It happens so fast — the dark I mean. One day it’s a bright afternoon and you’re swimming. Then suddenly how silly it seems, the sandy towel still in the car. 

How the curtain has drawn around our days, leaving us snatching at the bright hours, the light already fading at midday. The bare-bones grip of early dark and cold tightening each day until solstice. 

And then — well it’s a long time until time again expands. Always I try to remember the stretching is slow, daily, and accumulates. But there’s a long fallow time, the underground seep. 

The peace of a quiet day in a snow globe of soft and continuous motion and the chittering of birds. And yet — the yearning for light. 

A year ago, half or more of us sat transfixed at the unfolding election results and woke up drenched in dread. We’ve watched a malignancy sow seed since then, a maw open between the dark and the light, between rationality and dogma, a murk of fear color the country in charcoal.

Two years ago I took a small girl’s hand in mine as she waded through chilly water to shore, her baby brother in my arms. The Aegean sucked in her discarded life vest, a knockoff filled with sodden newsprint sold to her parents by smugglers, and deposited it like a bright anemone on the sea floor. Another broken promise.

I repeated, over and over, in bad Arabic to families in the throes, greetings and “Welcome to Greece.” We wrapped space blankets around shoulders, heads, and feet, like flower-surrounds of silver and gold, and sent traumatized people off for tea and dry clothes.

This winter, there are 4,000 refugees still in sagging tents in the mud of one camp, the barbed wire holding them in, immigration policies holding them back. This week one 10-year-old Afghan boy at the center of another overcrowded boat never got up, crushed. 

How at night, over cups of ouzo and wine, the fire in the taverna stove glowing, we loved each other, refilling each other’s ragged-edged hearts with fellowship, readying ourselves to give more, remain compassionate the next day. 

Late November and the last leaves, though still colors, have dulled; the sky is gray, and it’s absolutely still, neither warm nor chill. It’s a day for Led Zeppelin, maybe “Misty Mountain Hop,” “Black Dog,” or “Kashmir.” Something haunting and biting, to scrape the edges of this day. To draw a sharp line to play chicken with. 

It’s so fast, and I go willingly across the veil, leaving practical concerns behind; let them dwell in the twilight for a time. Into the morning gray, into the suspension of this day between seasons, just before my birthday.

Born late in the year, I get confounded sometimes by the math — or maybe it’s deeper than that. All year I’ve been thinking I was 58. And now, after asking the internet to straighten me out, I’ve discovered I’m not yet there. I have a year of grace, the time till 60 expanding. 

Grace — may we all have a little bit. Maybe it’s just one deep breath, some wood smoke in the air. Maybe it’s big or maybe it’s small. Once, for a while, there were just two things I clung to: the sight of a ribbon of ocean blue at the crest of a hill along East Hampton woods, and a hot shower at the end of the day. For the homeless, it’s a warm, safe, and quiet sleep. Or maybe, it’s just the touch of a gentle hand. Reaching out, receiving. 

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.

Something’s going on with me. The other day I remembered there was a working, but unused, electrical outlet under the living room couch so the first thing I did was move a table and lamp from their perfectly appropriate place next to a wing chair to the couch and plug in the lamp. It didn’t look right, so I moved them back and went looking, in the bedrooms, for a small table that would fit nicely next to the couch. 

With mission accomplished, I found myself removing the best ceramic lamp from a bedside table and placing it on the newly sited one in the living room. That, of course, required juggling things some more; the bedside needed a lamp, too.

Mind you, these objects, although neither antique nor particularly valuable, looked just fine where they were before I got started. What could I have been trying to achieve? No holiday party was about to happen, and the only overnight guests expected for the holidays were close relatives. Besides, newcomers usually find this vintage version of a family house just swell.

Was it the change in the weather? Done with moving furniture about, I checked out the living room coat closet. Several organizations, Town and Country Real Estate on Main Street in the village, for example, are collecting new and slightly worn winter items for those who find nighttime accommodations at this time of year in local churches through Maureen’s Haven. It seemed like time for me to cull. Or is it the coming of a new year that has me trying to set everything to rights?  

