of talks with leading chefs at Guild Hall. The pairing, if you will, between her and The Star seems natural. A brochure went in the mail to Star print subscribers this week; we have extra copies at the office, for those who did not get one.

As noted, our first Travel section is part of this week’s edition, which also has a two-part garden and landscape section. Travel sprang from an observation from Judy D’Mello, a contributing writer here and former reporter, who said Star staff tend to go on very interesting vacations. It immediately seemed a good idea, so we gave Judy the go-ahead.

While The New York Times Sunday Travel section is a must-read for many, part of the argument for a travel section in a local newspaper is that plenty of others do not see it. Planning ahead for some of the bigger adventures, such as Judy’s trip to Bhutan, requires lots of lead time for visas and visitors permits. Other choices, like the “Getaway” feature I wrote for a Greenport day trip, can occur whenever the fancy moves you.

It might seem odd to be thinking about travel on the eve of the summer season, but there is no time like right now to think about seeing the world — even if it’s just a couple of ferry fares away.

The other night, as we talked of Joe Biden’s predicament, it occurred to me that I, a diffident WASP not programmed to show much emotion, was at first bemused when men began hugging men in America — about 40 or so years ago, I think. 

“Did you say that you were ‘uncomfortable?’ ” asked Mary, who has wondered why the women now accusing Biden of unwanted attention in the past didn’t say so if they felt so at the time.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “Anyway, perhaps because I’m a WASP, I’m uncomfortable using the word ‘uncomfortable.’ Nor was I reaching out in those days.”

“You reached out to me. . . .” 

“Indeed I did, and have been forever blessed for having done so.” 

The hugging custom must have made its way from abroad to the younger generation, for I don’t remember anybody with whom I grew up doing it. I don’t remember being hugged by my father, or by my stepfather. We shook hands — that was the manly thing, especially at an all-male boarding school where, I think it’s fair to say, we were not, most of us anyway, in touch with our feelings. 

I’ve since come around, and though I generally don’t initiate them, I’m touched when hugs come my way, whether from sons-in-law or grandchildren. They hug me, I hug them. I’ve become much more comfortable with the practice, much more at ease with openness, with intimacy. It’s a sign that, at least when it comes to human interaction, we’ve evolved. 

So, I think politicians, pressers of the flesh by profession, ought — especially nowadays when “personal space” has, and with reason, become such a touchy subject — to be given some benefit of the doubt when there is doubt, as is the case with Biden, who seems surprised (and chastened) that in some cases he, a layer-on of hands guy, has given offense. 

Karen Tumulty said the other night on the “PBS NewsHour” that she didn’t think what he’d been accused of doing was so grievous as to pre-empt redemption. Uncle Joe says he gets it, and for that he deserves a hug.

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. . . .”

As constant readers, those of a certain age at any rate, undoubtedly noticed, when I wrote two weeks ago that I was paying $65 a week to rent a one-room apartment in Alphabet City in 1965, I was wrong. 

The monthly rent was indeed, as I had originally written, $65 a month. But then, wondering if there ever were a time when landlords, even in the East Village, charged tenants a mere $16.25 a week — substantially less than what you’d pay for a bottle of Mud House, Frenzy, or Cairnbrae now — I panicked and called in to stop the presses. 

Of course, the nice thing now is that a reporter or columnist can plead to being not entirely guilty inasmuch as an error in Thursday’s print edition can be set right by Friday in the website one. 

Yes, $65 a month. I know because I read it in the first “Point of View” I ever wrote, dated Oct. 26, 1967, which I found in a folder in my desk’s upper-left-hand drawer, a folder that I had intended to be opened only in the case of my death, but which I might as well dip into now, shamelessness apparently being in vogue nowadays. . . .

“. . . My one-room apartment, whose walls I painted yellow, red, green, and candy-striped, was a real joy. When the cockroaches shyly hid on the arrival of guests, I worried.” (N.B., Mary.)

