Thirty-two years after the fact, they’ve come up with a name for what I have been doing since the winter of 1986: Digital Nomading. 

According to a piece called “The World Is Your Office” in a recent Sunday Times Magazine, digital nomads are people who “travel the world while working remotely over the internet.” Entire industries are growing up around these wandering telecommuters, from international housing complexes to shared office spaces with gyms, spas, juice bars, and other Googlish perks, all built on the advances in communications technology — the article cites smartphones, roaming data plans, and cheaper air travel — over the last few years.

In the year I’m thinking about — which I remember well because it was one of the last jolly ones on the island of St. Croix before Hurricane Hugo destroyed an up-and-coming economy that never recovered — we went down for Christmas vacation with three kids, me lugging an Altima (not a Nissan sedan but an early make of laptop). It weighed maybe nine pounds, with a slot that took a 5.25-inch floppy disk and another where you could plug in a state-of-the-art umbilical cord called a modem.

Ah, the modem. It was the late Stephen Hahn of East Hampton, a gifted physicist who, had he lived long enough, probably would have figured out how to turn lead into gold, who introduced the Star staff to the modem, that magical dial-up data transmitter that worked, back in the day, only over a phone line. (If a call came through while you were using the modem it would break the connection; you couldn’t use them both at the same time.) Steve, an escapee from the Holocaust who never lost his German accent, called the thing a mo-DEM, so, knowing no different, everyone else here did too. 

I was his guinea pig the night he first tested the modem connection, he in East Hampton, me in Manhattan staring at the Altima’s blank screen. I’ll never forget it. First came a hummy little wait-for-it sound, then green words racing across the void: CAN YOU SEE THIS IRENE? 

STEVE I SEE IT! I typed. STEVE I LOVE YOU.

Because what he’d just done, after months of tinkering, not only made it possible for all of us to write and edit from afar, but for me to work year round, not just in summer as before. Crosstalk, a lightning-fast file processor the Star used for the next six or eight years until email came along, could condense entire stories into a single word and zip them across the miles via the simplest of commands — “send a:robbery,” for example. The story would arrive on the screen full-blown as from the brow of Zeus, and depart, edited, the same one-word way. Like those early years of the web, when AOL had barely a thousand subscribers, Crosstalk was too user-friendly to last.

Anyway, about that Christmas in the Caribbean. I remember, one beautiful sunny St. Croix morning, writing something along the lines of “Another snowstorm is predicted here this weekend, to be followed by a plunge in the thermometer that will likely leave local roads in dangerous condition. Beware of black ice!” 

Helen Rattray accused me of writing it under a palm tree with the laptop on my lap and a glass of Cruzan rum and Coke nearby. She was dead right.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

Even though I don’t consider myself particularly susceptible to trends in the kitchen — I never did get into sriracha, for example — I am, like all of us, susceptible to flavor fads. I’ve cooked my way through the great goat cheese glut of the 1980s, and the mania for sun-dried tomatoes. I can remember the days before balsamic vinegar, and the decades when we all called it just plain old coriander instead of cilantro.

Lately, what we’ve been cooking with a lot is fennel. Like anise, fennel has a licorice tang, which suits me just fine. I love real licorice, enjoy licorice tea, and have been known to buy licorice candy at the movies, just because the package says “licorice,” even though I know full well that that stuff isn’t actually licorice but is sweet junk and mainly corn syrup. 

The other day, when nothing had been planned for dinner, I devised a dish of chicken sausage from Iacono Farm with onions and fennel, and it came out with high marks. I started by sautéing chopped onion in a little olive oil, which 9 out of 10 recipes seem to start with, then added the sausage. After it had been broken up and thoroughly heated, I added quite a lot of fennel, which had been cut into long slices. It was a swell meal, and there was hardly any effort involved. To gild the lily, we sprinkled some fennel seeds on it, which made ultimate sense since a jar of fennel seed has been sitting in the pantry for so long that I don’t recall why it was there.

I’m not sure why I haven’t used fennel much until recently. Culture, I guess. Fennel was not familiar to my grandparents, its having been a perennial in the Mediterranean region of southern Europe rather than the countries from which they emigrated. I vividly remember my grandfather complaining about his wife’s cooking, however, which he would say amounted to “zip.” She could have used some fennel!

In the words of the Indian writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, fennel “is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people . . . smelling of changes to come.” 

