Weekday mornings, after I drop off my son, Ellis, at school, I stop by the coffee shop in Bridgehampton. It’s more of a habit, I guess, than a ritual, but it has become part of my routine. So, too, is it for a handful of other morning regulars who linger, sitting and talking across the floor with one another about politics as customers in more of a hurry come and go.

A couple of years ago, I walked into a similar place in Ojai, Calif., at midmorning and had shock of recognition. Three or four older guys occupied chairs and were rattling about this and that at one another in the same urgent, caffeinated tone. I shivered. “This could be me in a few years,” I thought.

Years ago, when I was in high school and just starting to drive, I went out before sunrise to go surfing and would sometimes stop at the Chicken House, which occupied the site on Toilsome Lane in the village where Hampton Market Place is now. No matter how early I went, there was always a small group of ancients drinking coffee in a small room off to the side. Glancing at them then, it made no sense. I mean, who in his right mind would get up and get out of the house before the sun was up to sit around in an overly bright, fluorescent-lit room at Formica-topped tables just . . . talking? I get it now.

The morning crew at Java Nation is the present-day equivalent. There’s the mushroom farmer, a builder from New Zealand, and the guy who grumbles under his breath if someone else is in the leather chair he likes to occupy till about noon. Over in the corner, there usually is a mom and her daughter spending a few minutes before the day begins.

Other regulars, who work nearby in blue-collar jobs, come in, spend a few minutes talking or making wisecracks, and leave. There are tall men with small dogs and women in fancy black cars (usually not together), groups of landscape workers, people in the restaurant business, and those who work in the schools nearby. Sometimes I see the guy who moved a driveway for me. Sometimes I see painter friends, but only if I stay late enough in the morning that they have gotten out of bed.

The guy who runs an insulation business stops in just long enough to put milk in his coffee. People in horse-riding clothes come in, though not so much at this time of year.  There is a father, who likes to talk, and his son, whom no one has ever heard say a word. The same three guys from one of the nearby construction companies roll in and out, joking about something. In turn, most of the people who work at the auto parts store drop by, as do the folks from the propane place across the street. We know each other’s faces, if not all the names.

I’m somewhere in between those who hang around indefinitely and those who don’t, getting a cup of coffee for myself and a decaf to bring back to the office for the arts editor, saying hello to Andrew, who runs the place, and getting out before I become part of the woodwork, like the other old guys. If I put a hat or part of a coat over the arts editor’s coffee, it will stay hot until I get back to East Hampton.

Isabel was talking about the Donner party and I said that it was our family’s only claim to fame, according to my father, who, when I once told him I had no ambition, said I was upholding the family tradition, which made me feel better. 

“He told me we were eators not eatees,” I told Isabel, who asked me if I’d ever written about it. “I must have,” I said. “That line is too good not to use — at least once a year.”

She looked the Donner Pass party up on the web and there it was. Twenty wagons had broken off from the main group, following a bogus shortcut map, “and they had to cut down trees!” she said as she read.

“And here I am complaining about raking leaves or shoveling a foot of snow,” I said. “And my ‘darkest hour’ was when the Steelers lost to the Jaguars.”

“Mary Graves was ‘the belle of the wagon train,’ and her father was Whiskey Bill Graves,” I told her. “They were Vermonters who had moved to Illinois in search of better soil, and, because they were eators not eatees, they wound up in California. It all may be hearsay, but it’s hearsay that you heard here first.”

My father also told me that his given name, Cebra, had been handed down through many generations of his mother’s family, the Quackenbushes, originally from the Netherlands. The first Cebra, he said, had been in the resistance to the Duke of Alba. This was at the time of the great Spanish Armada, and he had been caught and lashed by the Spaniards, who, in viewing the whip marks on his back, laughed and said (or thaid, if you’re translating properly), “Thebra, Thebra.”

Unbowed, he is reported to have said, “Cebra you call me, Cebra I will be.”

My father reckoned my son to be about the 14th in the line — Cebra XIV.