Setting things to rights. That’s pretty much what I suppose I do every morning. My husband is likely to have scrubbed the pots after dinner and left them on a counter. First thing in the morning, I put them away. 

As a matter of fact, putting other things where they belong, if and when I find them out of place, is a bit of an obsession. It seems that I need the assurance that things are in their places before I can move onto the day. It’s a householder’s security blanket.

And now, suddenly, I am reminded of the singsong nursery rhyme that goes something like: “Good morning. Good morning to you. We’re all in our places with bright shiny faces. . . .” Heaven forfend. Could it be that I have reached that time of life when folks are, anecdotally at least, known to return to childhood? Nah. It’s just that having objects in their proper places fools me into thinking all’s right with the world. 

The leaves are for the most part down from the trees in East Hampton. They were late in falling, it seems, though I was not watching the calendar all that closely. 

But I think fall turned, twisted, and curled on the stem and lingered in the air much longer than usual. No fall storms to speak of came through to tear them away. The mild temperature that lingered until it was at least Halloween held off the trees’ torpor.

The last of the leaves from the trees above the Star parking lot fell as if dumped from a truck over the weekend. The black cherry that in summer drops its fruit onto the cars released its yellow cargo all at once.

On Monday morning, early, before most of the staff had arrived, they were there, like a carpet of gold. A neighbor’s beech, still in faded copper, the only one left in gravity’s queue.

East Hampton Village has been quieter than normal this fall, the usual leaf blowers neither deployed as long nor as frequently as in the past. Fall’s slow fall has made for easier cleanup; the roar of the village’s vacuum truck past the windows less frequent. Across Main Street at Guild Hall, and at the library next door, the leaves seemed to have been dealt with swiftly and without much fuss. 

For the most part, I raked the office leaves myself. Already dried, like canvas sails left aloft in the harbor, they moved smartly in front of the metal tines. By the end of next week, they should all be gone. The village workers with the vacuum truck will make their last passes. The trees will be fully bare, their fractal limbs tracing like bloodlines against the sky.

Leaf sucker, leaf sucker,

What do you say?

Do me a boon, visit me soon,

Suck them away, suck them away.

Leaf sucker, leaf sucker,

Do as you did 

In the village today,

For all that we pay

You’d think we’d see more

Coming our way.

Leaf sucker, leaf sucker,

Don’t pass us by,

We’ve raked to the road

By our humble abode,

There they will lie,

There they will lie.

Bagging’s a pain, 

There’s a strain 

In my ass,

I’m middle class,

Please come up here fast,

It’s starting to rain.

Five hundred clams

I shelled out last year,

My neighbor did, too,

He’s moved to Cape Fear.

Isn’t it queer,

Isn’t it queer.

Town coffers are full,

Or so it’s been said, 

not in the red, not in the red.

Wife says you’ve sold them,

And if that is so,

Borrow the village’s,

And give it a go,

For I am half dead, I am half dead.

I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving for only about half of my life, as I moved to America some 25 years ago. But already I’ve decided that, like Christmas, Thanksgiving is nothing more than a set of repeats: Its uniqueness is its groundhog nature. Same food, same faces, same tablecloth, same fancy china.

The only thing that breaks the predictability is that if you happen to be a parent, which I am, you get to watch with each passing year the metamorphosis of your offspring, from minor to major. 

My son is 17, on the cusp of going off to college and then who knows what. He and I are close. Well, as close as anyone can be to a teenager. It comes and goes, like cell reception in Northwest Woods. Sometimes I hear his deep, comforting voice, and other times it’s just static and snatches of some indecipherable language. 

As I watched him at the Thanksgiving table, his long limbs spilling around him, chatting effortlessly despite being the only person under 35, I realized that all the received wisdom about teens, about the talking back and the mess, the sulking and the door slamming, is mostly just sitcom clichés. I’m actually pretty astonished at how good humans are at getting through the chrysalis stage.

And that’s the other thing about these festive holidays: Each and every year you get sucker-punched by sentiment. That ability only a select handful of days have to repeatedly overwhelm all sense of judgment and intellect. So by the time the meringue and pumpkin pies, the ice cream and the sweets made it to the table, I was already as wobbly as the cranberry jelly, on the verge of dampening the whole festive thing.