“My landlady, Mrs. Messina [I got that right], a Hogarthian character, told me to ‘bar your door — people are crazy these days.’ But what was there to steal? I felt this way despite the fact I probably lived in the high-rent district, since I paid $65 a month for my apartment, slightly more than I could have received from a weekly welfare check.”

I was just about ready to go on unemployment when The Times hired me as a copy boy — at around $65 a week, I imagine, for I do remember having adhered rather closely to the tenet that no more than a quarter of one’s income should go to housing. That advice is a stretch now. Those were the days.

At any rate, until summoned several months later to apprentice in Riverhead with Larry Penny’s late older brother, Art, a Long Island Press reporter and Times stringer on weekends, I was rather content living on society’s margins as I recall — sufficiently desperate, I suppose, not to feel so.

Sufficiently trusting too in my invincible surmise that in time all would work out. 

And, lo, that’s what happened. All — well, just about all — are working out these days.

A funeral service last weekend, and the reception afterward, seemed the embodiment of community. The memorial gathering was held at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church for the late Edwin Geus, with a gathering later around long tables, each decorated with spring daffodils, at the East Hampton Firehouse. Mr. Geus had served as a longstanding volunteer for both the East Hampton Fire Department and the East Hampton Village Ambulance Association, and members attended in uniform; a well-polished fire truck and ambulance stood like an honor guard outside the church, behind Town Pond.

I am always curious and interested when personal connections bring me into a church — being Jewish, myself, and having been raised in a moderately religious household (kosher, at least in my early childhood). East Hampton, founded by Congregationalists, used to be almost exclusively a Christian community. Today, the majority might still identify themselves as Christian — Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist — even if they don’t spend much time at services.

Anyway, I disavowed what others call faith long ago, in childhood, when my parents tried without success to send me to the Sunday school of a Reform synagogue. 

In my twenties, I was working at the Columbia University School of Journalism, as secretary of one of the deans, when I met the East Hampton native I was to marry. One of my colleagues at “J school,” as we called it, warned me to watch out: Anti-Semitism in such a town, she said, would be wicked. It turned out that the community I joined was welcoming instead.

Jeannette Edwards Rattray, my mother-in-law, made me comfortable right off. Her daughter had already broken any lurking religious taboo by marrying a man who was defined as an artist, rather than by the fact that he happened to be Jewish (although artists weren’t so revered here yet and it wasn’t obvious that East Hampton was going to become a 20th-century artists’ haven).

During my first summer in East Hampton, I heard an anecdote about how Mrs. Rattray gave a not-too-distant relative the business while table-hopping at Chez Labbat, the only sophisticated restaurant here at the time. He had stopped to complain that Jews were taking over Lily Pond Lane. She herself had married a worldly man “from away,” Arnold Rattray, and while conservative in some ways was progressive about religious freedoms and bigotry, and she read her rude relative the riot act. 

The East End, it turned out, had been a fairly worldly place for a hundred years or more. There was the broadening influence of artists and actors, since the late 19th century. Sag Harbor had a large Jewish population, based around its watch-case and silver factories’ need for skilled workers. (The journalist Karl Grossman is known for scholarship about the early Jewish community in the Harbor, as his frequent lectures attest.) 

Today, I no longer think of myself as a liberal New Yorker, but as a liberal-minded member of the East Hampton community, which never was as homogenous as some might think. We are not free of anti-Semitism here, that is certainly true. But, still, if only the rest of the world could mix and mingle as peaceably as we.

The word is out about a pair of eagles nesting near the water in Springs. Not much stays secret in this town, and thanks to social media, birdwatching sometimes seems like a game of one-upmanship in which the first person to get a photograph of a particularly charismatic species can claim bragging rights. Most times, getting close enough to wildlife to take a photograph with an ordinary camera or phone is too close.

