Tuesday morning awoke with a snarl. Two raccoons had gotten into the chicken run and were squabbling over something or other, making an indescribable clamor, kind of a blend of exercised chatter, hisses, and a predator’s growl. That roused the dogs, which roused me, and together we ran out to see what was going on.

As it was not quite 5 a.m., and there was only a hint of glow in the sky to the east, I could not observe what happened. I heard Weasel, the biggest of our dogs, making attack sounds and a raccoon screeching its answer. Then nothing.

I grabbed a flashlight. In its beam, there were two sets of eyes, coming from inside the wire mesh of the chicken run. Getting closer, I watched as a raccoon, with the shape of a slightly deflated balloon, rushed back and forth on the chicken coop roof before finding a hole in the mesh and squeezing to freedom. Its compatriot, with whom it had been wrangling just moments earlier, clung to a post about six feet off ground, not eager to descend. 

Thinking I might dislodge it somehow and shoo it through an open gate, I went inside to poke at it with an old clam rake that had been hanging around nearby. Mr. Raccoon was having none of it. I poked him a few times with the handle end of the rake; it snapped and carried on and refused to get down. After a bit more of this, it climbed on the mesh, upside down, and found a spot on the coop roof from which to glare at me.

I made sure that the chickens were securely locked inside the coop and left, keeping the gate open in case the raccoon eventually wised up and lit out for the woods and its now-gone rival. By that point Weasel, the dog, had gone to our house and was eager, I could tell from the way she was scratching at the porch door, to get inside and forget the entire thing.

Raccoons have been on my mind lately. I wage a never-ending battle with them over possession of the household garbage. But ever since a report that dog or dog-related waste was to blame in periodic bacteria spikes at Georgica Pond, I have wondered if raccoons might be to blame. A friend who grows grapes outside his bedroom window swears that there are more raccoons than people here, at least around harvest time, when they lodge on his arbor to gorge.

At Georgica, suspicion has been directed hypothetically toward people walking their dogs in a roadside pull-off just east of Wainscott Stone Road. No one I have talked to has said they have ever seen dogs doing their business in there. The bacteria could come from the prodigious droppings of raccoons instead, but that would not explain why the bacteria are so much higher in the pond than in other locations sampled by Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the Surfrider Blue Water Task Force, given that raccoons are everywhere there is something to feed on.

The bright side of Tuesday morning’s excitement is that I now know where to close up the wire mesh. The bad news is that the raccoons will sooner or later find another way in. They always do.

Two small daffodils forced themselves out in the greensward between the sidewalk and a picket fence in front of an old East Hampton house on Main Street about a week ago, and I admire them as I pass by. 

The house never seems occupied, and the daffodils have come by chance, which makes me realize that I admire come-by-chance, ostensibly tough blooms more than cultivated ones, scattered or in bunches. I admit to being pleased that there are several kinds of narcissi now in bloom in my yard, and enough to cut and bring indoors. But I enjoy those that have popped up here and there without help (except perhaps from the weather) even more, including some on the lane in front of the house.

Children aren’t daffodils, but I nevertheless think my inclination where flowers are concerned somehow translates into a metaphor for how I feel about children who have been separated from their parents while being processed at Homeland Security stations along the southwest border. A wall, a fence, a flower bloom­ing where it has been told it shouldn’t . . .

According to The New York Times, officials recently confirmed that about 700 migrant children have been taken away from their parents at the border since October, and that more than 100 of those children were less than 4 years old. Four years old!

The Department of Homeland Security is quoted as saying that families are “not separated to deter illegal immigration” but to “protect the best interests of minor children.” As far as I am concerned, this is not just double talk from the Trump administration, but a dark, dangerous doublespeak that is meant to obscure the truth of a policy that is horrifying and inhumane. Perhaps we would best call it doublethink, to borrow a word from Orwell’s dystopian book “1984.”

Taken from their families, these children will have to be tough to survive. Daffodils don’t need much more than air, sunshine, and rain, but children must be fed, clothed, loved, and nurtured.

At one point, the Trump administration let it be known that it was actually considering taking children away from their parents as a means of deterring migrants from crossing our southern border. I ask: Could our leaders disgrace themselves — and our country, and us, the citizens — more by even considering such a cruel policy toward children?

