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. 

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.

We (the editorial we, that is) began the year with trepidation. To begin with, we no longer think we can count on The New York Times as an exemplar of proper English and, adding insult to injury, we have to face the fact that language is changing faster and faster.

In addition to having its own strict set of arcane rules and traditional spellings and such, The Star has tried to adhere to Times style over the years, considering its published “Manual of Style and Usage” journalistic gospel. We have never favored A.P. style, the standard for many if not most publications around the country; it just isn’t as refined as we like the written word to be.

Like newspapers everywhere, The Times has been radically affected by digital media. Not only are new guidelines pervasive, but old standards have slipped. Like other newspapers and magazines, The Times has cut back its staff and reorganized its operations, with the old “copy desk” — responsible for keeping texts pristine — actually wiped out of existence in a shakeup last year that, in newspaper circles, was considered really quite cataclysmic.

With fewer editors on the job and stories shunting with greater haste from submission to digital publication, it is not surprising that errors crop up more frequently. I noticed the word “unknown” spelled “unkown,” for example, only last Sunday. 

But the sea changes in the world of the printed word are about more than haste and happenstance. Consider, for example, a new book called “A World Without ‘Whom’: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age.” BuzzFeed? Before deciding whether to get a copy of “A World Without ‘Whom,’ ” we have to decide if BuzzFeed is a worthy oracle. Emmy Favilla, the author of the book, has been called a guru of social media dialect; she handles the quandaries that arise as online communication re-engineers our language. Apparently, BuzzFeed gets around 9 billion (!) “content views” per month. Does volume of readership create authority? Or does mass consumption just facilitate a vast dumbing-down? Hm. 

In any case, debates about “who” and “whom” could be heard with a certain regularity around the Star office over the years. We have often deferred to Jack Graves, our Yale-educated sports editor, on grammar, but Jack’s ideas may now be . . . past tense. He’s the only person hereabouts who invariably uses parallel verb tenses, for example. (Parallel verb tenses? He would not write in the same sentence that he “finished” his lunch and “was finishing” his sandwich.) 

But back to the turmoil at The Times. 

One absolute no-no around here is what is called false title, or coined title. At The Times — and The Star — only formal titles (Mayor or Judge, for example) precede a person’s name. “Architect Frank Lloyd Wright” is not seen, or “actor Tom Hanks.” Instead, you will read “the architect Frank Lloyd Wright” or “Maziar Behrooz, an architect who lives in East Hampton.” 

I haven’t noticed any false titles in The Times so far, but I expect to see them any day now, as those who write, edit, and proofread what we used to call the Gray Lady become less particular than they used to be. 

It seems that The Times is trying hard not to be quite so Gray, as we forge into the unforeseeable future, to be more modern, both visually and verbally.

I am a grammar curmudgeon and have spent many decades sticking up for the old linguistic ways, going to battle over false title and the Oxford comma. (In case you hadn’t noticed, we do use the Oxford comma here at The Star, considering it proper, pleasing, and crucial for clarity, too.) But we have already given way on “whom,” as well as on the old “more than” versus “over” debate. 

Over 200 million BuzzFeed readers can’t be wrong, can they? 

Hm.

Until this year, I had never taken part in the annual Polar Bear Plunge at Main Beach, thinking, as a year-round surfer, that going into the ocean without a wetsuit in January was a bad idea.

My son, Ellis, however, is of a competitive mind these days, and, what with his second-grade friends mostly somewhere warm over the holiday break, he thought he could one-up them by running, not into the warm Caribbean but into a near-freezing Atlantic. The boasting rights would be worth it, he seemed to think. In retrospect, with the air 18 degrees and the water 37, it might not have been the best year to give it a go.

Ellis was all right in the end, after a hot bath at home and getting under several blankets to watch YouTube in bed, but getting into the water and back out was something else. Waiting around before the event was perhaps the hardest part for us both. The west wind made it feel near zero, though he was able to sneak in close to a wood fire burning in a barrel to keep sort of warm. Soon it was time to line up. We stripped to our trunks, standing on a towel to keep our feet from the frozen-solid sand.