That’s very poetic, and if I use my imagination I do think I know what she means, but I prefer this explanation of its appeal from East Hampton’s own food guru, Ina Garten: “In the summer you want fresh, light, and sort of quick things; in winter you want things that are comforting, so your body really tells you you want to go towards potatoes, apples, fennel, things that are warm and comforting. And loin of pork.”

The internet says that in medieval times fennel was employed, together with St. John’s wort and other herbs, to ward off witchcraft and other dark influences. It was supposedly hung over doors on Midsummer’s Eve to keep away evil spirits.

I’m not sure that source is particularly reliable (isn’t that what they said about garlic?), but I do know that fennel is good for what ails us. Have you tried it with pork chops? 

It would be great publicity for all involved, if anyone reads it. That was part of my thinking this week on a story about a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis whose ownership is disputed in a federal lawsuit.

One of the indisputable truths about media in these times is that readership is fractured into innumerable discrete groups. Television news, which once was confined to the big national networks and their local affiliates, matters far less than it once did. Newspapers’ monopolies on the public’s attention ended with the rise of radio. On the internet, social media spoon up news your friends “like” and little else.

The Jackie O painting story was first reported by The New York Post and Daily News on Saturday. Other news outlets picked it up, and by Monday it was everywhere, or so it seemed. The story, I assumed, was interesting enough that, at least locally, it would cross over into general consciousness.

In short, the suit alleges that a small painting of the future first lady was stolen from the Beale house, otherwise known as Grey Gardens, in the 1960s or early ’70s. What is not disputed is that Terry Wallace, who runs a gallery in East Hampton Village, bought the painting from an unnamed antiques dealer in about 1988.

A Beale nephew, who lives in California and who has not been shy about trying to cash in on the family name with a line of fashion accessories, wants the painting for himself and has sued in federal court seeking its handover.

That the suit is with the feds is notable in and of itself. T.E. McMorrow, the reporter who wrote our story, pointed out that there is a $75,000 threshold to bring a property claim before a federal judge. The nephew’s lawyer says the painting is worth at least that much. T.E., or Tom, as we call him, is skeptical; none of the portraitist’s works has gone for more than $850, he said.

But federal court is federal court, and it makes for better headlines and a greater likelihood that, as happened, multiple news outlets pick up a story. Still, at my usual Java Nation stop on Tuesday morning, none of the news-junkie regulars had heard of it. Even Andrew, who runs the place and knows everything, was in the dark.

So the question was what The Star should do. Should we wait for it to appear in print before putting it on our website or just go for it? We put it up, pushing the story out over Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Interest was steady, if modest. A small item we had posted a few days earlier about the New York City restaurant chain Il Mulino held an insurmountable lead, followed closely by our coverage of a seal pup found scooting along a road in Amagansett in January. Everybody had heard about that.

As to the publicity value of the Jackie O painting, the nephew wins either way, by seeing his name go cross-platform from New York to London’s Daily Mail. And Mr. Wallace, who says the portrait is his legally and not for sale anyway, does too.

The other night on the “NewsHour,” our source for horror on weeknights, they showed the light that could not until recently be seen in what was heretofore thought to be vast outer blackness.

It was comforting. “We’re looking at heaven,” I said, “all the light that can now be seen.”

Well, I didn’t mean by that to imply I’d been convinced, though, as I say, it was comforting inasmuch as the revelation did nothing to disabuse me of a feeling that has persisted, to wit, that despite the suffering that attends us, all will be well. Or, as my French stepmother used to say, “Tout s’arrange.”

“It’s nothing,” my father reported his mother-in-law as having said to Lucette and him on her deathbed. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

I do wonder sometimes if the life to which we cling so isn’t a dream from which we’ll awake. Sometimes it almost seems as if it’s a sideshow. Nay, most often it seems like a freak show, so confounding at times that I’m prompted to seek refuge from the madhouse in Mud House.

And refuge in “The Book of Joy,” a compendium of conversations in which the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu engaged not long ago, two leaders who know well what suffering is, but who, despite that, are joyous, their joy being linked to suffering. Theirs is a state, I presume, beyond happiness and beyond mere optimism. 

There is a large photo of the Dalai Lama laughing in our daughter and son-in-law’s house, and sometimes I wonder why he is. I can only conclude that it is because he is supremely accepting, that he’s never trying to force the issue. Still, inasmuch as I’m a citizen in an exhortatory nation, I would like to have a bumper sticker made that says, “Strive for Beauty.” For me that sums it up.

