“It’s all the same fuckin’ mall, man,” I said to Mary as we headed west from Pittsburgh last week on Route 80 in search of greener pastures, which we were to find in Perrysburg, Ohio, whose historic district reminds one of Sag Harbor on a river.

There were malls that appall and treeless tract housing there too, though well beyond the village, whose historic district is welcoming, its sidewalks lined by gnarly trees, whose roots have been known to thread through old sewer lines and cause cataclysmic cloacal backups such as happened the last time we were there — just as we had sat down to what was to be a celebratory family feast. 

Perrysburg’s spirit is upbeat, as it is here, nature and a sense of place, I think, playing a big hand in it. At an elementary school ceremony they talked of respect, responsiveness, and responsibility, honesty, creativity, and kindness. There was one sour note — no mention of irreverence, but then again I always got Cs in citizenship.

Everybody waves to you there! There’s a palpable feeling of comity, though I hear Democrats must meet in the catacombs.

While our trip to see our daughter, son-in-law, and two young grandsons was, likewise, brief, a few moments in their paternal grandparents’ deck chairs at the edge of the breezy Maumee in the setting sun can stay with you a long time. Indeed, it helped to make bearable an interminable eight hours’ slumping wait in the Baltimore-Washington International Airport for the hop to Islip.

Unresponsive, uncreative, irresponsible, unkind . . . Southwest Airlines would have merited no awards at Toth Elementary that day.

“The good news is we’ve beaten the trade parade, though barely,” I said to Mary as we tooled along Route 27 in the early morning hours toward home.

More good news: In the absence of any other traffic, the beauty of this place was, even in the dark, she said, all the more evident.

A few hours later I was back at work, and happily so, Main Street having been shut down to traffic at 9 a.m. so hordes of middle schoolers with the beach their goal could dash across it. 

A moment’s pause before the summer’s frenzy, which at its heights could well find me singing, “Why, oh why, oh why, oh / Why did I ever leave Ohio. . . .”

Those returning to East Hampton after a time away will be sure to notice that the green near the flagpole does not look quite the same. Where until this year it was unbroken grass, a winding ribbon of plants and low shrubs now extends to the little bridge on Mill Road. This, we are told, is a bioswale, which is, as I told a group of Ladies Village Improvement Society members in a recent talk, a fancy word for swamp. This brought a laugh, as one of the next speaker’s topics was to be the Village Green and how it recently came to look different.

So it was in time past. In his 1849 history, Henry P. Hedges said what is now Town Pond was not a pond exactly, when East Hampton was founded 200 years earlier. “There was no collection of water, and a swamp or marsh covered the centre of the street.” Like today’s bioswale of native plants, “a small rivulet or drain communicated with and ran into the swamp from the north,” Hedges wrote.

The swamp was soon to be changed. In June 1653, according to town records, “a watering pond” was “diged at the Spring Eastward.” Around this, the English were already building houses and setting out their plantation, as they called it, and their bodies were relegated to the earth in the South End Burying Ground there. The second and more substantial church was built in 1717 along the rivulet’s bank, where the newest wing of Guild Hall stands in all its concrete-block anonymity across from the Star office.

Maidstone, as the plantation was first called, existed independently of other European outposts for a time, but the founders relatively soon voted it under the authority of the Connecticut Colony. There was little interaction with the Dutch who lived at New Amsterdam far to the west; it was difficult to reach, for one thing, and far easier to sail across the Sound when the need arose for trade or to adjudicate a complicated legal matter. 

In the first division of land, 34 allotments were divvied up around what would become Town Pond, the parcels long and narrow and between 8 and 12 acres each. The first laws that might be considered precursors to today’s zoning rules came early, too: In 1650, the town trustees declared, “yt whosoever shall take up a lot in Towne shal live upon it himselfe and also yt no man shal sell his alotment or any part thereof.” 

