There’s something about living in the woods that brings out the stockpiler in me, and my husband couldn’t be happier. 

I’ve long poked fun at his penchant to overprepare when it comes to supplies. We had 50 pounds of white rice in advance of Hurricane Sandy, and more than five years later, we still have 50 pounds of white rice. The same 50 pounds. We don’t eat a lot of white rice under normal circumstances, but I guess if things had turned out worse for us in East Hampton and we had been cut off from the outside world, we would have been glad for all that rice. But why buy six extra deodorants when just three ought to last you a couple of months? Or 36 rolls of paper towels when 18 would probably be adequate for the foreseeable future?

My husband, in turn, has long been stumped by my reluctance to resupply until after I’ve used the very last drop of something and can no longer shake loose the tiniest bit. 

Living these past five months at the Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island, way down at the end of a long, long driveway, my husband is in his element. A Boy Scout by nature, he now has every excuse and then some to be prepared. There’s no easy popping out to the store, and once you’re home, you enter your own happy bubble in the woods and you don’t want to leave. Heaven forbid you forget something after leaving the house. Provided you’re still on Shelter Island, getting home will take 15 minutes round trip at best from the paved road. 

Each weekday I go to East Hampton for work and almost every day I find myself at the grocery store getting one thing or another that I forgot the last time I was there. A lot of times it’s rice. . . . Just kidding.

Seriously, though, you cannot arrive home at the end of a two-and-a-half-mile dirt driveway and then ask yourself what’s for dinner because some days the answer would be “nothing” or maybe “clams” or “white rice.” But my daughter is allergic to clams and she doesn’t like white rice, so I have to be prepared. I have to stockpile. 

Two weeks ago while shopping in Riverhead, we decided to do a walk-through at Costco. It was snowing and it was lunchtime and we’d been impressed before by the samples on offer to hungry shoppers. By the time we left we had a membership, five pounds of pita chips, and the biggest chicken potpie I’d ever seen.

“We’ll see if we use it,” we said to each other, meaning the membership, not the potpie. 

At the store we wondered why anyone would need a five-pound bag of pita chips, but once we got home and got into it we wondered why they don’t make a 10-pound bag, and why we hadn’t bought three of them. 

Back in Riverhead last weekend for a children’s birthday party, I was at Costco again browsing the dinosaur-size bags of organic kale, pallets of marinara sauce, and eight-pound blocks of cheese. Another $300 later and I’ve got a four-month supply of Ritz crackers, 10 pounds of pita chips, a five-pound bag of organic quinoa, 70 AA batteries, 18 apples, and enough table crackers to last until June. While the organic chicken thighs were a great price, I couldn’t see a circumstance in which we could use or store 12 pounds of them. 

“Our pantry looks like a grocery store,” my daughter exclaimed. 

“Mom, just saying, you did go a little crazy at Costco,” my son gently admonished, while my husband happily organized the shelves. 

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

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.

The title, a quip from the filmmaker Michael Moore in his 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” came to mind again, this time as the bus rolled past the East Hampton Presbyterian Church late on the morning of New Year’s Eve.

Why? Because of the once incongruous, now sadly normalized scene. Outside the church on snowy Main Street, alongside the worshippers’ many parked cars, stood what looked to be a policeman, clothed in uniform and reflective vest. Must a Sunday service in small-town America be guarded by a trained professional? Was he armed? Was he even a police officer? I was unsure.

One week earlier, on the morning of Christmas Eve, my mother, brother, sister-in-law, nephew, niece, and I crowded into a sedan and drove to a church in southeastern Massachusetts. As we neared, I saw not one but two reflective-vest-clad, uniformed men, directing cars into and out of the church’s parking lot. They were still there when we left. 

The scenes outside the two churches just weeks after 26 were shot and killed during Sunday morning services at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., were disconcerting. On Saturday, I sent an email to my brother, a pastor at the church in Massachusetts. Were they just directing traffic, I asked, or did their presence start after the shooting at the church in Texas, or in response to the countless other mass shootings in recent years?

“They are volunteer parking attendants,” he replied. “They wear the reflective gear for safety.”

“As far as security goes,” he continued, “we have some protocols in place and a trained volunteer team that isn’t in uniform. We wanted to have security due to recent violence against churches and violence in general, but not visible where people would feel nervous because of it. Hopefully something we never need.”

It’s such a routine occurrence now — mass shootings, that is — that what was once ghastly beyond description is now quickly forgotten, or supplanted, in the mind, by the next one. The Mass Shooting Tracker — yes, that is a thing — counted 429 such incidents in 2017, almost 1.2 per day.

A crowd-sourced, unfunded resource, the Mass Shooting Tracker sidesteps the F.B.I.’s definition of mass murder (three or more people killed in a single event). “We believe this does not capture the whole picture,” according to its website. “For instance, in 2012 Travis Steed and others shot 18 people total. Miraculously, he only killed one. Under the incorrect definition used by the media and the F.B.I., that event would not be considered a mass shooting! Arguing that 18 people shot during one event is not a mass shooting is absurd.” Instead, it defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot.