“We are same human beings,” the Dalai Lama says at one point, and, at another, Archbishop Tutu says, “We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another . . . human beings are basically good. . . . Ubuntu says: A person is a person through other persons.”

Theirs too is a light you can see, and much closer, and yes, it too is comforting. Jack Graves

“You have to write the piece that goes with this rap: ‘No Conca, no movie theater, no diner, no Black Buoy. (Variety Store? You’re right, it’s still there.)’ ” This from a book editor quoting back to me my lament for the wreckage of Sag Harbor.

I’d emailed her in the fall, I forget why, maybe because she’s a parent too, and so seemed to agree that the emotional crater left behind by the disappeared Conca D’Oro pizza parlor was going to be particularly difficult to crawl out of — the kid hangout, the antithesis of Hamptons pretension, the throwback, if not exactly to a time of a gas station on every corner, at least to those days when from downtown you could make out the distant whine of engines up in the woods at the Bridgehampton Racetrack, a siren call to something, anything, happening out here.

The vacant Conca storefront may have been in the back of my mind as I crammed in the next best dinner I could think of on a Monday night, a couple of Pierson High booster club frankfurters in sweet white-bread buns, one French’s-only as a starter, another as the main course squirted with two different colorful streams of condiment for variety, the meal finished off with the butt end of my fourth-grade daughter’s leftover mess, all ingested in mere seconds as the Whalers and Bees warmed up in preparation for their recent tête-à-tête, and all three dogs for 4 bucks, the nice booster lady had informed me, math I’m still trying to figure out. 

About the game, for you parental units out there skeptical of teens these days, let me put it this way: Effort was not an issue, was in fact in ferocious evidence, particularly on Pierson’s part, the boys hammering the boards and raining threes without the help of their thousand-point man, Will Martin. He was missed more in the bleachers, as he’s fun to watch, this baby-faced assassin who’ll smoke your ass flat-footed as he slashes to the hoop, then calmly floats back up the floor, blond head cocked to one side like he’s negotiating the inclined deck of Captain Havens’s whaling vessel in a heavy swell. 

As for the Bees, they looked like a team not used to playing together, as my wife put it, incisively, I thought. Maybe next year.

Yet for all the shouting and high spirits, what ghost was that haunting the Sag Harbor gym? For the visitors too. I mean, Bridgehampton: What’s to become of you? How many more regular folks can you stand to lose to the saner economies of the Carolinas? How many more 19th-century houses have to come down? 

And those kids sacrificing their bodies for the sake of a loose ball deserve a magical place of their own come summer, like the old drive-in movie theater. Is that maudlin to say? Or merely pointless. I’ll go ahead and add to the grievance list those two six-foot-tall fiberglass soft-serve cones Carvel wanted atop the shop but Southampton Town ordered mothballed decades ago. The supports are still there, if it’s not too late. God forbid there be a glimpse of joy intruding on that dreary suburban stretch of Montauk Highway. 

It was noise complaints that did in the racetrack — the worst loss the South Fork has suffered, more than a few of us believe. And now the same judgment is being visited upon another large tract where interesting things happen, the East Hampton Airport. So here’s a modest proposal: Rather than silence surrounded by mostly empty second homes and an unchecked army of deer, how about doubling down and putting a luncheonette in the terminal? The kind of place you could get a tuna melt, fries on the side, chocolate malted with a coffee back. Sit under a lacquered wooden propeller mounted on the wall and watch the planes come and go. The occasional refueling. See who deplanes and treads across the tarmac to points unknown. Good for old people with nothing to do, good for kids. 

I know, I know, don’t hold your breath. But we’ll always have the hardwood.

Baylis Greene, Bridgehampton High class of 1985, is an associate editor at The Star.

I’ve been known to complain that those who bought second homes here in the last few years are not like those who arrived earlier, in, say, the 20th century — who, I liked to insist, made an effort to learn East Hampton history, meet remarkable locals, and discover native flora and sometimes even fauna. Lately, however, I’m beginning to think I’ve been wrong. Perhaps it has something to do with the resurgence in the idea of locavore food, and the millennials’ celebration of old artisan crafts, but I see more and more fresh faces taking an interest in our common East Hampton history.