The Trump administration’s lack of compassion for the well-being and dignity of human beings is a reflection of Mr. Trump’s own narcissism, and this degrading state of affairs should by now be painfully evident to all Americans, even those who have always in good faith supported the Grand Old Party. 

If ever there was a moment for the scales to fall from the eyes of people of integrity who made the mistake of voting for Mr. Trump, is this not it? 

On the way to school on Tuesday morning, one of the kids announced that she and a classmate had a plan if a shooter ever turned up. They would stash some food and water in a tree in the woods behind the school, which they would grab as they fled for the power lines. From there, they would work their way toward East Hampton Airport, where, they figured, they would be safe.

It is obvious to remark here about the unfortunate things kids today have to think about. Gun violence continues at a tragic rate in the United States, with school shootings now commonplace. But it is also true that for people of my generation, there were fears as well. 

I remember clearly the nuclear attack drills we had when I was attending East Hampton Middle School in the 1970s. Teachers would lead us from our classrooms into the basement, where we were told to sit in rows with our backs against the hallway walls. At the end of the drills, the school would serve us ice cream from five-gallon pails, both as a reward and a way of dispelling any lingering fear.

It was the height of the Cold War at the time, and for us kids, the thought of dying in an atomic attack seemed real enough. As giggle-inducing as sheltering in a school hallway might have been, we could not escape the back-of-the-mind notion and would confess to each other that there was at least a small chance our town could be swept into a nuclear blast as the Russians took aim at the submarine base across Long Island Sound in Connecticut, There would be no running for safety in the scenarios we envisioned.

The Russians never came, of course. Not so, school shooters. For children today, horrors are frequent enough that they must appear much more of a possibility. What a tragedy to hear kids talking among themselves about what it would be like to have to leave slower friends behind as they sprinted for their lives into the woods.

“I dreamt I’d won a Peace prize. . . .” “No, no, that was my Peace prize,” corrected Mary, who recently had spent hours straightening out one of my bill-paying gaffes with State Farm, had painstakingly laid the groundwork for a tax grievance, and had raked leaves and edged until she was a physical wreck.

“Ah, mind and body,” I said. “Actually, you were the one who gave it to me, though you’re right, I should have been the one to give it to you. Dreamlife’s unfair. It was a photograph of my mother with me as an infant . . . blissful.”

“I would like to have a dream like that. . . .”

“And then I dreamt I was flying the night before. On my back, borne up by a breeze, dipping and soaring above everyone. The sun was shining. I’d been with a group of people. I began doing jumping jacks, and then I began to fly, out into the outdoors.”

“I love dreams of flying. . . . You were joyful.”

“Yes, joyful. . . . Maybe some of it has to do with the fact that there are things to write about now, now that it’s ostensibly spring. It’s a relief, I no longer have to dream things up as I did all winter, just hang on for the ride.”

“Or maybe it was about ducking out on hours of phone calls to State Farm to get the insurance snafu ironed out, or checking the internet for comps. . . .”

“Yes, it could have been about escape. . . . I mean, there are so many reasons now not to neaten up so much around the house. We want to win our tax grievance, don’t we? Shouldn’t we cultivate more of a down-in-the-mouth look? Where’s that old baby puke-green Ford Falcon when I need it? The night it died I pushed it back onto the front lawn, where it stood for years by the mailbox. . . .”

“When we had that town party everyone covered it with graffiti. Georgie and Johnna used to wait for the school bus in it. You began calling it ‘a home for wayward dolls.’ There were four or five of them propped up against the rear window.”

“Then a neighbor left that note: ‘Usually, after the viewing the dead are interred, Mr. Graves.’ The Reids towed it away. Geoff Gehman thinks I was inspired by the Beales’ Buick that I saw that wintry day in the bracken as I was biking down West End Road long ago. Perhaps I was, subconsciously. There’s not so much living down the Joneses anymore. The houses are obese, the lawns just so. Bonac yards — folk art really — are rarities now. I saw one the other day and was smitten. I thought of writing it up and photographing it, but then reined myself in. ‘In your dreams,’ I said. ‘It won’t fly.’ ”

As the season changes from the calm quiet of winter to the raucous bustle of spring, the nature preserve where I live is teeming with new life. 