“Cebra, you call me, Cebra I will be. . . .”

I’m told a genealogist in our extended family has strong doubts about the story, and if plain truth were more appealing to me than colorful hearsay, I might deign to investigate. But in the end, I, whose ancestors were eators not eatees, don’t want to be disabused of my illusions, as long, at least, as they’re savory. And make no mythtake about that.

I am always looking for cool stuff. I have what you call the acquisition gene. To spin on the Latin: Veni, vidi, Visa. Lucky for me, my acquisition gene is nurtured through an additional kind of “shopping”: taking pictures for The Star. Veni, vidi . . . voro? It’s not the same kind of shopping, but it’s easier on the pocketbook and that hungry gene can be fooled.

I am a born hunter-gatherer and vintager. As a bohemian girl in the early ’60s, I was always happy to wear nifty hand-me-downs as long as they went with black tights and sandals. But it really started in the 1970s, when cool stuff was everywhere and I was getting a paycheck. Antique stores and thrift shops were ubiquitous and all you needed was a good eye. Who remembers the Ridge Trading Company on Great Jones Street?

When I first set up apartment-keeping, rent control existed and gas was cheap and shopping for stuff was entertainment. My live-in boyfriend and I prowled the shops on Bleecker Street every Saturday night after pizza at John’s and an ice cream cone at the place on Christopher Street. We went to antiques markets at Farmington and Brimfield. We subscribed to The Newtown Bee — the bible of antiquing — and Maine Antique Digest. On one vacation, he and I drove from Orient to Nova Scotia and back (no bluenose ferry for us), stopping at every antiques shop on old Route 1. We piled up the car with what we called “props” and filled our large rent-controlled apartment with our finds. After a river trip in Utah, we drove the blue highways (Thank you, William Least Heat-Moon) from Ouray to Manhattan, shopping all the way. This time the car was filled with Acoma pots and Zuni fetishes, and of course the requisite Georgia O’Keeffe-ish old bones, patchwork quilts, and souvenir snow globes. Much of that stuff I still have and cherish. 

That man friend and I went our separate shopping ways but the skill set we honed over 10 years together stuck with me. As a single dame, I scoured Manhattan for vintage clothes. After I married John Berg, my collecting focus came to include advertising thermometers, of which he already had a collection. 

Life for John and me eventually became more East Hampton oriented. As year-round weekenders we would spend Saturdays checking out the antiques shops and garage sales. My husband would drive and I would navigate, and along the way we bought a little of this and some of that . . . mostly, it turned out that the “that” was little paintings that looked “local.” Barbara Trujillo Antiques was an excellent source for little paintings. She curates well for my taste. I once bought a painting from her that had been signed by the artist three times in three different places. It has a train and a lily pond and that makes it local enough for me! 

Even though I hung things salon-style we began to run out of wall space (small house, lots of windows), so I rotated things in and out to make room for the swell paintings I kept finding. (Thanks, Springs School Mystery Art Sale, for the endless temptations.)

After my husband died two years ago, in a need to resettle in my nest, I had the inside of our house painted. Anyone who has ever emptied out a room for painting knows at least two things: 1) After the paint has dried you are loath to put a hole in the newly painted walls, and 2) What used to fit in the room or on the walls will no longer do so. Even with the most careful planning, it all just doesn’t want go back the same way. A painting collection that had grown organically just did not want to be forced. 

Suddenly a little seascape no longer looked good next to a little pondscape or fieldscape. Reinstalling would clearly be copying the original hodgepodge and would no longer have the same serendipitous overlay. 

So, I left the Ikea bags full of little framed paintings around for months. I guess I was waiting for a snow day. That day came and I began “shopping” the bags. Slowly the walls are beginning to fill up with paintings that I am looking at in new ways. This is the fun part: going to my own yard sale.

Last week I re-looked at a seascape I had bought at an estate sale quite a few years ago. Oddly, I pretty much remember when I encountered it and actually where it was on a shelf in the house where the sale was taking place. The house was south of the highway on the east side of the street, likely on Dunemere but maybe not. The painting was on a shelf of a white painted bookcase with lots of molding. There was a window to the left of the bookcase. I bought it on the spot. 