Some friends told me of a person in a pickup truck who was parked in a saltmarsh the other day for about four hours, peering at eagles through binoculars. One friend, worried about the effect of visitors, has been putting up “no trespassing” signs, including one warning of dire consequences for setting foot on Gardiner’s Island, which he had found on the beach.

Bald eagles favor fish, which is probably why the East End of Long Island is attractive to them. Osprey, with whom eagles compete for food and nest platforms, have been extremely put out, screeching angrily as generally indifferent and far larger eagles go about their business.

Clamming at Three Mile Harbor on Sunday with a friend and my son, I noticed an eagle sitting on an oak limb 60 feet or more above the water on a bluff. Nearby, a fish hawk, as my father called osprey and I did in my youth, mobbed it the way blackbirds do a red-tailed hawk that enters their territory.

After bald eagles were all but wiped out by the early 1970s in New York due to the use of shell-weakening pesticides, state authorities began to release hand-reared nestlings, brought to the state mostly from Alaska. By 1989, there were 10 breeding pairs doing their thing upstate. Twenty years later, the number has grown to 173 pairs and continues to climb. 

New York’s bald eagles have now pushed south and east into our area. Pairs, which mate for life, also tend to return to the same nesting area each spring, meaning that their offspring have to move on in search of spaces of their own.

In Springs, friends have seen people in a kayak coming close to nesting eagles for a better look. Whether it was too close they were unable to say, but their story reminded my of those knuckleheads who get out of their vehicles in the national parks to taunt moose, bears, or bison, and then, if they are lucky, get away with just an antler up the patootie.

I suggested my friends put up a perimeter of floating line and found buoys. I’d even help, I said. They declined, but the offer still stands. 

At this time of the year, my yard is awash in yellow flowers. I’ve never known exactly what they are — or if someone once did identify them for me, I’ve forgotten — but they look a bit like hardy buttercups. They create a bright, sunny carpet that covers the entire lawn, on all sides of our old house in East Hampton Village. 

A friend who is a landscape designer once remarked that my lawn is less like a lawn and more like a meadow, dotted as it is with not just these yellow mystery flowers but with tiny wild violets. That’s true, and I love it that way. 

Still, by the end of April, I have to buckle to the reality of just exactly how untidy the grounds have become — with the fallen branches of winter tossed everywhere, and clumps of spiky crabgrass among the yellow petals — and I call in Martin Soto, who, with his crew of yard men at a company called Sottessey, has been my outdoor fixer for decades now.

Another friend mentioned recently that deer don’t like the color yellow, and that this is why the forsythia bushes are often the only blasts of color to be seen in some people’s yards. We do have forsythia, and they do seem relatively undestroyed by the troupe of deer who live behind the tall old fir trees near the barn, but I don’t know if this deer-hate-yellow thing is just a suburban legend or if there is science behind it.

The flower that I really love now, in early spring, is the daffodil. The deer never do seem to touch them. Our Nikko blue and Annabelle white hydrangeas have been decimated, as have our old roses of pink and white, but the several varieties of sunshine-colored daffodils return each spring like the swallows. 

It is the variety, indeed, that I love the most, and we must have half a dozen different sorts of daffodils, from the ruffly many-cupped old-fashioned ones tinged with green to the classic canary-yellow trumpet-shaped cup to white ones with an orange center.

I’ve had neighbors complain about the little yellow flowers that carpet our yard. Apparently they can pose a danger of invading a more carefully groomed lawn. So far, that hasn’t really turned out to be a problem, at least on my side of the fence. Did I mention that these little flowers open with the sun and close as the sun goes down? Who wouldn’t love a flower that does that?

Suffolk County, as part of its Adopt-a-Highway program, marred the vista on the west side of East Hampton Town Pond last year by sticking up an eye-scorching sky-blue-and-fuchsia sign, exactly at the most-photographed postcard view in the village. You probably noticed it; it read “Lyft.”  I had a vague idea that Lyft, like Uber, was a ride-hailing service, but it really hadn’t meant anything to me — beyond visual pollution —  until two weeks ago. 