It was standing room only, for example, at a recent East Hampton Historical Society event at Clinton Academy. To be sure, year-rounders were in strong evidence, but so were others, ranging from young to upper-middle age, who seemed new to the room but were obviously delighted to take in indigenous stories told with knowledge and humor by Hugh King and Ken Collum about two of the 20th century’s prominent physicians here, Doris Zenger and Dave Edwards. 

Socially, as well, I’ve  met newly arrived residents who have disproved my earlier opinion about newcomers. For example, at a dinner party just before the scallop season opened this year, I got talking with a woman who not only knew that a day would be set aside so residents could dig a few for personal consumption before professional Bonackers got to work commercially, but planned to take advantage of it. She sent me a photo afterward. It showed her in full regalia and waders, holding a handmade wooden box with a see-through bottom, which she had a carpenter make for her just for shellfishing. I never got around to asking her about the New York City law practice from which she had recently retired.

And then there are two men who came “from away,” as locals used to always put it, to become the most extraordinary experts on the work of East Hampton’s Dominy family, who made furniture for a century or more (some of the finest examples of which can be seen at Winterthur in Delaware). No one could be more devoted to preservation than they are.

I once was a newcomer here, too, many moons ago. For the first few years I got a pass as far as boning up on local history and  lore went, because I married into a family who wrote books dealing with local history, both fiction and nonfiction, and could reflexively defer to them. As the years have swept by, however, and given the intense attention to community that has gone into making The East Hampton Star the paper it is today, I can claim to have amassed a fairly reliable store of knowledge about what made East Hampton such a fine place in centuries past. You can ask me what the old spelling of Sammy’s Beach was, and I will be able to answer.

In the introduction to his 1979 book, “The South Fork,” Everett T. Rattray, my late husband, wrote: “The South Fork is native now to a relative handful; it could be native to thousands more if they would undertake the necessary naturalization exercises, which include some long looks beneath the surface of things.” 

He would be pleased to know that many are now doing so.

The late Russell Drumm used to talk about how paper money would wash up in a certain spot at Ditch Plain in Montauk every year, right after the first hard westerly swell in late summer. It was his opinion that much of what fell from beachgoers’ bags and pockets would get buried in the sand in the preceding months and would then emerge and be swept to one side or the other, gathering among broken snow fence bits, sea grass, bones, and lost fishermen’s gloves along the wrack line.

I was never really sure about the money part, thinking that perhaps it was a gag that Rusty liked to pull to get the beach kids all excited and running around looking for their share. Cold cash or not, interesting things really do end up on that crook of sand, like what appeared to be a 1972 high school identification card that I pocketed there during a short walk on Monday morning.

The card, made of plastic, was yellow and faded, as if abraded by blowing sand. One corner was missing, but the letters that remained were still sharp. At top, it read, “borah J. Hess 72,” the student’s name and her graduating class, I assumed. Below that was what I thought was her mother’s name and address, “Mrs. Dorothy Hess, 149-50 5th Ave., Whitestone, N.Y. 11357.” And below that, “St. Agnes Academic High School.” To think, this card might have been on the beach since Richard M. Nixon was in the White House.

Turning to Facebook, I asked for advice. Some accounts noticed by George Eldi matched, but the geography seemed wrong. Cindi Crain saw a 2013 St. Agnes bulletin online and found a death notice for a Dorothy Grimes Hess, who had been a member of the class of 1959, and then found someone she believed was Ms. Hess’s daughter, and sent her a message.

Two calls to different phone numbers hoping to reach someone who might have been the card’s owner went unanswered. An email to St. Agnes School produced only an automated response. Cindi Crain also sent a message to someone who she thought might be Deborah. As Tuesday morning turned into Tuesday afternoon, there was no luck.

From a Daily News obituary, however, I learned that a Kenneth Hess, who was married to Dorothy Hess and who had a daughter named Deborah, had, according to other online records, lived on 5th Avenue in Whitestone, and, at one point, in Hampton Bays and would be about the right age.

Closing in, perhaps, I found a person who might be the right one, given that she listed having attended St. Agnes on her Facebook page. I sent her a photo of the ID card and waited.

Beachcombing is a long tradition here. Time was that valuable things might be found along the shore after a ship that wrecked on the bar spilled its cargo. In East Hampton’s earliest days, who could claim a whale that drifted ashore was of enough significance to be included in the agreement between the English colonists and the Indians from whom they took title to the land. In addition to 20 coats and 24 hoes, the native people were “to have the fynnes and tayles of all such whales as shall be cast upp.” More than 200 years later, during the marijuana smuggling boom of the early 1980s, there were stories about people stumbling on bales of weed thrown overboard and left to float with the tide.

