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.

I am very happy that Evelyn Osborn celebrated her 3rd birthday on Sunday, March 10. 

Her birthday day began late for me because of the daylight-saving/daylight-giving clock changes. In short, I seriously overslept.

Though rushing to my photography assignment of the day, I did note the weather and donned boots. 

The Project Most Empty Bowls mega soup event was packed with soup-ies despite the nearly torrential rains. After slurping up some soup, I headed off to take some pictures of the puddles that the rains had produced. 

Meanwhile, Evelyn Osborn’s family was getting ready for her birthday. We had not yet crossed paths.

After visiting my usual photographic sure-shots — Main Beach, Hook Pond, the ducks on the flooded golf course, the over-washed Nature Trail — I headed toward Bridgehampton using Wainscott Main Street, another sure-shot, as my highway bypass. 

Passing the chapel, I noticed a bunch of cars. Had I considered them at all, I would have thought there was a meeting or a late church service. At the intersection by the Wainscott School, I decided to take that right turn onto Wainscott Hollow Road going north because, again, that is a photographically interesting route. I turned to head north, but behold, the street in front of the school was a pond, or maybe a lake. Side to side, as far as the eye could see, just water. 

This was a cool photo op, so I decided to pull over to get a better view.

This was a really bad idea, and it became a worse idea when, having pulled over a bit to observe the lake, I decided to back up to turn around. Wheels spun, mud went everywhere, and I was up to my tire rims in mud. 

Sunday afternoon. Rainy. Everyone cocooning at home, and there I was in the mud. I did not have my cellphone with me (I know, stop yelling!).

I contemplated my fate. Good that it wasn’t cold out. Good that I was near a church with cars. Good that the rain had stopped. Bad that I had no cellphone. But surely someone would drive by and see that I was obviously in trouble.

There was no traffic at all.

I took pictures of the lake and the 

reflections and my mud-splattered fender and totally embedded tire, and was grateful for the boots I was wearing, as the water kind of seemed to be rising.  

A vehicle took the turn behind me and drove right into the lake. I rolled down my window and waved. The truck stopped and backed up. Salvation!

The two most perfect guys for the moment got out of the truck, Elisha Osborn and Jason Petty. These lovely men got on the ground and assessed my mess. 

Elisha, the driver, announced that they could help me, but first they had to go get pizza for his daughter’s birthday party, and could I wait while he did that and that they would then come back and help.

I said of course I could wait. Where was I going to go?

He said I could go over to the Wainscott Chapel, where the birthday party was and wait. What a guy! I thought it was better not to abandon the potentially sinking ship of my car, so I stayed put and took more photographs.

I saw no other cars until they came back to me, along with another friend, Aubrey Peterson. 

While sitting alone, I had had visions of cardboard under the tires and blankets and mud spattered all over, but, amazingly, it turns out that not only did the guys have everything needed to get me out of the mush, but that Elisha is, in fact, the owner of a towing business, Hammer Towing, in Wainscott, right next to the Wainscott Chapel. 

What luck! Could it have worked out any better? They were not just good Samaritans, they were great Samaritans, with the perfect truck and skill sets. Professional Samaritans. Serendipity, kismet, syzygy? 

The guys knew exactly what to hook to what and Aubrey drove my car and made it do what it needed to do to get out of the deep rut I had created in my first attempts to get out of there. 

Once solidly on the road, I was invited back to the chapel for the birthday party, the chapel to which I would have walked looking for a phone to call a tow truck, which would have been parked 20 feet away. 

It turned out that while these lovely men were helping me, they had missed the birthday party entertainment which was a costumed shark and the 3-year-olds singing the ubiquitous “Baby Shark” song. I am sorry I missed that, too. 

I was welcomed, offered pizza, and, yes, I took some pictures. 

Happy 3rd birthday, Evelyn Osborn. You may forget this particular birthday, but I shan’t forget it or you, your dad, Elisha Osborn, or Jason Petty and Aubrey Peterson. 

You guys are a gift. Thanks for almost literally bailing me out. 

Timing is everything.

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.         

At sea in the Mexico City airport the other day, following a nine-day idyll in Zihuatanejo, I was reminded of the Bonacker, who, in Penn Station, said that he certainly knew New York City was big but he hadn’t known it had a roof over it.

We’d still be there probably if it weren’t for Rodolfo and Diana Reta, whom we’d met on the flight up from Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo, and who were our advocates for two hours after we’d arrived too late to make our connection to J.F.K.

The kindness of the Retas, who faced a two-hour drive home, buoyed Mary’s faith in the goodness and gentility that can be found in the world.  