For more than 200 years, the area around Town Pond was mostly a mudhole. Main Street, in an old glass-plate negative I found at an estate sale at its north end some time ago, appears a soggy mess of cart wheel ruts and horse hoof divots. The Village Green — and Hook Pond, into which it eventually drains — has long been a cache basin for what runs off the street or leaks through the groundwater. 

The village occasionally still hires wader-clad baymen to rid it of algae mats when they get unsightly. The recent bioswale is an effort to slow runoff as it heads toward the pond. Its plants will help that process, their roots taking up moisture and creating an underground net to trap contaminants, I suppose. 

I find the appearance of the now-planted bioswale appealing, though I detest the word. And I am keeping an eye out to see what birds and other wildlife will show up there. Whether it will be adequate by itself to improve Town and Hook Ponds’ water quality, I don’t know, but it is a nice reminder of how things were when a rivulet ran the length of a soggy Main Street to communicate with a swamp at the north.

In rehearsing a speech to give on Helen Rattray’s behalf at her induction into the Long Island Press Club’s Hall of Fame, my nerves got the best of me and I began hamming it up. Actually, it was my inner imp that was getting in the way — I was upstaging myself.

“Think of her,” Mary said, pulling me up short. “Stop all the clowning around. Nobody will pay any attention to what you’re saying, they’ll just notice your tics.” She had learned that years ago in a public speaking course. Next to death, her teacher had told her, people are most afraid of public speaking. I am in that number. 

Mary’s advice was, of course, sound. Make ’em laugh — or at least smile — is more or less my metier. Get in and get out. Which perhaps is why I’ve never written anything longer than 500 words. The speech was more than twice that, and I had fallen so in love with my easeful words that I refused to brook any more changes. Still, I was tending to rush at times, Mary said. Think of Helen and slow down. I had written a good speech. It would be all right.

But would it? The crowd at the Woodbury Country Club that night was raucous. Umpteen awards were being handed out and everyone was hooting and hollering. I remember thinking Karl Grossman, the club’s founder, had created a monster. I was hungering for perhaps one more glass of wine, however unpalatable. 

Best Blog, Best Use of Facebook, Best Use of Twitter, Best Social Media Campaign, Best Non-Local News/Feature, Best Non-Local Photo, Best Food and Beverage Narrative, Best Entertainment Narrative, Best Entertainment Video, Best Interactive Presentation. . . . I remember turning to Helen and saying, “We’re dinosaurs!”

Then they said no one speaking that night (Helen was one of three Hall of Fame honorees, Jimmy Breslin and Carl Corry being the others) should exceed five minutes. We’d timed mine at just under nine! Hurriedly, Mary and I began to slash and burn, Xing out, alas, some funny things. And then I was cued to come up. 

The noise level was still pretty high when I began. 

“After Ev Rattray’s funeral 37 years ago, his widow, Helen Rattray, whom you are honoring tonight, took my hand and held it, as if to say, ‘Well, here we go. . . .’ ” 

As I said this — slowly, and looking at her — I could sense that voices had lowered, that people were listening. 

As Mary had said, I could indeed take my time in addressing myself to Helen, whose night it was. In short, I knew I had them.

Ever trying to reconcile good and evil, I came across in Joseph Campbell’s book on Oriental mythology what Chuang Tzu said when his friends found him drumming and singing after his wife had died. 

Not only nature, but mankind had seasons, he said. Why would we think we could alter the eternal round, what use would it do to wail and lament someone’s death?

“Maybe he just didn’t like his wife,” said Mary.

She’s always injecting reason into my reverie. (And beating me far too many times in backgammon.)

But this is spring, the season for revery as well as revelry. No sooner had the leaves popped than our population did too. “Stay in your backyard,” I said to Russell Bennett on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. “Even better, stay in your backyard for the rest of the summer.”

It was during that weekend that I celebrated some rites of spring. No, no, I made no sacrifice to propitiate the gods as in ancient times — I simply fired up the grill and put on some chicken thighs. It is one of the things I do fairly well now. Mary, who’s witnessed my selective ignorance up close (and my general ignorance too), says she doesn’t even know how to turn the grill on or off. A likely story, but in so demurring she’s helped raise my self-esteem.

