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.

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 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).

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.

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.

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. 

In rugby it would have been a try, a score, but no, in football, it seems, if you catch the ball and then put it over the line with your hands — as in touch it down — it doesn’t count as a touchdown. It broke the plane and we’re in pain. You know the Steelers won the game, Patriot fans. You know we won it. And we won it even without Antonio Brown.

What is this? Football or forensic science? Where hair follicles are examined under high-powered microscopes for DNA evidence.

Those — and not all of them Steeler fans by any means — with whom I’ve talked about this are in general agreement that the Talmudic touchdown catch rule, which insists that “the process [whatever that is] must be completed” should be changed. If it breaks the plane, a touchdown’s gained.

But on to other things, to the “giant Christmas gift” to the working people of America. I have this to say about that: No Republican should ever be returned to office in this land, not one.

A writer interviewed in The Times’s Book Review recently said we live mundane lives. Actually, he said it twice. Well why then am I still freaking out about the outcome of the Steelers-Patriots game and the tax “reform” bill when my head should be stuffed into the crease of a couch pillow, as O’en’s was that Saturday night he was in my care, bored out of his squash.

No, it was not a great day for us. We, O’en and I, did nothing of note, and so mundane — though in the dictionary it merely says it is to be earthbound, which is hard to deny when you are, in fact, for the moment, earthbound — I suppose you could say it was. Boring even. Mary would have freed us from our torpor, but she was 3,000 miles away. Life with Mary, though we are earthbound, is never mundane.

Sunday, however, was an entirely different matter. I had planned it out and it all came to pass as I had planned, save for the Steelers’ “loss.” (Patriot fans, I find, are the smuggest of all, which annoys the hell out of me, but on to other things.)

At training O’en shined. As I’ve said, he knows the drill, what’s required. Once in the Wainscott Farms bubble, he’s all business. It’s a marvel. I was all over him afterward, so proud, so proud. Later, I took him to Georgie and Gavin’s where he reveled in the glee of children. That revelry no longer enlivens our house, which is as neat as a pin. Not that that is all bad. Serenity isn’t to be sniffed at, yet it’s clear that O’en misses socializing, mixing it up. We’ve thought of getting him a friend, especially in those moments when his head is stuffed into the crease of a couch pillow, as if it were a rebuke of sorts, as if he were saying, “Life is so mundane, so mundane.”

But then there was Sunday. I would like to think I fueled his spirit, just as he fueled mine.

If this is as good as life gets, I don’t mind that it’s mundane.

And, anyway, Mary will be back in just a day.

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.