By afternoon on Tuesday I was chatting online with the card’s owner, now Deborah Hess Sharkey, a kindergarten teacher in Whitestone. She had visited Amagansett in the 1970s, about the time of the gas crisis, and could have lost it then. Later, she owned a house in Hampton Bays as an investment, and, most recently, she had stayed at the Born Free motel in Montauk. 

No, she did not know exactly when she last had the card in her possession. Yes, she would like it back. I promised to put it in the mail at the end of the week.

“It will make a good conversation piece,” Ms. Sharkey said.

I recently read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s little book on astrophysics, probably the smallest book ever written about such a vast and ever-fascinating subject. 

It’s a pity all of us can’t be astrophysicists, for then we’d never be bored, and thus we’d not spend so much time thinking of ways to kill each other or of ways in which to puff ourselves up, often at others’ expense.

I would like to think, though it may be wishful thinking, that as the universe continues to expand, my ego will continue to deflate, as certainly it should given the immeasurable (thus far at any rate) immensity in which we find ourselves, which counsels humility and wonder. 

Temporary residents on a water spot in this vastness — a blue marble when seen up close — you’d think we’d be more inclined to reconciliation than to beating our chests.

Still, wretch that I am, I can’t help but beat mine after winning a tennis match. 

Yet, as I’m about to unveil the full panoply of my tail feathers in strutting before Mary, I consider that one of my opponents recently underwent open heart surgery, that his partner not only has two knee replacements (as do I), but also a new hip and shoulder, and that my partner’s ripped rectus abdominis must be bound by a girdle, even when he’s not playing tennis.

Such thoughts tend to tampen the ego, as happens too whenever I think of solar winds and asteroids and light-years and gigantic black holes, such as the one upstairs here in the attic into which many of my negatives and contact sheets have disappeared forever. Try finding 1982, for instance. It doesn’t exist, or, if it does, it’s in a parallel universe.

Do I feel at home in our galaxy? You know, as I do on Harbor View Drive? Sometimes. And I’d like to more and more, which is why I’ve begun to read “Cosmos” again, which is wonderfully well written, by the way.

But my main preoccupation at the moment, earthbound as I am, is to learn how to keep score in pickleball. 

Winning in that sport, in contrast to tennis, seems to be less of a concern than having fun. 

Yes it’s fun. Fun all the way down.

One cold winter’s night about 26 years ago, two friends and I shivered on West Third Street, craning our necks and peering in the large window of the Blue Note Jazz Club, straining for a glimpse of Ray Charles. We were barely employed musicians then, sharing a small apartment in Hoboken and busking in the subway when times were especially tough (they usually were).

On Saturday, I nodded hello to the shadows of those three poor scruffs as I strode into the club, now flush with 40 dollars and then some, to sit at the bar, sip wine, and listen to Jools Holland bang out rhythm and blues and boogie-woogie on a grand piano.

I’d seen a blurb about Mr. Holland, an original member of the band Squeeze, and his show at the Blue Note, “Piano, Vocals, and Drum Frenzy,” in the “Goings On About Town” section in The New Yorker. Learning that Ruby Turner, a wonderful British-Jamaican singer, would accompany him at the Blue Note, I had to attend.

Squeeze was a marvelous band that crafted superb, Beatles-esque pop in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Since 1992, Julian Miles Holland has hosted “Later . . . With Jools Holland,” a BBC program on which new and established musicians perform and are interviewed by the host, who often joins in. 

My introduction to Ms. Turner came on “Small World, Big Band” by Mr. Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, a sprawling, 22-track release featuring blues and pop artists including Paul Weller, Stereophonics, Van Morrison, Taj Mahal, and Mark Knopfler. George Harrison’s final performance, completed shortly before his death in 2001, is one standout track. Ms. Turner’s contribution, the elegiac and deeply stirring “Nobody ut You,” is another.

But Saturday: Curse you, Metropolitan Transportation Authority! Fifteen long minutes ticked by before the F train pulled into the station, and by the time I got to the Blue Note, the bar, which accommodates just a dozen stools, was full. But, unlike that frigid night 26-odd years ago, fortune smiled. The nice lady at the door said that if the show wasn’t sold out, I could upgrade to a table seat for an additional 15 dollars. After an hour of lurking uncomfortably behind the bar patrons, I received the welcome news and was led deeper into the venue. 