In my lachrymose state, I realized that one of the biggest lessons about being a parent is that until you become one you have no idea of what love is, or like, or even what it’s there for. That urgent, delicious loin-warming feeling that you had understood to be love was really only something to be prefaced with “making” — it’s the tease, the amuse-bouche, the glimpse, a warm bath compared to the riptide of the real thing that arrives with parenthood. Up until then you’ve just been paddling in love. Growing up, nobody ever tells you this, parents never explain this fact to you — that one day you won’t be able to feel the bottom of your loving, that you’ll drown in the stuff.

Parents don’t tell their children this, of course, because by the time they’re adolescents or teenagers, to try to explain the depths of that terrifyingly transcendent fundamental act of nature that is loving your child is too difficult and choking. Most likely if I tried right now, my son would curl up into a skinny, athletic-clothing ball of hellish embarrassment, arms scything the air.

The funny and sad thing is that the time when it’s easiest to express these feelings, when there is the least emotional resistance between parent and child, when all that love is most obvious and free flowing, is the one time your child will never remember. Those first years when he couldn’t blow his own nose, when you picked him up and rocked him and watched him speechlessly as he slept, are simply blank. 

Later, as a child grows up, the relationship is muddied with practicality, with life’s lessons and mistakes, with the dull rigmarole of discipline and bedtimes and homework, inappropriate behavior, soccer games, and tiredness. And that’s the part a child remembers of his childhood. He’ll remember dodging through it. But there were four scant years when all he was immersed in was an ocean of love, and even though we parents will never forget it, a child remembers none of it.

I’ve decided the greatest design flaw of human beings is that we don’t remember our childhoods and can’t recall the moment we uttered our first words or took our first steps, the first time we tasted chocolate or fell asleep on a father’s shoulders. My son doesn’t remember these things. He won’t until well into the future, someday when perhaps he’s a parent, and then, sitting around a Thanksgiving table surrounded by faces and food so familiar that you come to realize they are only there for the transmission of memory and remembrance, it will all come to him.

Judy D’Mello is a reporter at The Star.

Approaching Indian Wells, I stopped my truck on the beach to look at a flock of small sparrow-like birds. It was about a week ago. I figured I would take a few last casts of the season into the ocean. Big bluefish and a few striped bass remained around, or so I had heard.

Small birds are not my thing. To me, all the sparrows and warblers look pretty much alike. Not that I wouldn’t want to be able to tell the varieties apart, it’s just that I didn’t learn about them as a kid and that there are too many of them that move too fast to truly get to know at this busy point in my life. Seabirds, gulls, raptors, these I take a stab at identifying.

Yet the flock drew my attention. From a distance it looked like the birds were hopping. Once the truck was no longer moving and I peered through binoculars, I could see what they were up to. Each bird would jump onto a stalk of beach grass, its feet clasping around the fat seed heads. The bird and stalk would drop to the ground together, the bird would let go, the stalk would whip up, and the bird would pick at the seeds that had fallen. The process would be repeated.

This was, mind you, on the Amagansett National Wildlife Refuge section of the beach, where there are no snow fences on the natural, sloping fore dunes. Elsewhere, I have noticed lately, snow fence does indeed trap windblown sand, as intended, but also creates a barren microenvironment of little interest to the birds. It crossed my mind to wonder if anyone had ever done a rigorous impact study or really asked whether all the miles of snow fence were, on balance, doing good.

Birds’ adaptations to the Long Island environment never fail to amaze me. Though there were no fish interested in my offerings that day, scoters dove just offshore, picking something, I knew not what, off the bottom. Gulls worked the edges of the bar at low tide, eating small fish or invertebrates exposed by the outrushing water.

The flock of seed eaters moved away to the west before I could get a good enough look at them to try to find later in a bird book. There was plenty more beach for them to comb.

The first time I visited the house I live in now, the shelf at the bay window in the dining room was filled with great, big flowering Christmas cactuses on a painted, dark-green copper tray. They brought color into an otherwise dark wintertime room and, taken as an entirely natural holiday decoration, they were perfectly suited to my taste. Their brilliant red flowers and deep green foliage were enough to perk up any cold afternoon.