“Es un santo,” I said to Diana, who smiled as her husband, an engineer by profession, energetically advocated on our behalf with an Aeromexico clerk whose overseer was finally to tell us that it was not the airline’s fault that the plane didn’t have enough fuel to circle about, but the airport’s, for being “full.” Then why schedule a flight at such a time knowing that that might be the case, Mary persisted. To no avail, of course. We were screwed, and that was that.

I had known something was up when the pilot addressed us at length, at first in Spanish, as we began our second loop. “I understood one word,” I said to Mary. “ ‘Disculpe.’ I think it means ‘Forgive me.’ ” Soon, in English, we learned that he was about to run out of fuel and that we would have to land “at another airport.”

Which turned out to be Querétaro, north of Mexico City, and not far away, Diana was to say later, from San Miguel de Allende, where Sheridan Sansegundo, my former co-worker, lives happily — and whose invitation to visit I presume still stands.

Somehow, Rodolfo found our luggage, having spirited Mary and her sister Kitty down an obscure hallway from which others similarly perplexed had been shooed away, and, once assured that we had boarding passes for an early-morning flight, Diana and he guided us to a palatial hotel, one of a number within the airport itself, where we said our goodbyes, mine in halting and fractured Spanish. 

I tried to say we’d always remember their extraordinary kindness. I hope that came across. “Estamos muy agradecidos” would have done it, Isabel was later to tell me. 

And my brother-in-law, having been thoroughly apprised of our return trip woes, said no wonder there were so many hotels in the airport, and that we must be desperate now to go on a vacation.

But our vacation had been blissful, and, it occurs to me, had we not undergone the rigors attending the first leg of our return, we never would have met the sainted Retas.

I’ve been living without kitchen appliances — really, without a kitchen at all — while our walls and shelves undergo their first thorough sanding and painting in, well, decades. Once again, I’m thanking my lucky stars that it is only a hop, skip, and jump down Main Street to Starbucks and Citarella. (Mind you, I do much prefer Breadzilla and L and W Market to Starbucks and Citarella, but when I need to nip out for a quick bite, proximity is everything.)

It has been amusing to be out and about in the village while the world sleeps. Yesterday morning I woke up very early and headed to Starbucks for a first cup of coffee. To my surprise, it was booming at 7 a.m. I somehow hadn’t realized that the old-fashioned gathering of convivial early birds — who used to gather, once upon a time, at the G and T Dairy (a.k.a. the Chicken House) and still do, I’m told, at the Candy Kitchen — had survived in this modernized, Starbucks form. The crew on Main Street seemed to mostly know one another, and they seemd quite cozy as the traffic slowly picked up on the street outside.

Living without a kitchen reminds me of Uncle Morris, my mother’s brother, who came to live here in East Hampton when he was old and white-haired. He made it into David Rattray’s “The Mast-Head,” under the heading “Einstein Was Wrong,” two weeks ago; I don’t want to overdo mentions of him, but I feel like mentioning here that I think he never lived in a house with a kitchen in his entire adult life.

Uncle Morris was certifiably brilliant, talented, and schizophrenic. Longtime East Hamptoners and readers of The Star will remember him. He was hard to miss. A tiny man, he wore a Scandinavian hand-knit sweater, three-quarters unraveled, and could be seen almost every day walking to and from the old A & P on Newtown Lane. He seemed to survive on a diet of canned spinach. 

Because Morris had traveled to the far corners of the world, mainly getting around on foot and making his way selling drawings on sidewalks and in public squares, I had assumed he was a totally fearless person. But when he first washed up on the tide here, we offered him an upstairs bedroom in my house, on his first night in East Hampton, and — as we discovered from the noises coming from the ceiling — he pushed a heavy dresser against the door to guard it while he slept. Eventually, he decided to accept an apartment living space that was then on The Star’s third floor and, eschewing the kitchen, would heat his can of spinach on a radiator. He had been a vegan since the 1920s. 

Although my diet has been slightly unconventional during these home renovations — I had takeout Chinese food the other night, and had to eat it on the “good china” that remained accessible in our dining room, with a plastic fork, and I actually found myself eating a Starbucks “protein pack” prepackaged meal for dinner in front of the television another night  — I don’t think I am about to start heating canned spinach on the radiator. 

I have had my eye on the old G and T Dairy space on Gingerbread Lane, which appears to have been vacated by its most recent inhabitant, a market and deli. Work appears to be underway, and many of us have been speculating on what is to go into that space. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could wave a wand, and the Chicken House would reappear as it was in the 1970s or 1980s? They did make wonderful fried chicken, and we do miss the friendly people who gathered there at first light.

Thinking about President Trump and his southern border wall the other day, and realizing that it somehow seemed to ring an ancient bell, I understood that growing up here, my friends and I often talked about a barrier of our own — at the Shinnecock Canal.