It was the tail end of the sale and I cannot to this day see why nobody else had snatched it up, but sometimes things are behind things waiting for the right person to send out their little beacon: “Here I am, buy me!” I got the message, bought the painting, and hung it up next to a window where it stayed until everything came down. 

Looking at it again last week, I decided to put a picture of the picture up on Facebook and to ask my buddies if anyone recognized the location or names of people connected to the painting. It is called “Dudley’s Flag,” and the inscription on the back says, “To Dudley, thanks for all the great fishing trips off shore and on the rips.” It is signed “Jim, 1999.”

It only took 20 minutes for some details to emerge. First from Lys Marigold: “Think it was done by the owner of that English thatch-roofed mansion next to Maidstone Club. He was Jim Johnson and a painter; his wife Gretchen. Dudley Roberts lived next door or one over, on the ocean. Nice find.” Then from Irene Silverman: “ Dudley Roberts was the man who saved the Dominy workshops from demolition during WW II and used them as a guest cottage. He did live on Further near the Maidstone; he was its president for years.” Laura Donnelly and Richard Barons weighed in. And there is more from Lys: “Then Dudley Roberts gave the beautiful Dominy accessory building to his neighbor who last year donated the old wooden structure to the Village for the museum on the corner of North Main and Cedar.”

So here I am with a wonderful piece of local history, on so many levels one of the coolest things I have ever bought. And thanks to the internet for solving the who and the where, and to friends who helped, and to Jim Johnson for painting this nifty work in 1999.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.

It’s a cliché of personal-essay writing to complain about how everyday items disappear from the home — socks, for instance, and the bizarre frequency with which they are eaten by washing machines. Well, let me begin by assuring you that I never lose socks in the washing machine. Never! And I’ll tell you why. A woman named Susie gave my husband a helpful tip: All you have to do is safety pin the pairs together. We actually do this.

However, as it turns out, there are other, much more mysterious, ways to lose socks. Not long ago, for instance, I was standing next to my bed taking off a pair of pants while wearing socks but not shoes. As the pants fell to the floor, one sock fell with them. The sock on the other foot, however, just upped and disappeared. I looked inside the pant legs, around the floor, under the bed, and into every crevice of the wood frame of the bed (which is a four-poster), but it wasn’t to be found. I’ve never seen it again. This was toward the end of December. Have we got a gremlin?

My husband and I have a standing joke about the bread knife that flew the coop. I suppose a visiting member of the family, adult or child, could have borrowed it for some purpose or other and not only forgotten to bring it back but forgotten having done so. (We’ve asked everyone, of course. They think we’re going bonkers.) We refer to the bread knife whenever something else we are looking for can’t be found. “Maybe the sock is having a meeting with the bread knife in the attic,” we say. “Maybe the bread knife is vacationing on Tortola.”

And then there are the scissors. In our house, at least, scissors have a way of levitating and night-traveling that I find nearly occult. 

And how about our ballpoint pens? My husband buys black ballpoints in packs of six and replenishes the supply frequently, because he likes to have one at the ready at all times. He even takes one or two with him when he leaves the house. (I’m not sure if he carried them in a pocket-protector during college, but I wouldn’t put it past him.) Now, I will admit to taking one of these ballpoint pens to the office every now and again, but I absolutely refuse to take responsibility for the vast numbers that disappear around here. I’m not kidding. Dozens of them.

Then there is a pair of light blue pillowcases that match my favorite sheets. Where could they possibly be? I’ve looked in every feasible closet and on every possible shelf to no avail. If only one pillowcase was missing I might have more hope, but it is hard to imagine that two pillowcases could have gotten lodged behind, you know, some household appliance or piece of furniture, and the two disappeared at the same time. Did the dog bury them? Did one of my grandchildren make them into a skirt? The imagination runs wild. Maybe they have eloped.