Someone blew the starting whistle. We ran. Ellis fell and was stepped on, by a teenager, he said. I helped him back up and asked if he wanted to go through with it. He did, and we ran for the water. 

A trough lay between the shoreline and the bar on which a small swell was breaking. Ellis shouted that he wanted to go all the way, and we did, plowing through what was for him chest-deep water. Because of our delayed start, we were about last out of the water and got a loud cheer from the crowd of spectators. 

Ellis was shivering and in tears under a heavy wool blanket, however, as I, still in my wet trunks, struggled to get him dressed. A volunteer suggested we head up to the Main Beach office to get him out of the wind, which was a good call. “I am never doing that again!” he cried through chattering teeth.

After 10 minutes or so draped over an electric space heater, Ellis was more or less fine again and saying that he might, just might, do it again on the first day of 2019.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in bed.

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.

Knowing I am Jewish, some people look at me askance when they see or hear me going overboard at Christmastime. I am choosy about my tree (white pine), and about the menu on Christmas Eve, and tend to buy a few too many frivolous presents for the grandchildren.

To be sure, I honor Hanukkah by lighting a traditional menorah decorated with the Lions of Judah, which I cherish because I inherited it from my mother, and when my kids were growing up I gave them presents on each of the eight nights when we lighted candles. Still, Hanukkah was always more of an observance than a celebration. When my brother and I were small, my grandfather gave us silver dollars, which we thought were great, but only on the first night of the holiday — and that was that. 

I certainly didn’t pay any attention to Christmas as a child, although I was awed by the tree draped in a pale-blue film that the neighbors put up. Even after I graduated from college, and was working and living on my own in New York City, I ignored Christmas; it was an event that emphatically didn’t belong to me, to begin with, and as a young woman with beatnik tendencies, I wasn’t about to start listening to Bing Crosby and wearing reindeer brooches. 

But then I married into a Presbyterian family. Ev and I were anticipating our wedding when I was welcomed to my first Christmas in East Hampton by a grand and gracious woman, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, my mother-in-law to be. I don’t remember many of the particulars of the festivities, but I recall liking the simple white-and-green china with which she set the table — perhaps it was the Old English Ivy pattern, of which we still have a few plates — as well as the exuberantly bright Christmas cactuses in the dining room. The only overdoing-it that I indulged in that first year was the unnecessarily creative wrapping of a present or two. 

After we were married, however, Ev and I met Marlys and Peter Dohanos. The Dohanoses had two young children whose ages matched two of our own three, and before long they introduced us to a glowing, fantastically festive, and delicious Christmas Eve. Marlys’s heritage was Scandinavian, and the holiday featured all sorts of Nordic decorations and treats, from smoked salmon on dark rye to the most amazingly intricate gingerbread cookies decorated with white icing, much fancier than you could buy in stores in those days of the 1970s and 1980s.

Year after year as the kids were growing up — and the adults were experiencing the various vicissitudes of life — Marlys and Peter made Christmas a sheer delight. Their friendship never waned. Years later, after Ev’s death, when I had to step into the breach and take over The Star, they would bring over a big casserole once a week to make sure the kids were properly fed. We had become so close that it seemed that they had welcomed us into their family.

Ev and Peter have been gone for many a day, but for years after the kids were grown Marlys made sure that Christmas did not pass without a gift, perhaps home-baked madeleines. 

Marlys had been in declining health for a while now, and she died on Christmas Eve. 

When we heard this dismal news, none of us were sure at first if the timing of her loss made it so much worse or somehow eased it just one tiny bit: She was to an entire generational gang of East Hampton kids the essence of Christmas, a Minnesotan Mrs. Claus. 

She didn’t just teach us how to enjoy the night, or what the best way to prepare a lemon mousse was — she taught us that these gatherings could be an expression of love. She brought joy to our little world, and we will miss her, and think of her every December as she was when we all crowded into the Dohanos living room and ate much more than was reasonable and weren’t sorry a bit.