I have spent a fair amount of time in Massachusetts lately, with my husband, who has been in treatment at the Lahey Medical Center. Marooned without a car, but needing to get from hotel to bedside, I surprised myself by joining the app age with ease, summoning Lyft drivers by cellphone to take me hither and yon.

I can see why some people prefer these services to a traditional cab. When I pressed the icon, it already knew where I was and asked where I wanted to go. I liked being informed in advance who the driver would be, and when he or she would be arriving (“Adel in a white Toyota Camry” would be at the door in three minutes, or “Amama in blue Honda CR-V in five”).

Contrary to preconceived notions that apps are for kids, in some ways, this service was particularly suited to someone of a certain age who might be slightly slower on their feet. I rather liked receiving texts telling me it was time to “go outside” and where to stand and wait.

Another enjoyable part of my Lyft experience was that the vehicles and drivers were diverse: some cars immaculate, some not; all the drivers were interesting, some chatty, others less so. Drivers, it seems, can sign up without having their vehicles conform to uniform standards. And, as is obviously also the case with the drivers of yellow taxicabs, with Lyft they don’t have to speak perfect English. 

I don’t usually enjoy talking with random people. I keep mum on the Jitney, for example, while others, like my husband, enjoy the opportunity to make friends of strangers. But I enjoyed meeting my Lyft drivers and engaging in small talk. One young woman got a nice tip when she explained she was working for college tuition. And then a young man, who told me he had been in this country for less than a year and liked speaking with passengers to help him improve his English, said he came from a country in Eastern Europe of which I had never heard. The country? “Moldova,” he said. Well, I replied, that is Romania, where my maternal grandparents came from!  

Lyft worked a treat for both short and long hops. Indeed, I even took a single ride all the way from Waltham Mass., to the ferry at New London, Conn. in a car with bad suspension.

Writing on my laptop now, safely back at home in East Hampton, I realize that to a segment of the population the big-brother aspect of ride-hailing apps still seems a bit creepy: A commercial entity knows your whereabouts, and there is a fleet of cars and drivers prowling around waiting to answer the call. But, at any rate, I succumbed — as most of us seem to be succumbing — to the trade-off of privacy for ease.         

They say that if you’re not worrying about the outcome, things go better in sports, thus enabling you to remain in the moment, and I suppose you could say the same about life, whose outcome, while still a dark glass in my view, is nonetheless definitive.

My tennis partners and I sometimes banter about the Great Chair Umpire in the sky. “ ‘When I don’t see candles and don’t smell flowers, I know it’s time to get up and greet the day,’ Red Skelton used to say,” said Gino during a recent break in our doubles game.  

Three of us then segued from death to the Oscars, weighing the merits of “Green Book,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and “If Beale Street Could Talk,” which I thought, in the end, ought to have won for having nailed it when it comes to truth and beauty. 

As we talked, our fourth walked out, but only momentarily, miffed, I suppose, that, given the serious matter at hand, we were wasting precious time. I could see his point. Earlier in the match, in fact, I said I’d like to play tennis all day. When things are going well, when you’re not thinking about the outcome, in other words, euphoria envelops you, and bonhomie. It is a wonderful feeling, and you play better, more “within yourself” as they say, because of it.

You may remember Cailin Riley’s beautifully written piece about me in a recent issue of The East Hampton Press, headlined “Everyone Knows Jack.” “But everyone does not love Jack,” I said to Mary, who needed no reminding, having been kept fully abreast of my myriad decidedly not beautiful (though true, Har-Tru, in fact) meltdowns over the years.

So, becoming a more companionable opponent remains atop my bucket list — no more jumping over the net to remonstrate over outrageously incorrect line calls — knowing in my heart of hearts that lightheartedness can more surely than fits of temper ease you into the flow.            

And the flow is all ye need to know.