How about this one, she asked, pointing to an empty chair. We can do better, I thought, though by now the joint was jammed.

And then I saw it: amid the dense crowd, an open seat, not three feet from the stage, directly in front of that grand piano’s keyboard! I was the new companion of a family of three, who had flown from Orlando so that the ninth-grade pianist among them could see Mr. Holland. They had apparently been the first arrivals, and I silently thanked them for their enthusiasm, their punctuality, and for not having had a second child. 

And then it was show time, and Mr. Holland and the drummer, Gilson Lavis — another Squeeze alumnus, smartly attired in three-piece suit and tie — were fantastic, surely living up to the show’s title with a flurry of rollicking, stomping duets.

On a frantic, boogie-woogie rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the pianist himself took flight, his left hand pounding an insistent bass as the right danced up and down the keys. Taking an odd, delightful turn, the musicians segued into, and then out of, a most uptempo take on Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C major as the crowd sat, spellbound.

Finally, the gregarious Mr. Holland announced, “It’s time for our last very special guest of the evening, one of the most famous people in the whole of England.” No, he said, it “isn’t Her Majesty, the Queen.” Making her debut at the Blue Note — “apart from last night and the night before” — was “the living boogie-woogie queen of England.”

Ms. Turner, with her accompanists, brought the house down, belting out “Rock Me,” made famous by Sister Rosetta Tharpe; “To Love a Child,” and, finally, “Peace in the Valley,” the latter two featured on the 2015 album “Jools & Ruby.”

The lights came up, and so did the soundtrack, and the crowd made its way to the door, and as I thought again of those poor scruffs straining for a peek at Ray Charles so many cold winter nights ago, the unmistakable sound of a Wurlitzer electric piano sounded and the late legend’s “What’d I Say” filled the venue:

“Hey mama, don’t you treat me wrong

Come and love your daddy all night long

All right now, hey hey, all right!”

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

I gather there are some dogs — huskies and Newfoundlands and such — who love nothing better than a good romp in the snow, but my dog, Sweet Pea, who came to the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons after the hurricanes in Puerto Rico, clearly isn’t a fan of ice and blizzards. I would be curious to hear if other ARF dogs who come from warmer climes are as indignant about the snow as mine is. 

Two weeks ago, East End dogs and their owners had a 12-inch snowfall to cope with, in addition to single-digit temperatures. When I opened the door for Sweet Pea the morning of that storm, she looked disdainfully around, and ran back into the living room to curl up in an easy chair. She must have a bladder of iron.

A courageous friend said her technique for dealing with her reluctant dogs was to shovel the snow off a rectangle in her yard and carry her two small pets to it a few times a day. Another told me his little dogs were willing to go out the front door when he opened it — but no further. They did what they had to do, he said, right there by the front door, but he wasn’t going to clean it up till the cold-weather siege had ended. (I can imagine the spring thaw will bring surprises in my garden, too. Oh, well, I guess it’s good for the roses.)

A city friend said that the snow-melt chemicals all over the sidewalks were the worst thing about taking his dog for a walk in winter. The grains got into the dog’s paws and made the otherwise pleasant experience of a twice-daily stroll feel somewhat cruel.

For the most part I’ve faced the weather by staying, quite happily, at the computer keyboard or in our well-heated kitchen, watching the birds. Sweet Pea is always close by, or settled onto my lap. No matter how much time she and I devote to reading The New York Times and the other newspapers and magazines piled up in our sun porch, we never seem to reach the bottom of the stack.

One of the nice things about having a dog again is being forced to go out a few times a day for at least a short walk. I have insisted that my husband do the same, canes and all. The first few minutes of each walk, at least, are usually great: There is nothing like the exhilaration that comes from a winter walk, especially when the sun comes out and your grandchildren arrive in high spirits, delighted to have had a chance to tromp through clean, deep snow and happy for another day off school.

To my surprise, on Tuesday, when we were treated to another bountiful snowfall, Sweet Pea showed signs of acclimating. She actually bounded outside and into the drifts, ignoring the fact that her legs were too short to keep her belly out of it. I do, however, think she might benefit from a set of little snow booties, to protect her feet (if not her dignity).