And earlier, before firing up the grill, I had immersed myself in the waters of our outdoor shower, toasting the Omphalos in the presence of the leafed-out trees and prehistoric ferns with a small glass of Mud House, it being midday.

“I’m trying to live in gratitude and awe amid the mystery of things,” I said to Mary on emerging. “Shintos do that, you know.”

Whereupon I got my leg (shin . . . toe . . . leg . . . kneed I say more?) pulled. “It’s a mystery you haven’t mowed the lawn,” she said. “I’d be in awe if you did, and you’d earn my gratitude.” 

Naturally, being a Mariolater, I set forth on a quest for the mower, which had overwintered in the shed, tugged on the cord until it turned over — a third rite of spring — and traversed the mossy front lawn, stirring up a lot of pollen as I went. The headiness of spring is not — sneeze, cough — unalloyed. But I try to remember that it’s all one — the beauty, the allergies, the crowds, all the people frantic to relax. Still, you can’t help but be hopeful this time of year. 

It just comes naturally, no matter how much evidence to the contrary there is, here and abroad, and there’s plenty. Still, we live in what East magazine has said is a happy place, so be happy. Well, if not happy, pleasant.

And so I’ve made a note to myself consequently to be pleasant this summer, to be as sunny in disposition as our extraordinary natural surroundings warrant. In fact, the lichen demands it. 

Though it is tempting to just stay in the backyard.

There we were, seven of us, in a circle with prosecco in stemmed glasses and lovely hors d’oeuvres on a table at center. Like-minded people, we were talking about Trump. What else?

It’s easy to go on about the president. Each of us had something to contribute to the conversation, a bit of news the others had not heard or a droll comment. When I asked if anyone had a friend who voted for the president, one of the seven said he had tried without success to talk someone out of it; another said the same about a parent. When I asked if, subsequent to the election, anyone had spoken about national issues with Trump supporters, or made an effort to do so, the “nos” had it. We admitted we lived in a bubble.

The conversation continued, and we all said we had received endless email requests for money for candidates in other states, whom we might not have heard of previously; we agreed that after the election many political and environmental organizations had been persistent in asking us to sign petitions against certain actions emanating from the White House. But my friends looked askance when I described a problem I have with some of these relentless petition drives: It sometimes seems, I said, that we have forgotten that in this country everyone is supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty. 

Among myriad others, I have been asked, for example, to demand that Jared Kushner lose his security clearance. This proposal and others like it are based on allegations of wrongdoing rather than evidence presented publicly and reviewed impartially. Are we succumbing to something we accuse the president and his cronies of doing — basing our actions on personal bias or emotion? If so, how can we so easily brush aside the president’s claim that Democrats are promoters of falsehood or that the press is biased?

There is, of course, a world of difference between petitioning for the resignation of a presidential appointee who may have broken the law or petitioning for the removal of top federal officials placed in charge of agencies that they had fought and even litigated against before getting the nod from the president. I know enough about Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, for example, to want him out, even if he conceded during his Senate confirmation hearing that he didn’t believe climate change was a hoax. 

Half the people I know are jumpy, walking around trying to stay calm, pushing down anxiety that the president will bring on a crisis, perhaps even a nuclear disaster. Six months in, and many federal agencies are understaffed and in increasing dissaray. Six months in, and the shock has worn off. What more can we do than sign petitions, pour drinks, and have world-weary conversations with our fellow bubble-dwellers?

The message on the iPhone was from my son-in-law, a wildlife biologist who spends his days worrying about biodiversity, habitat, and endangered creatures in the farther reaches of Washington State, and rarely if ever emails or texts  unless I’ve written first, which I had.

“Jeff!!” I messaged him on May 29. “We have sent Julia’s birthday present, which will be delivered on June 1 by FedEx. If at all possible can you please somehow intercept the package and hide it away till June 15? No signature required for delivery so maybe you’ll find it on the porch who knows. XX”

“Consider it done,” he replied.