Bluebirds and tree swallows are moving into the nest boxes spread around the meadows of Mashomack. Everywhere robins pull worms from the earth. Shockingly red cardinals flaunt their fresh feathers, bright scarlet with new growth. Two weeks ago, a flutter of royal blue and teal caught my eye on the morning drive. At least half a dozen richly colored little birds were flitting from ground to branch — indigo buntings, my first-ever sighting. 

The ospreys have been back for a month and are staking out their nesting sites. Peering through a scope at the massive bald eagle nest, we’ve spotted at least one fuzzy gray hatchling. A bundle of fluff that pokes its head up from among the sticks now and then, it would be easy to miss if you weren’t patient enough to wait and watch. 

Fox kits caught trotting down the driveway stop to take a look at an approaching car, still too young to know better. While out at night two weeks ago to watch a team from the D.E.C. netting bats in the woods, we came across the pelt of a muskrat that a mother fox must have delivered to her young. It was a neat rectangle, furry on one side and picked clean on the other. A kit surprised by the beam of our headlamps had dropped it. 

In the ponds and kettleholes, the spring peepers are screaming. The chorus from each pond is a little different. As night falls, it becomes a symphony, reaching a crescendo, dying back, intensifying again. The populations of the ponds seem to be competing against one another. How is it these creatures no bigger than an inch can make such a wonderful, riotous racket? 

When we first moved to Mashomack, I described myself as a reluctant naturalist. Not true, exactly, but I wasn’t sure I would like being in such an isolated spot after being five minutes from everything for so long. I thought it would be too quiet. It is sometimes, but in the absence of all that human influence, the natural world speaks more loudly and clearly. 

I pay attention to the comings and goings of the red-tailed hawks, the point in the night when the peepers pipe down, the hour when the egrets head to their favorite tree, the kind of morning light that the bluebirds seem to appreciate. All of these things are rich with character. 

In every pocket of the preserve a different story unfolds and changes with the season. We are part of it, but nature is in charge.

Carissa Katz, The Star’s managing editor, is living at the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island, where her husband is the preserve director.

Not since Hurricane Sandy had I seen tides that flooded and then stayed high for days. The winter storm that arrived on Friday did this, and I am worried.

I am old enough and have lived in the same spot long enough to have a sense of how things should and should not be. The bay has been at odds with what should be, but scientists tell us this is the new normal.

Down South, coastal communities have seawater in the streets even on blue-sky days. A raging East River for more than 24 hours after last week’s storm closed two lanes of Manhattan’s F.D.R. Drive. Scituate and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts were flooded through Sunday.

Here, Gardiner’s Bay rose and never really went down again. Storm waves tore at the dunes and toward the foundations of several houses near the old Promised Land fishmeal factory. With the tides remaining so high, groundwater that normally would have seeped through the dunes into the bay had no place to go. The swamps alongside Cranberry Hole Road filled, turned into ponds, and then rose more, joining into one long wetland even as the rain became a memory.

Even on the ocean and with a hard north wind, it was the same. Each time I checked the beach at Georgica and Main, my eyes suggested that the tide was near peak, even if the charts insisted otherwise. Same thing in Montauk, where I stood on one of the expensive staircases the Army Corps of Engineers built over its sandbag earthworks. White water surged under my feet as I descended to take a picture of the Atlantic Terrace hotel.

There is no beach to speak of left at downtown Montauk now. Taxpayers will have to pay to truck sand in before the summer season. At ordinary high tide on Gardiner’s Bay, you cannot walk around one corner of one neighbor’s house anymore. At Lazy Point, two houses are already in the water and two more look about to join them. Gerard Drive was again overtopped by waves, leaving stones on the pavement. 

We had better get used to it, the sea is only going to rise a whole lot more before it’s done.

“It’s sooo nice,” the young woman behind the counter at Trish Franey’s liquor store said last Wednesday evening.

“Yes, I think any day the sun shines here is nice — whatever the temperature,” I said. “We were in Palm Desert not long ago and it was hot, but there are so many people, there’s so much traffic, and everyone lives behind walls. . . . There are always worms in the apples.” 

“Maybe a nice day is even more nice because we’ve suffered a bit, not that I’m a great advocate of it,” I said on my way out.