Longtime readers of this column may recall my writing about a couple of large glass pantry jars of the sort popularized some years ago by Martha Stewart. I inherited them from my father, who, more than half a century ago, brought them home one at a time from breakfast meetings of his men’s club after they had been emptied of delicacies like dill pickles. You might say he recycled them. They are basically square, with top openings five or size inches around and lids of green metal. (And here I can’t resist adding that Martha Stewart’s jar lids look like plastic.) Well, you’ve guessed it: Two lids from my favorite old jars have gone off somewhere. They aren’t in the dishwasher, or on any pantry shelf. Did someone throw them away? Why would someone do that? 

You know how this will end, of course. These things will all be found someday . . . but it will only happen after we’ve given up and thrown away the matching sock, the matching sheets, and the glass part of the jars. 

Sorry to say, I did not get the name of the reader who stopped by The Star last week with a small skein of darning thread. 

I had written a lament about the absence of suitable yarn at the Sag Harbor Variety Store with which I expected to mend a hole in a wool mitten. Time was, I might drive over with an old sweater looking for material to close up a hole eaten by a moth and be able to buy a small amount in a near-perfect match wrapped on a card. I was, it seems, one of the few still looking for yarn; the store no longer keeps a supply.

By coincidence or luck, the Coats & Clark’s silvery gray darning cotton the reader brought by is close in color, if not texture, and I mean to try it.

I was surprised by a second response to my column, this one an email from Peter Fitzgerald, who suggested I stop by Black Sheep Knit Works in East Hampton Village. A kindred soul, Mr. Fitzgerald went on to say, “As someone who has a shed full of things I fully intend to repair (they accumulate faster than I fix them somehow), I commend your good intentions.”

And that brings me back to something I have written about before: the near-hoarding quality of those of us with, perhaps, the ability to fix and repair material things but not the time. Darning a glove or sock is one thing, but letting a leaky cold-water faucet under the sink go on for six months before being shut off at the valve crosses some sort of line.

Last summer, I started work on putting a favorite surfboard back into shape after a friend had driven it into the sand and snapped off the nose almost a year earlier. The board is still waiting for a final coat of resin and sanding. In my basement and workshop you might find as many as 10 antique chairs awaiting attention. There is even an old hammock from Mexico hanging near a broken canoe paddle, which I have long intended to tend to.

There is joy in making broken things work again, which is why we hold on to them, I suppose. And yet from their dark, cobwebbed places in the corner of a basement or the back of a shed they call to us, mocking us for not letting go. If the worst thing anyone can say about Mr. Fitzgerald and me is that we keep too many things for too long in the hope that we can resurrect them, I guess that is not all bad. I am sure he, like me, believes that he will get around to them eventually.

The president says he doesn’t want anyone from “shithole countries,” and then I thought about the people I’ve most admired: Gandhi, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Tutu, Martin Luther King Jr. . . . Shithole countries can produce some great men.

They’re pigmented all in my pantheon, spanning the globe. Not that I have anything against Scandinavians, good socialists all.

But when will the day come when people, rather than by the color of their skin, are judged by the content of their character? That is the question; one raised by a visionary resident of this acknowledged land of the free, who in seeking balance was struck down for presuming to think that human beings harm themselves in harming others and help themselves in helping others, a vision that presupposed an equitable, vibrant society, one in which, moreover, poverty would be abolished.

“A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself,” Martin Luther King Jr. said hopefully, though these many years later it has yet to do so. 

“We are same human beings . . . we are the same,” the Dalai Lama says, to which Archbishop Tutu adds, “You blossom, really, because of other people.” Or, as Ubuntu has it, I am I because of you and you and you. 

We could be an equitable, vibrant society if we had the will, but it’s not there at the moment. Mark Shields said the other night that the president’s racist sentiments were damaging to the spirit of the country, and that’s no mean thing, spirit perhaps in the end being the main difference between a country that is whole and one that’s a shithole. 