 It was a big present for a big, round-number birthday — a rose-gold, latest-version, Apple iPad with gigabytes up to here. We’d been puzzling over what to get her, until one day, in the wake of the United Airlines insanity where they physically hauled a man off a full plane for refusing to give up his seat to an airline employee, somebody wrote on Facebook that he’d just cut his Chase/United credit card in half.

I had that same card. I decided at once that I’d do that too. It wasn’t the same as picketing with the crowds in front of Trump Tower, but hey, you get to a Certain Age and you protest where you can.

Here now is what happened. While deleting the card, which I’d had for four or five years, from the computer, United’s “MileagePlus Service Center” page popped up, the first time ever. Lo and behold, I had amassed 110,000 miles! Who knew, who ever even bothers to know, when mileage upgrades, as The New York Times reported on Sunday, are almost unheard of today — a remnant of the distant past, unless you’re an airborne jewel of platinum or diamond status.

Eureka! The “service center” turned out to be a Manhasset Miracle Mile, with page after page of temptations, from a field box to see the Toronto Blue Jays play the Cleveland Indians for 10,000 miles, to, you guessed it, a rose-gold, bells-and-whistles-loaded, Apple iPad for 96,000. Plus tax, it left me with 604 miles that I will never use.

June 1 arrived. “Interception Day!” I texted. “Ball is in your court!”

“I won’t let you down,” he promised.

June 10. “The day approaches. Did the Box arrive?”

“It arrived and was intercepted before she could see it.”

Then, on Monday, Jeff called. He’d opened the brown shipping carton, he said, sounding strangled; removed the Apple box inside, wrapped it up in birthday paper, and left it downstairs atop a pile of other presents — visible from outside through a glass pane in the front door. He was working in the basement when he thought he heard footsteps above, but did not go up to check. 

Did I say the front door was unlocked?

Portland, Ore., where they live, is supposed to be low on the crime scale, but someone had walked into the house and taken the first thing they saw, ignoring everything underneath. He’d called the police, Jeff said, who came and said he was “probably out of luck.” 

It was not a happy day.

Sometime later, Julia, who was at work, got a call from someone in the neighborhood whom she’d never met, asking whether she’d left her house a while before carrying a package, and driven off. 

“No. Why?”

This neighbor said she happened to be looking out her window and saw a woman going from house to house along the block, trying every door. She called her son over, she said, and they watched as the woman slipped inside and left a moment later with the box. Mother and son hurried out, she said, and “stood and stared,” and the thief saw them seeing her, dropped the package, ran to a car, and fled.

At 6 that evening the neighbor appeared at the door and handed over the birthday box. “I was still stunned,” Julia said. 

They gave her a fine bottle of Willamette Valley pinot noir, and are thinking of installing a keypad lock. 

Happy birthday, baby.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

Maybe it’s because Memorial Day is almost here, the time of year when (at least in the decades before year-round weekending) second-home owners used to arrive in force, saying they were going to “the country.” Whatever the reason, I cannot stop anticipating the deluge that comes with the season — not of people, but of luxury vehicles.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no quarrel with those who drive expensive cars. Some of my best friends are Mercedes owners. My issue is that, unfortunately, fancy vehicles draw my attention to the aging car my husband and I share. It certainly doesn’t warrant comparison with a late-model Range Rover, for example.

My first car was a Fiat, a small Italian automobile you don’t see around here much, whatever the season. My Fiat helped me pass my very first driving test, because when I stalled on the railroad tracks in Riverhead, the examiner said, “It’s not you. It’s the damn foreign car.”

Chris and I drive a 2006 Honda Civic hybrid and haven’t taken it on very many trips so the mileage is only 86,747. Consumer Reports lists the Civic among 10 cars most likely to reach old age at 200,000 miles. Still, my husband has been ogling new cars, especially those that have rear-end cameras. He even asked the Honda dealer, where we take our car for maintainance, how much it was worth. He was told its trade-in value was about $1,000. Kelley Blue Book says that a car of our make and year is worth about twice that, but maybe the dealer was taking into account our propensity for fender-benders.