That night the gibbous moon was so bright that I didn’t really need a flashlight when O’en and I went out on our evening constitutional. We could see and be seen amid the branches’ shadows on the penumbral streets.

We tend to drift along dreamily on these night walks. He’s calmer at night, much less inclined than he is during the day to yank, and I’m calmer too, under the moon and stars, just walking long, reminded that we’re earth-bound only in those moments when he takes a dump, the evidence of which, thanks to an inverted blue plastic New York Times wrapper, I deftly erase.

It was not always so. I used blithely to walk on by in the days I walked Henry, O’en’s predecessor, along Main Street, imagining, with a frisson of delight, summer people stepping in it as they alighted at night from the Jitney. Yes, yes, I confess it . . . a wretch, I am a wretch. 

Finally, a librarian who walks back and forth along Main Street every day, as I do, set me straight. And Mary said she was right to do so even as I complained that, boy, did she have some nerve. It was the hygienic thing to do, Mary said. And so I began to pick up after my pets, and have ever since been so attentive in this regard — and thankful for Debbie’s intervention, by the way — that I risk ecstatic sanctimony, to borrow Philip Roth’s pejorative term. 

I must remind myself — a reformed worm in this apple — that I am only human. Walking with O’en under a gibbous moon and the stars inclines me to this conclusion.

And stepping in it at the edge of our lawn drives the point home. 

Not long ago, during an idyll in Palm Desert, Calif., I was doing the crossword puzzle and the first clue I came across was: “ ‘Serial’ podcast host Sarah.”

No problem. I knew that that would be Sarah Koenig, who used to work here at The Star.

Usually, I’m out of it when it comes to topical questions in the puzzles, preferring the gossamer past to the lurid present.

“Do you know who Odysseus’ rescuer was?” I asked.

“How would I know,” said Georgie, who had been reunited with her twin, Johnna, following a long separation.

“. . . You’re right, Ino!” I said, looking up after some moments of reflection.

As it turned out, Georgie and Johnna were my saviors that day because they are of a younger generation, which, at long last, I’ve begun to listen to, and could therefore fill in the gaping gaps of my knowledge of current events. 

“Who wrote ‘Hamilton’?” I asked out loud. “Lin . . .”

“Lin Manuel Miranda,” Johnna replied.

“What’s the backdrop to AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’?” I asked, at a loss.

“Zombie apocalypse,” Georgie said, laughing.

Done.

And so, back to reality, though I’d rather not. 

From wit to shit. Our other daughter, Emily, a veteran teacher, was, I learned on our return, up in arms concerning the move to arm teachers in the wake of the massacre of 17 students at the high school in Parkland, Fla. 

“Now they’re telling us we have to be police officers and security guards too?” she said when I phoned her. “We can carry a gun, but we’re not allowed to turn up the thermostat? Where were the bonuses for all the supplies we’ve been paying for out of pocket all these years — for books, markers, pencils, crayons, copy paper? I could go on and on and on. ‘There’s no money,’ that’s what the answer’s always been. But now, all of a sudden there is money! Not more money for social workers and psychologists, but for guns. We had one social worker at a school of 960 kids in an impoverished community in crisis where I taught in Chicago. One. We’re always telling the children to pick the best possible answer from among several possible ones. Well, this is the worst possible answer.”

“Everything’s always been put on the teachers,” Emily continued. “Turn out sterling scholars, lifelong learners, outstanding citizens, fix poverty . . . and now we’re to solve gun violence?! I can’t go to a math conference because there’s no money. There’s no money for education, but there’s money for guns. It’s so sick. I can’t believe people are voting for this. It’s like a wildfire. I want a bonus for the other stuff I, and all the other teachers, do.”

“Frankly, it terrifies me. I don’t want my sons going to a school where there are guns. I’ve never allowed guns in our house. It was all I could do to say yes to a lightsaber.”

“Can you imagine a teacher shooting a former student? Are teachers going to wear holsters? If a gun is locked away, might not a student find a way to get at it? What about teachers and students being shot in crossfires? Have they really thought all this out? Maybe some teachers might be good at this, but the school would not be a safer place if I had a gun. I didn’t sign up to be a security guard. I don’t want to shoot anyone. I’m not wired that way. I just want to do what I love to do, which is teach.”