Walls won’t do it, whether they be the walls we’ve built in our psyches, or about our gated communities, or the one that the president, his arms folded tightly about him, would build along our southern border. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Not good for the spirit, and spirit is the main thing. 

You wouldn’t think that going away for only a weekend, two days and two nights, would change what might be called your mental metabolism, but it did for me. 

We went to Rhode Island last Friday, where we stayed at the Weekapaug, an inn so luxe that the morning newspapers were delivered to our room in labelled fabric gift bags, there was a special “borrowing closet” where you could check out Hunter knee-high muck boots, and every guest room had a copy of “Sibley’s Guide to Birds” and a pair of binoculars. If the weather had been fine, we would have ventured out for a walk around a nearby salt pond with the resident naturalist, but it was really too cold for that.

Instead what happened was that I slowed down and didn’t mind having nothing to do. I hardly recognized myself —  letting time go by without purpose.

The vacations in my life that I have enjoyed the most were those during which I got acquainted with a heretofore unknown place, zooming around meeting friends of friends, birdwatching, or bustling about the new territory from department stores to museums, heritage sites to restaurants. The goal has always been to get everything in and not miss seeing something I would be sorry about later. This little trip was different.

My husband had made a weekend by the sea in Rhode Island a surprise Christmas present. There were no worrying “must-dos” and no nagging “should-have-dones.” I might have complained about how much time was, well, empty if I had been functioning at usual speed, but my wheels were turning slowly. Breakfast in our bedroom, off a well-laid tray, and dinner in the excellent restaurant at the inn were nice bookends of the day.

I think part of what made it such a breakaway — aside from the level of comfort and luxury — was unplugging from my computer. If I were at home it would have been a run-of-the mill weekend of puttering: picking up around the house, doing some cooking, keeping the email up-to-date, checking on whether there was anything I could edit, exchanging messages with members of the staff, and consulting my various calendars and datebooks to make sure I wasn’t forgetting something I wanted to do (which has been known to happen lately).  

Instead, we did something that, for me, was the height of lazy self-indulgence. No, we didn’t get massages and spa treatments. We went to the movies. That’s right, we went all the way to Rhode Island to go to the movies. The inn was showing “Lawrence of Arabia” in one of the common rooms, but  when we learned that two of the season’s best films, “The Darkest Hour” and “The Post,” were at the nearest theater, there was no holding us back. We hadn’t seen either, so we made it a double feature. How luxurious is that?

There is no darning yarn at the Sag Harbor Variety Store, as I discovered the other day after making a trip there from Amagansett. I had found a hole in one of my gray wool mittens while shoveling the driveway during the last big snow, and, knowing I  had only beige yarn in my sewing box, had planned my day around getting to Sag Harbor for the right stuff. Some time ago, though I can’t say how long, the shop stocked a good supply. No longer.

Who darns things anymore anyway, seems the right question. The back-counter clerk at the store told me that most customers bought colored embroidery thread when they needed to stitch something up. I almost did, but having spent several minutes holding packets of thread up to my mitten, forgetting about weight and texture and finding nothing that matched the color, I gave up, put the sample back, and climbed into my truck, feeling a little blue and stupid for even wanting to try. Maybe I should just buy a new pair of mittens, like everyone else.

Repairing things around the house may be a dying art, but I enjoy it. It gives me no small degree of pleasure to know how to clear an ice jam in my refrigerator drain, instead of waiting for the repair company to arrive, for example. As everything has gotten more complicated, however, there is a limit.

I did engine work on my first car (a 1970 Dodge Dart) and the second, an International Scout whose model and year I have forgotten. Messing around under the hood of the Chevy Volt I drove until recently was unthinkable. Mittens, though, I can do, and I still want to. If I can find the yarn.

It’s all the same eff-in day, man, Janis Joplin used to say, though some, as Mary would readily agree, are colder than others, such as this week’s were, but I could hardly contain myself this morning as I read that in the coming week the temperature will soar into the 30s, and perhaps even flirt with 40!