In the early days of the East Hampton settlement, then known as Maidstone, no fence surrounded the South End Burying Ground.

This would not be particularly notable, except that in those days the area on both sides of Town Pond was the main thoroughfare, for people and livestock alike. David Gardiner, who had lived nearby and reflected on this in 1840, found it odd that over the years the graves had been exposed to the intrusions of cattle and to depredations of all kinds, as he put it.

Gardiner published his “Chronicles of the Town of Easthampton” in 1840 in The Sag Harbor Corrector, and the series was assembled into a small book in 1871. The book was reprinted in 1973 at Isabel Gardiner Mairs, one of his descendant’s, expense. Copies of that edition are free for the asking at the Amagansett Library, Nellie’s, an Amagansett antiques shop, and we have a few copies here at The Star office.

That the burying ground was actually in the public highway interested Gardiner greatly, and got him to speculating that it could have been explained as the product of the early residents’ stern religious views.

“What the object could have been in thus locating it, at a time when land was of little value and all equally accessible can only be conjectured,” he wrote.

“Burial grounds are considered holy by the Romish church, and the zeal and bigotry of that day was so intolerant of all papal customs, that the puritans were generally disposed to adopt the reverse of what they considered the superstitions of that church.” Burying their dead in the road, Gardiner supposed, might have been intended as a show of contempt for popish rituals. 

 At some point before 1840, when Gardiner’s account of the early days appeared in The Corrector, the town trustees had decided enough was enough and that the cattle that came to Town Pond to drink or that were being driven past it on their way to the meadows on Montauk were no longer welcome among the graves.

Today, a picket fence surrounds the burying ground with wooden steps at either end, which you have to climb to visit the graves. Small signs indicate that dogs are now not welcome. The cattle that do pass by do so aboard trucks.

A large sculpture across the street from my window reminds me of a pork chop, and pork chops remind me of foodstuffs which, while tasty, aren’t necessarily good for me. 

That’s not to say I don’t like the sculpture, mind. It’s evocative, it’s monolithic. It could be South America, for instance . . . or a pork chop. 

Anyway, I’ve become concerned lately about what the doctor says is “a slightly elevated cholesterol reading,” which is no surprise inasmuch as I’ve been eating omnivorously for months (Kitty’s torte, about which I wrote at Thanksgivingtime, being just one of many examples), counting on a small daily dose of pravastatin to rid me of the bad stuff without triggering the shakes.

(I’m never quite sure, by the way, which it is, the HDL or the LDL, but what the L.)

It’s the snacking at The Star, I know. Its rickety small kitchen table is the frequent repository of so many things — berry pies, chocolate chocolate cakes, carrot cakes with that piquant sour cream icing, macadamia-nut cookies, soft, stinky cheeses — that aren’t good for you, but which are tempting nevertheless, and my fingers have tended to stray, toying with their confections, pinching, caressing, fondling as I have passed by. (Cast a cold eye, huntsman, cast a cold eye.) Recently, I publicly acknowledged that I was a preprandial predator, but no one seemed to care, the profile of a weekly journalist not being so prominent as to rate universal opprobrium, I suppose. 

It’s become sort of a game with me, a diversion, if you will, this peaking and valleying of cholesterol counts, as it was with that weird haracter on “The Office.” Like Sisyphus, minus the mountain and the boulder (think Dreesen’s doughnuts) and the physical exertion for all eternity.

Mary always reminds me Camus said concerning Sisyphus that it came down to what he was thinking about on the way down the hill. I’m on the way down the hill now, as it were, and what I’m thinking about is Haagen-Dazs. Cherry vanilla mostly. I got the last pint of it at Round Swamp on their last day. Mary said she’d never tasted anything so good when I held the spoon out to her. 

That was the last spoonful she was to have of it.

I can’t go on, I must go on, but in order to butteress . . . buttress, rather, my will, I’ve made an appointment with a clognitive therapist.

“From your lipids to God’s ears,” I can hear Mary say.