Midafternoon on Tuesday, as the snow seemed to be tapering off in East Hampton, I headed out from the Star office to have a look around. Though the roads were clear, few drivers were about. A couple of cars were parked at Main Beach but only one at Georgica when I stopped to watch the surf.

Main Street was empty, too, as was Newtown Lane. All the boutiques were closed. So, it appeared, was the hardware store. The food market across the street was open, but that was it; Mary’s, Villa, the lumberyard, Hampton Country Market, the new beverage place, the electric supply store, the library, Guild Hall, and everything else was dark.

Two village plow drivers pushed snow around at the beach; another cleared the Chase bank parking lot. It was quiet. I passed very few other trucks. Ice broke free of the branches above and hit my windshield with a loud thwack.

It’s hard to know if my memory is right, but I recall that a snowstorm like the one we had this week would not have shut down East Hampton quite so much. If you could get around, you would work. Now we hear about bombogenesis in the North Atlantic. Ordinary winter storms get cutesy, post-millennial sounding names that bring to mind contestants on “The Bachelor” or something. We stock up, hunker down, and catch up on shows we missed.

The kids, though, know better when the ground is white and there is no school. Ellis and his cousin and a friend got together around lunchtime at my sister’s place on Accabonac Road and made what I gather were record-size snowballs and rolled boulders although the heavy snow was too sticky for sledding. They shrieked and ran around until they were too wet and out of breath to go on.

Maybe we had it wrong those decades ago when we showed up almost no matter what. If we nestle down on the couch in a soft blanket with a book while the dog sleeps nearby, the world will nevertheless spin on. The work can wait for another day.

Copies of The Star’s 100th anniversary edition were dug out recently for the edification of several new staff members, and we found ourselves reminiscing about people who worked here over the years. 

Our centennial issue was published on Dec. 26, 1985 — the actual anniversary date, to the very day. Some of the memories the centennial issue brought to mind were wistful, some humorous. 

One indelible memory was of a man named Chester Browne, a former U.S. Marine who had been wounded in France in World War I and who worked as a Linotype operator and proofreader at The Star from 1923 until the late 1960s. When he died in 1977, he was remembered in his Star obituary as a real American archetype, a character you might read about in Dos Passos: 

“As a printer of the old school, he deplored the appearance of vulgarisms in type, and on one occasion fought long and hard, without success, to prevent the use of the colloquial verb ‘skunked,’ in the sense of having been held scoreless, in a sports story. He was equally affronted by improper hyphenation, and perhaps fortunately had left the business before the advent of electronic typesetting, in which word breakage is sometimes left to an illiterate computer.”

In a photo from 1930 reprinted in the anniversary edition of 1985, Brownie, as we all called him, is seen in the building at 78 Main Street where the paper used to be composed.

One of our favorite stories, back in the old days, was of Brownie. One day, he arrived at work before every one else and was surprised to see folks gathering across Main Street at Guild Hall. He couldn’t figure out what they might be doing at Guild Hall at that hour, but as time passed and no one else showed up to work, it slowly dawned on him: He had fallen asleep after dinner that night and, waking up to glance at the clock, saw that it was 7:30, and rushed off to work. It took a while for him to realize that it was 7:30 p.m., not a.m., and that he still had a long night of sleep ahead. 

We laughed about this for years. The deadlines of newspapering do make a person anxious.

Looking at our special edition also made me nostalgic for the processes and equipment that went into putting The Star together many years ago. Even the 1985 anniversary edition itself seems like a relic at this point. When we said “cut and paste” in those days, we actually cut and pasted! 

“When we think of small-town newspapering as it was,” the 1977 Star obituary for Chester Browne continued, “Brownie will be there, wearing a clean white shirt, a brown apron, and a small smile, and bearing a galley-proof.” Those of you who, like me, enjoy a good trip down memory lane might appreciate knowing that the East Hampton Library has already scanned and digitized every copy of The Star from its inception through 1968, which is as far as they got before the grant that made the project possible ran out. (Perhaps new sources of funding will be found sometime soon to complete this expensive project; I have my fingers crossed.) 

If you go online to nyshistoricnewspapers.org, and click on The East Hampton Star, at right, you will see how easy it is to look up old friends, old football games, old birth announcements, with a simple key-word search. You not only see the text, but can zoom in on high-resolution images of the page. Try it, you’ll like it.