Have I ever mentioned, here in print, that when they were young my children nicknamed me “Helen Wheels”? It was eventually shortened to just “Wheels,” which I actually answered to sometimes for a few years there.

I’m not so sure about a new car, myself, despite my husband’s wandering automotive eye. I would have to be comfortable driving it, which means it would have to be small, while nevertheless holding its own against all the big-bully S.U.V.s, which apparently are still outselling conventional passenger sedans and such.

Still, maybe I will start thinking about it. You come to appreciate the value of style when the car you drive has absolutely none. I don’t remember how it got into my head as a young married woman to imagine myself owning a convertible Jaguar, but it did. In my mind’s eye, it was yellow. I even inquired about the Jaguar reputation, once, and was told they were too high-maintenance for the likes of me. At that time, I drove one of those long, heavy, American-made station wagons that were so common in the 1960s and 1970s. Later, I drove a giant, rear-finned Cadillac, the uncoolest car of all time, mainly because it made me feel safe. The Cadillac was an odd beige-pink, the color of a pencil eraser. 

I asked a friend to tell me this week what the small and snappy sports car I saw him driving was. It was a classic BMW Z3 roadster. Now, a nifty little car like that would be the right scale for me, even if it would be ridiculous to think I would ever take advantage of its alleged top speed: over 120 miles an hour. But, then, there is the aforementioned propensity for fender-benders. And I believe a BMW convertible costs around $50,000. I have another friend who owns a Tesla, in which he tools around Springs. That one is pretty stylish, too. I think a Tesla costs even more.

Truth is, I am jealous of the car belonging to the editor of this paper, my son David. It is a 2014 Chevrolet Volt, an electric car bought at a local dealership, and he has given it high marks in the weekly column that sits below mine every week. 

Is electric the way to go? I’ll check it out and keep you posted.

My son-in-law and I were treated to a squash lesson by the young Egyptian pro, Mohamed Nabil, at the Southampton Recreation Center recently. He was kind, kept feeding the ball back to us so that we could smash it crosscourt or down the rail, and it was a lot of fun, especially for one whom the game has long passed by. 

Squash, as Mohamed says, is “exhilarating” — that’s probably the best word for it. I liked it too when he said that in order to win you had to be calm on the outside and very angry on the inside. 

I suppose part of it is wanting to outdo your father — or stepfather, as in my case. It was he who taught me the game, in my early teens, when I was even more excitable than I am now. 

I was a terrible sport then, as now, and he was a Christian martyr to have put up with me. We played in the plastered courts at the Edgeworth Club, in the basement, beyond the duckpin bowling alleys, and the thwack, thwack, thwack sounds the hard, hot ball made as it came off the walls was . . . exhilarating. 

Later, he admitted to letting me win at times so that I wouldn’t go off in a huff. 

Much, much later in life I wrote him a letter thanking him, whose patience I must have tried many times, for always being there for me in trying times. He said it was the best letter anyone had ever written him. Though I had forgotten, he said, one thing. He had (pace A.R. Gurney) taught me how to play squash.

As I say, we played singles with the hard ball then (used only for doubles now), and, as must have been the case with most Americans before meters replaced feet, we — my college teammates and I — were dismissive of the squishy English ball that the rest of the world used. America was great then, remember?

Anyway, that squishy ball later became universally used, and the court was widened just a bit to make the game even more maddening for a prima donna such as I, who because squash has long passed him by limits his strutting now to tennis — an easier game if truth be told.

If you’re agile and you like getting your heart rate up and feeling marvelously exhausted after half an hour or so of all-out effort, during which you have repeatedly ripped the ball (which warms up after a while) down the rails, dinked it into the front corners, teased up lobs so that they die in the back, and ceaselessly stretched yourself full length in mad, exhilarating pursuit of your opponent’s shots, you should give it a try.