It is difficult now to empathize with my teenage self, who, along with a lot of other year-rounders, fantasized constantly about keeping city folk from getting here. High tolls were one notion. Getting rid of the canal bridge altogether was another. Ours, like the president’s, was an arbitrary distinction: Our friends from the city and their parents were cool; everyone else was not cool.

Okay, so this is not to say that we were exactly like Mr. Trump. He arrived by helicopter on his one memorable visit to the neighborhood, during which he attended a beach volleyball match played by a bunch of models. Still, in the same way he demonizes Latin Americans, we blamed the summer influx of “outsiders” for all our ills. What we did not realize then was that we had met the enemy and he was us.

East Hampton has had a love-hate relationship with people from away for more than 100 years. We like the money, but resent the changes and think we can have it both ways. As kids in the 1970s, for us, it played out in whom we hung out with at Indian Wells. 

In my own adolescent group of friends, the city girls provided the opportunity for a date. Or maybe it was that, wisely, the local girls knew enough to want nothing to do with us. But, at the same time, we would whine about the city people messing everything up while the grown-ups allowed the farm fields to be carved into house lots and the woods trails to be blocked off by tennis courts. Sure, the folks from the big city might be buying, but we were the ones selling.

When we were a little older, a friend put an ad in the paper with a drawing of a Jeep with a laser mounted where the rear seats would have been. His business — entirely a fantasy, mind you — was called the McMansion Eliminator or some such foolishness. We all thought it was hilarious.

Fact is that East Hampton was and is inextricably tied to the city and suburbs to the west as Mexico and Latin America are to the United States. My friends and I eventually wised up. It is a pity that the Build the Wall! crowd never did.

The feel-good movie “Green Book” winning the Best Picture Oscar on Sunday night drew immediate protest. Most notable, perhaps, was the filmmaker Spike Lee’s comments and fast walk out of the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. But more measured, if no less passionate, responses came from all corners. 

One that I found particularly illuminating was on The New York Times’s “The Daily” podcast. On Tuesday, Michael Barbaro, the host, spoke with Wesley Morris, a Times critic at large, about the context and message of “Green Book” and its Oscar win. Most sharply, Mr. Morris pointed out that “Green Book” was almost a remake of “Driving Miss Daisy,” both of which he pegs as racial reconciliation fantasy. 

“Green Book” screened here in October as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival. “BlacKkKlansman,” Mr. Lee’s far superior film, also nominated for Best Picture, had a celebrity V.I.P. screening here in August. 

“I’m snake bit,” Mr. Lee said backstage on Sunday. “Every time somebody is driving somebody, I lose — but they changed the seating arrangement!”

If you have not seen it, “Green Book” involves a white tough guy from the Bronx hired to drive a black concert pianist on a tour of the Deep South in 1962. Through proximity and osmosis, the men forge a bond of friendship.

Set in the South, “Green Book” might feel safe for Northern audiences used to thinking that racist divides are a Southern thing, even though that is not true, especially on Long Island.

During a forum last fall on Sag Harbor’s historically black neighborhoods (which, incidentally are more or less all on the East Hampton side of the town line), I was struck by an audience member who spoke about car rides as a young woman from her family’s Brooklyn brownstone. Once getting on the road, there was no stopping until they reached Riverhead, she said, the middle of the Island being unsafe for strangers of color.

Personally, there was poignancy to the timing of the Academy Awards, “Green Book,” and Mr. Lee’s outrage. That afternoon, I had taken part in a near-sellout event at Bay Street Theater sponsored by Sylvester Manor Educational Farm on Shelter Island on the topic of East End slavery.

My own involvement has been through the Plain Sight Project, a joint venture between the East Hampton Library and The Star to identify and compile a list of every enslaved person and free person of color who lived, worked, or died in East Hampton from the 1650s to the 1830s. The core idea is that these men, women, and children have been excluded from the founding story of the United States, and of our town, and that by learning their names and encouraging other communities to do similar work, we can gradually make the American myth more accurate.

In his acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screenplay, Mr. Lee hit the same note: “Before the world tonight, I give praise to our ancestors who have built this country into what it is today. . . .” He is correct, of course. 

Some of the Plain Sight Project’s work can be previewed at plainsightproject.org. 

“No way. Tell them to call you when the price drops below $1 million.”

This was my texted response to a friend’s inquiry about an eroding piece of waterfront on the bay with an asking price of more than three times as much. “There’s a reason that it’s been on the market for 10 years,” I wrote.

My friend was among the rare property hunters to actually inquire. In my experience most people do far more research when thinking about buying a dishwasher or four tires than real estate. Over the years, I have been queried only a handful of times by prospective buyers, and never, to my mind, has someone phoned this office with a request to look at our files or talk to a reporter with a question about one parcel or another. They might, however, take a look at online maps predicting future sea level rise. But in fact “room for a pool and tennis” are about the only words potential buyers take in from their real estate salesperson once that I-gotta-have-it feeling takes hold.