It makes you want to take your shirt off and do jumping jacks. Meanwhile, it is nice to be snowed in with the one you love. Ping-Pong is out because the basement’s too cold, but backgammon is in, and, though I’m a poor loser in general, I’m happy to say she’s winning. When she’s not beating me in backgammon, she’s reading by the fire.

“You are what you read,” she said, looking up from the week’s Times Book Review.

“Glad you’re not reading ‘The Iceman Cometh,’ ” I said. “ ‘A World Lit Only by Fire’ would be more like it if it weren’t so dark. And talk about being what you read, if in the Dark Ages you were caught with a vernacular translation of the New Testament, you’d be dead.”

As for being what you read nowadays, I’ve been reading about the universe and the unconscious recently, subjects heretofore pretty much unexplored by me, to such an extent that I think the next time I’m asked for my religious affiliation I’ll put down, Wondermentalist. (That’s it! I’ll declare myself the founder of the First Church of Wondermentalism, and file for non-prophet status. Put that in your smipe and poke it, I.R.S.)

I should add that insofar as wonderment goes it’s serendipitous that I haven’t entirely understood — at least on the first go-round — what I’ve been reading lately. So what else is new, you might say. But that’s just it. If I thoroughly understood what I read, I’d become jaded, I fear, world weary. This way, I’m in a state of wonder pretty much constantly even though I’m of great age. I think that is why Montaigne said he was happy he wasn’t so quick on the uptake. (Mary, too, I think, is sometimes in a state of wonderment, wondering, for instance, when I’ll take the garbage out.)

As for the unconscious, a state in which I find myself pretty much half the time — if not more — I keep wondering if I’ll ever crack the code of the symbols in my dreams. For instance, I dreamed the other night that I’d been told Mary had killed a wild boar. Or was it a mild boor?

At any rate, inside and out, there’s much that’s left to explore. Else what’s a lifetime for?

The words “celebration of life” are used rather over-optimistically sometimes, when plans are being made for a funeral or other memorial observance. To be sure, the phrase always conveys an honest desire of the bereaved to commemorate the person who is gone, but these “celebrations” are rarely what you could really call a party.

We were lucky enough to participate in the exception to the rule on Saturday when we attended a celebration held in memory of our dear old friend Marlys, who — as avid Star readers will know — died on Christmas Eve.

At the Lutheran funeral service earlier that day, tears poured. But later, when Marlys’s daughters, Nina and Daisy, staged a genuine, no-holds-barred party at the Bell and Anchor in Noyac, we all were lifted up by the warmth and cheer. It was Christmas in January, and Marlys would have loved it. 

There was a big spread of all Marlys’s traditional Christmas dishes: Swedish meatballs, baked ham, smoked salmon with capers, Norwegian lefse, and huge trays of cookies and rum balls. The wine flowed, and another dear friend, the folk singer Tom Paxton, sang in a voice that was as clear and strong as it was when the kids were little and we all gathered in the 1970s and 1980s. We raised our voices to join in Christmas caroling, and we looked long and hard at all the wonderful old family photos that had been placed around the room, which was decorated with Nordic elves and sprites made of wood, straw, and wool. 

The family members who had traveled from Minnesota to say goodbye made it obvious that while they had come to mourn they were, like all of us, both moved and pleased to feel close again to Marlys, feeling her presence in these rituals of music, good humor, drinks, heartfelt conversation, and generosity. The highlights of the evening were recorded via cellphone for other relatives back home. 

Some of us hadn’t seen one another for 10 or 20 years, or more. There really are only two occasions that have the power to bring together far-flung friends and family as we came together last weekend: weddings and funerals. The mood at weddings is, of course, generally bright and the conversation light and humorous, as guests trade stories about the happy couple just starting out together in life. But while the mood at Marlys’s party was bittersweet, it was mostly sweet, sweet as the mulled and spiced glogg wine. We all felt her spirit there. She was a joyful person, someone who positively twinkled when she smiled, which was frequently. It was a celebration of life — hers and ours.