How grotesque that such statistics are compiled, and the numbers so very large. But they are, after all, only numbers, staid and clinical, bereft of the horrific impact on sentient beings and the lasting trauma visited on the dead, the wounded, and the countless souls each of them has touched.

The anniversary of a few such statistics occurs each December, as another calendar’s conclusion draws near.

Dec. 14, 2012: 20 children, 6 and 7 years old, and six adults killed at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. One child suffered a single bullet to the head. Another was shot in the neck. All of the others were shot multiple times by the 20-year-old killer, shortly after he shot his mother four times in the head.

Dec. 8, 1980: John Lennon is shot four times in the back and left arm as he returns to his Manhattan apartment building after a recording session. The aorta ruptured, a lung pierced, bones shattered. As fast as new blood was pumped into his body, in a nearby emergency room, it poured back out.

Now, we can add Dec. 6, 2017. That was the day the House of Representatives passed the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would require all states to recognize any other state’s concealed-carry permit. The bill, co-sponsored by our own congressman, is a top legislative priority of the National Rifle Association, from whose collective hands gushes a never-ending geyser of blood. 

“Something is wrong in this country when a child can grab a gun so easily and shoot a bullet into the middle of a child’s face,” the father of a student murdered at a Littleton, Colo., high school in 1999 said at a rally shortly after that massacre, as depicted in “Bowling for Columbine.” 

Cut to Charlton Heston, still movie-star handsome then at 75, addressing a meeting the N.R.A. convened just days after, and only a few miles from, that incident, in which 13 were killed and 21 wounded. “We have work to do,” he told his brothers in arms. “We may have differences, yes, and we will again suffer tragedy almost beyond description.” He didn’t know the half of it.

That bus, on the morning of New Year’s Eve, rolled all the way to Manhattan, where, thankfully, the murder rate dropped steeply in 2017, unlike in Baltimore or Kansas City. In the late afternoon, aiming to cast off all of 2017’s negativity, I stood at the Mahayana Buddhist Temple and thought of this passage from the Dhammapada. 

“All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life.”

“See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?”

“He who seeks happiness by hurting those who seek happiness will never find happiness.” 

“For your brother is like you. He wants to be happy. Never harm him and when you leave this life you too will find happiness.”

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

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.

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.

Driving along Long Lane before the freeze broke a few days ago and looking out of the left side of my truck over the corn stubble, I noticed a large number of crows in among the Canada geese. 

It was late in the day, and in the yellowing light, flocks of geese winged in from the direction of Hook Pond, where, presumably, there had been a few remaining open patches of water. 

Most of the time the geese around here spend their days in the fields and the nights on the ponds. With the ponds frozen, the geese settle down in the evening on solid ground. It is sunset on a Tuesday in January as I write this, and I can see from my office window long black strings of them moving in the opposite direction over the Village Green, so who knows.

Crows seize whatever opportunity presents itself, even if it means bedding down with the geese — or eating them. Harvey Bennett, who runs the Tackle Shop in Amagansett and spends much of his time outdoors, told me that he saw a group of crows dining on a goose carcass by the side of the highway up at Ken Schwenk’s place in Sagaponack. They will eat hard rolls, too, like any good Bonacker, Harvey said. For years a goose would come around his place in Amagansett if Harvey threw it some of his breakfast. “It got to that he would almost take it out of my hand,” he said.

Crows were something of an Amagansett thing at one time, Harvey said. Stuart Vorpahl Sr., who was an accomplished trapper, was the first person Harvey knew of who took a fledgling crow from its nest and raised it as a pet. 

Keeping crows and other wildlife as pets is forbidden by the state now. It probably was when Harvey was growing up, too, but the authorities did not care as much at the time. 

Back then, Harvey said, one crow in particular would follow Stuart Junior to the Amagansett School and in good weather could be heard through open windows cursing from its perch in a tree. Crows are exceptional mimics, Harvey said, and this one learned how to say “God damn it” and a whole lot more from hanging around the fish market.

Harvey laughed at the thought of some fifth grader going home and asking his mom what “son of a bitch” meant and then having to explain that he had heard it from a crow. 

Think of that the next time you see a flock of crows harassing a hawk or picking at something furry and indistinct on the side of the road.

A well-wisher asked me a while ago if we were ready for Christmas.

“You mean the Steelers game?” I said, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, though not all the way. As for Christmas, I told him, we’d “escaped.” Mary didn’t have to feed the 5,000 inasmuch as we were going to other houses on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Moreover, we were treeless, our house was unlit, and, in keeping with the spirit of the season, we would stay in bed as long as we could until hounded out by the dogs — O’en and his houseguest, Marley. (O’en can do a pretty good impersonation of Jaws, rearing up over the stern of the Cricket, as it were.)