There seems to be a law of nature that the more expensive a purchase the less most people think about it. Certainly, speaking for myself, I tend to compare the chicken thighs at the Amagansett I.G.A. for price, fussing over a 40-cent difference far longer than I would a $32 free-range entree with Balsam Farms Yukon gold potatoes, roasted garlic, and rosemary at Nick and Toni’s.  

As far as waterfront real estate goes, caveat emptor might be better replaced by “interrogare emptor,” that is, buyer inquire.

The panel at Sunday’s fifth annual Black History Month program at Bay Street Theater on the history of slavery on the East End was illuminating. Its title, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” made the thrust of the story about enslaved people here from the 1650s into the late 18th and early 19th centuries evident. Who were they? Where were they buried? And, yes, what were their names? 

Only two gravestones, for Ned and Peggy, are known in East Hampton for people who were enslaved. A single boulder on Shelter Island commemorates the burial of some 200 enslaved people. It reads: “Burying Ground of the Colored People of Sylvester Manor since 1651.”

Georgette Grier-Key, executive director and chief curator of the Eastville Historical Society, Donnamarie Barnes, curator and archivist at the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, Aileen Novick, administrator of Hempstead Houses in New London, Conn., and The Star’s own David Rattray were the panelists. (He comments on the event this week in his column, “The Mast-Head.”)

Ms. Grier-Key, who acted as M.C., is well known. A writer, curator, and full-time professor at Nassau Community College, she is an outspoken advocate for what she calls the reconstruction of African-American and Native American history. Ms. Barnes, a longtime photo editor for magazines such as People and Essence, is a Sylvester Manor scholar, leading tours of the house and grounds and educating visitors and schoolchildren about its lengthy and complex history. Ms. Novick,

who has degrees from Northeastern University and Bates College, worked at the Indiana Historical Society and began teaching about the history of slavery at Historic Locust Grove in Louisville, Ky.

At one point in the program, the word, and concept of, reparations caused a phil­osophical flurry. Ms. Grier-Key seemed to say reparations for the sins of the past would be impossible because the need for them was so vast. A woman in the audience, the Rev. Leandra Lambert of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton, argued with her, saying that reparations were crucial because indeed they would have to be vast.

The audience on Sunday was thoroughly engaged, raising questions for the panelists and criticizing history itself. They expressed dismay when the event was called to a close and obviously could have gone on for a long time.

What the panelists had to say is not to be found in school textbooks, which continue to disrespect the lives of enslaved and indigenous residents by omission. What was evident, however, was that Bay Street Theater was filled with people of good will, who no longer are satisfied to allow the full history of this place to be “Hidden in Plain Sight.”   

We were watching the red carpet effusions preceding the Oscars when “Roma,” which we liked very much, came up, Susan wondering what the fuss was about inasmuch as she had found the movie to be “boring.”

A lifetime lover of “boring” movies, I took issue. I’ve always been enthralled by quiet-spoken, reflective films concerning the sadness and joys we all have in common.

Action movies with fiery explosions, over-the-top comedies straining for laughs, maudlin love stories, movies with frills, in other words, don’t move me. Give me understatement and the sense of time passing every time. Give me truth, or, even better, truth and beauty, which the Urn in Keats’s ode equated. 

“Roma” was true and beautifully done, luminous in black and white. “Green Book” was enlightening and rang true. “If Beale Street Could Talk” was beautiful, and, shameful to say, even at this late date, true, and “BlackKkKlansman” was true and in its skewering of evil beautiful.

So, with this in mind, I went to BookHampton and asked Jesse to order a copy of Keats’s letters, which, in truth, he did. Beautiful. 

I guess Keats’s idea in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was to be all-inclusive, to look equably upon sorrow and ecstasy. Though while truth and beauty may have been conflated in the Urn’s eyes, that being all we needed to know, it’s pretty clear that all things which are true, such as war, pestilence, anguish, death — I probably could think of quite a few others — are not beautiful.

Still, what’s to keep us from plumping for beauty and righteousness, for inclusion rather than exclusion, such as the Oscars this year began to do, every step of the way. 

To our nephew, who was bemoaning polarization the other day, Mary said she’d combated it in the past election by knocking on doors, in our neighborhood and in others, even unto Montauk no less, to find, through simply listening, how much we share. She was brave, he said. I agreed. She is brave. I wasn’t a coward, I told him, until faced with danger. (Got that from Molière.)

While truth may not always be beauty, if we’re true to ourselves, to our better selves, we can, I think, make America beautiful, genuinely beautiful.

And that is all ye need to know.