When, years later, I turned out to be in charge of the cactus garden in the bay window, I was lady bountiful. I gave the largest plant to my upstate niece and a smaller one to a son who had a place of his own. And then, without careful thought, I gave all the rest to the deer. They were delighted that I had put them outdoors for the summer; our yard had neither a fence nor a gate. So long, Christmas cactus.

A year or two ago, I started again from scratch, because I wanted Christmas cactuses again at the bay window. And now, just as the holidays have arrived, I am rewarded. 

Truth is, it’s a good thing the Christmas cactuses are doing so well this season, because they balance out other botanical news in our household, which is not so jolly. I am sorry to report that I left a huge, ancient jade plant — perhaps 30 or even 40 years old — that I had taken great pride in, outdoors during an unexpected cold snap this fall, and it didn’t survive. We belatedly dragged it back inside after two hard frosts, and it sits now in the corner of our sun room with its thick branches drooping and dying sadly, the Charlie Brown of jades. 

Except for the fact that one of the larger Christmas cactuses now in the dining room was a present from my granddaughter Evvy two birthdays back, I hardly remember when or how my new array arrived on the scene. I had acquainted myself with the Christmas cactus species, Schlumbergera, but I’d never been systematic about accumulating or caring for them. I randomly gathered four three-inch and two six-inch pots without ascertaining which variety, or color, they were. I’ve just watered them once a week, and  been smart enough to keep them inside in summer.

Despite this benign neglect, about two weeks ago I realized they were all budding like crazy. By this morning, one had started to flower. These Christmas cactuses may no longer be quite the floral showcase I remember from the 1960s. There’s no longer a copper tray to add to their glamour, and I still don’t know if the flowers will be a hodgepodge of magenta, pale pink, and deep red. But they still make me very happy.

Well, I’ve stared at Montaigne long enough. It’s time to begin. 

But what to say? Ah, it’s Thanksgiving, time to give thanks for Kitty’s torte, which I swear will be the death of me. The ingredients are not arcane, store-bought devil’s food cake mix, a box of Nilla wafers, two bags of walnuts, light brown sugar, butter, plenty of that, and whipped cream, yielding a crunchiness, creami­ness, sweetness, and softness that taken all together are nonpareil.

The torte isn’t Kitty’s only Thanks­giving dessert. She makes pumpkin pie, apple pie, and pecan pie as well. At the first Thanksgiving we ever shared together years ago, they all (Mary, Kitty, Georgie, and their mother, who soon was to be my mother-in-law) placed bets as to which dessert the gentleman caller would come back with from the kitchen. They all lost. I came back with every one of them. 

With age, I’ve had to cut back. So it is just the torte now, and maybe half the pecan pie.

The turkey, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the green bean casserole, glazed carrots, and heady wine are all very fine, but the canted dark brown and white miniature monument to delight is pretty much all I think of as we hold hands at the dining room (not that we have a dining room) table, humbly grateful for our blessings and for our persistent optimism in the face of all the countervailing evidence. 

I know. I should be wishing for world peace, or at least for domestic peace, or, at the very least, for some peace of mind, but invariably I am torte-ured on this day devoted to communal sharing by self-serving thoughts.

If it were just one piece — and I always swear I will limit myself to one piece — that would be all well and good. But it’s never one piece. At the end of the evening, I plead for someone to take what’s left — and there’s usually quite a bit, for not everyone is as addicted as I — but no one ever does.

When will the younger generation step up? But no, they “eat healthy‚” these days. Why, son, did you know I once ate a five-course meal, which I chased with an entire gateau Basque? You never know what’s enough until you’ve had more than enough. Blake said that, I think, but enough. Would you get me one more small piece while you’re up?

In my mind’s eye, Thanksgiving Day looks — as it probably does for many Americans of a certain age — like a famous Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom From Want,” that appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post during World War II. My father was a Post subscriber and a fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose inaugural speech in 1941 invoked four necessary freedoms: freedom from want, along with freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and freedom from fear. Rockwell painted all four, which he turned into consecutive Post covers in 1943.