We had agreed not to go overboard when it came to gift giving, a book here, a book there, nothing too much. And yet, and yet. . . . There was something that had caught my eye as I was reading a book on dreams, “Man and His Symbols” — a reproduction of a painting by Marc Chagall titled “Time Is a River Without Banks,” a large, colorful fish in the sky with a violin and a grandfather clock above a river, with lovers entwined perceptible in the lower right.

I had finally hit it, I thought, a symbol of us at our best, at our most intimate, at our most silent, at our most attuned. 

I had been trying, trying to sum us up for years, but hadn’t quite. And then this. Out of the blue.

Interestingly, nobody had a poster of it (though they did of many, many other Chagall paintings), so I had Arthur Kaliski take the page out of the book and frame it, which he did wonderfully. She responded as I did. Christmas had found us.

And whenever we’re thinking that time — and love — is a river with banks it will be there. 

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?

Coal was in short supply as 1917 came to an end. I did not know this until recently, when I was reading the front page of a copy of The Star that was scanned and digitized by the East Hampton Library.

L.E. Terry, the local fuel administrator under a federal wartime program, wrote what amounted to the lead article on the Jan. 4, 1918, issue. In it, he outlined the strict questions that coal dealers had been ordered by Washington to ask each customer to determine if anyone might be hoarding coal. Printed cards would soon be distributed for coal buyers to sign, attesting that they were only ordering enough for their immediate needs.

If conditions persisted, East Hampton residents would soon have to burn wood for heat, Terry wrote.  Suffolk County had plenty of that, and wooded areas would benefit from cutting, leaving new growth a chance to spread out. It was, he argued, the patriotic duty of wood-lot owners to cut wood themselves or allow someone else to do so. Owners of wood lots who refused should be reported, he wrote.

Wood lots were an old idea in East Hampton. Most of the families who established footholds here in the 17th century were granted them by the town trustees, acreage not suitable for farming but from which a supply of timber and wood for heat and cooking could be maintained. On old maps, land ownership in Northwest Woods appears in long, narrow blocks; these were the wood lots, though they now are broken up to accommodate houses and driveways, pools, tennis courts, and such.

The 1917-18 coal shortage was the result of a bottleneck in transportation more than a reflection of a drop in mining or soaring demand. Even though coal producers were increasing their output at a remarkable rate, wartime production had placed new demands on the nation’s rail system, making it difficult for all that newly mined coal to get where it had to go. Then, an early season blizzard that brought the Northeast to a standstill crimped the supply further.

Coal and the transportation pinch are thought to be one of the reasons President Wilson decided to nationalize the railroads at the end of December 1917. They would return to private control in 1920.

At the time of the 1917-18 coal crisis, some newspapers speculated that coal’s day would soon end and that a century later, its use would be abandoned. Though that day may still come, and nobody much uses coal to directly heat their house today, coal fuels a large share of the electricity produced today. And most of it is still carried by rail.

I remembered Tony Demmers as I tried this morning to read upside down and backward the headlines of The New York Times’s first section that Mary, as usual, was reading with avidity.

Even with more avidity than usual, for it’s hard for common, everyday, ordinary people these days to keep up with all the goings-on, from the horrific to the banal, which confront you in about equally mind-boggling portions.

You’ll want to know something about Tony Demmers. He was the one who put the lines of type in the galleys in the hot-type days, and he could read as fast — or faster — upside down and backward than you or I can read right-side up and forward.

I can do it a bit, though Tony was way out of my league. He read more right-side up and forward than I did too.

Anyway, I could make out enough this morning to gather that the investigation as to whether you-know-who as a private citizen was tweeting with an enemy government before he was, in fact, elected to office (long live the Logan Act of 1799) might, in the end, be so vexing as to prompt a missile exchange with North Korea — to divert us, if you will. Just a wild surmise. Always jumping to conclusions. Pay no attention.

Is reality any different from our dream world? Which is half of our lives really, or almost half of mine inasmuch as I tend toward narcolepsy. I can go 10 hours easy, more if pressed. Mary, on the other hand, is often sleep-deprived inasmuch as she pays more attention than I. In a movie we saw recently, “Lady Bird,” the nun — a good one in this case — said that to love and to pay attention were, she thought, the same thing. Mary pays more attention, she loves more, which is why, I think, she has trouble sleeping.

The liberal judge Harry Pregerson’s last words were that he was sorry he could no longer help people. Mary is like that. Her example is clear. We must connect. Not because we want an enemy government to tilt the election toward us in return for . . . (we’ll have to wait for the answer to that one), but because it is simply the right thing to do. 

Connectedness without the con. That is life to her as it should be lived. That is her truth, and it is beautiful. And it is why, when it’s so easy these days to be distracted, she pays attention.