And here’s to you, Dad, for teaching me.

One of the things that sets East Hampton apart from so many other American communities is respect for its own history. Up here around our office, Main Street looks much the same as it did 100 years ago. Some of the houses here date much further back still, as much as a century before the Declaration of Independence. My own office window view is of the Mulford farmhouse on James Lane, built shortly after Capt. Josiah Hobart aquired the land in 1676. By that measure, the Star building at 153 Main Street is just a baby, built around 1900 for my great-grandfather as a pharmacy with an upstairs apartment. My office on the second floor overlooking the East Hampton Library was until not that long ago a bathroom. 

As far as getting in touch with the past goes, one could do far worse than this end of the street, though actually being here is no longer necessary. An online collection at the library provides access from anywhere to, among other things, editions of The Star from 1918 to 1968. The plan is to soon have the years since the paper’s establishment in 1885 available as well.

Searching the East Hampton Star archive in the Digital Long Island feature at easthamptonlibrary.org gives a picture of how much distance we have traveled metaphorically from a page-one call for substituting wood for coal to aid the World War I effort in Europe to a story about the soon-to-open Montauk Downs golf course clubhouse in 1968 — written by our current sports editor, Jack Graves, no less. 

Browsing the old Stars turns up some surprises and peculiar coincidences. A November 1919 edition reported that a 61-pound striped bass had been netted in the ocean near Mecox and referred to a 101-pounder that Capt. Nathaniel Dominy seined up off East Hampton some time earlier, which was said to be the largest of its species ever. In the modern era, the official record bass weighed 81 pounds. The Dominys were the subject of Helen S. Rattray’s “Connections” column last week and will be discussed next Thursday by Hugh King during an outing organized by the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society.

 That the past was of interest is clear from a 1923 Star I happened on in the library collection. A front-page account by Harry D. Sleight gave great detail about an armed sloop, the Hampton, built in East Hampton or Southampton for the purpose of trading with the slave plantations in Jamaica and elsewhere. A 1757 manifest lists pork, barrel staves, Indian corn, onions, horses, and sheep among its outbound cargo. And so it goes. I recommend the archive to anyone curious about East Hampton in earlier times, or those just looking to spend a bit of time forgetting today’s troubles. After the latest news from Washington about the president’s firing of the F.B.I. director, this seems even more necessary.

So I was down at Town Hall the other day, picking up my dump, ahem, recycling permit, and a clam, uh, shellfish license. As I waited for the next available assistant clerk, I noticed a Latino man taking care of some complicated business at the next assistant clerk’s station. A moment later, a tall man with a long beard wearing a white crocheted cap came in, seeking town taxi paperwork.

No one besides me looked up when the tall man’s cellphone loudly announced driving directions, saying he should make a U-turn. He pulled the thing from his trouser pocket and silenced it. It would be only speculation to guess where he was from. 

According to Google, his cap is called a Kufi, and is worn by Islamic men in many countries. The Latino man was perhaps from Central America, or Mexico, but unless I asked, I would not know for sure. The three of us at the counter made up our own United Nations of a sort, and reflected in a minor way East Hampton’s past, present, and future.

Of course, the sample at the town clerk’s office was much too small to be significant. The Census offers a glimpse of a far-more complex demographic reality, even though outdated and incomplete. Of the resident population in 2010, the last time a field sampling was conducted, 5,660 Hispanic or Latino people lived in East Hampton Town, of which just over 2,300 came from Ecuador alone. These figures are out of a total of about 21,450 people, meaning that Latinos and Hispanics made up more than 26 percent of the population at the time, with Ecuadoreans almost 11 percent of the total.

The population has changed since 2010, for sure, and it changes from season to season. The Census is conducted in April; even seven years ago, the summer makeup of the local population would have been different. Driving a child to school early on Monday, I noticed what looked like a group of Jamaican men on bicycles headed east on Amagansett Main Street in the foggy drizzle. The Census had nothing to say about them.