 The point of the “four freedoms” covers was to evoke all that was good about America, those virtues in midcentury including a general prosperity and a lessening, post-Great Depression, in the numbers of citizens who went to bed hungry.

Were any Americans at the time concerned that the image of a white nuclear family presented by Rockwell as a standard of American life was a bit homogeneous, when those fighting abroad came from what we used to call a melting pot? I wonder.

Thanksgiving was not particularly celebrated when I was a child, but as an adult in East Hampton I grew to treasure it. From a small dinner party with my mother-in-law as the only guest (and a scar on my right thumb because I handled goose fat carelessly), it grew to a multitudinous affair with up to 20 or even 30 people, embracing extended family, old friends, and the occasional passer-by. The Thanksgiving we celebrated in the 1980s and 1990s turned out to be a white, black, Christian, Jewish, and atheist affair. I loved it. Sometimes things got a bit noisy, with pots and pans making music in the living room. (Yes, those were the days when everyone drank a lot more than they do today.) I’ll never forget the year Tom Paxton sat with a guitar in his arms, a child on his lap, and a new song for us to hear. 

For the most part, however, our rituals were based on the foods at table. One of the regulars wouldn’t let anyone else mash the potatoes or turn out her airy pumpkin mousse. One family member could always be counted on for an inventive vegetable presentation. I made Oysters Rattray, which differs from Oysters Rockefeller because sorrel is imperative for the green topping. And every year, another family member who had been practicing the art since about the age of 12 did up Florence Huntting Edwards’s Chocolate Sunday Pie. We were prosperous, yes, and privileged, too. Homogeneous we were not.

Lately, those of us still standing have been looking around us with increasing consternation when it comes time to plan our Thanksgiving gathering. Where has everyone gone? Some of the old crew have moved south, many are no longer living, and the rest of us have aged. Inevitably, our Thanksgiving traditions will have to change. 

This year, with only five or six participants ready to join around the table, we threw in the turkey baster along with the towel and have decided to indulge in the unthinkable: Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant! Who would have thought it possible? I’m fairly certain this sacrilege won’t become the new normal, and that we will return next year to the oysters and the custard pie. But maybe the time has come to invite in the next generation of old friends.

It would be about now that the football season would be winding up, assuming we had a football team. 

The fall has come and gone with no football games, and I can’t say I’ve sorely missed them. The girls swimming team was great, ditto boys cross-country, the boys soccer team was good, the girls volleyball team was good, the boys volleyball team was good, the girls cross-country team was good, the field hockey team was not quite as good as I thought it would be, ditto the girls tennis team, golf, as always, was good, though not great, as it has been in the past, and girls soccer, though vastly outscored, will inevitably come along some day if the hordes of young girls I saw kicking the ball around up at the high school at the end of summer stick with it. 

So, even absent football, whose four-down, linear format is obviously more sportswriter-friendly than games that flow, such as soccer or rugby, or even field hockey, despite its continuous baffling whistles, there was plenty to write about this fall when it came to local sports.

Football, while exciting when the plays work, has been shown not to be that good for developing — even developed — brains. At the pro level, we continue to watch — accessories before the fact, as it were, slouching in our recliners — yet at the high school level the emotional rewards to be derived from gridiron grit and explosive plays may no longer, given the preponderance of brain injury findings, outweigh the risks young players run — in the short and long runs, repeated nonconcussive hits having also been shown to exact a serious toll over time. 

A rose-colored glasses guy, I never thought you could get terribly hurt playing high school football here until seeing not long ago two of our players go down with concussions on the same play. 

Yes, concussions can happen in other sports too — in soccer, with its constant headers, in ice hockey, with its checking into the boards, in wrestling, with its throws to the mat, in basketball, with its sharp elbows under the boards, even in swimming if you swim headfirst into a wall, as I did once, though that was in another country and I was drunk.

Someone told an inquiring photographer this week that he missed the smell of leaves burning in the fall. I do too, though they say leaf smoke isn’t good for you. 

With me it’s kind of the same with football. It’s being borne into the past, if not ceaselessly. I miss when the games were played at Herrick Park, I miss when everybody came and leaf smoke was in the air. Rugby anyone?