What is it about staying in one place or, for that matter, moving around? I moved around a fair bit in younger days and still think of myself as that kind of footloose spirit, but the truth is I’ve been living in one place, here on the East End, for upwards of three decades, and in my little house on an old field lot in Springs for more than a quarter century.

The knowledge of this place, deepened year after year as the groove of the seasons keeps shaping my experience of time and my memories, is a force so central to my life I can no longer separate it from who I am.

I love knowing the world this way: as the time of the yellow flag irises around Town Pond or the days of lacy flowering trees or cherry blossom time or the time of year when that one curve along Accabonac Harbor with a certain mix of trees pops with color and tells me it’s fall, or when the overhanging bower along Old Stone Highway is a doorway into a magical snowy world. 

There’s the evening of the first spring peepers in the wetland behind my house — disconcertingly early, on Feb. 28 this year — the night of the first fireflies that send me to a quiet evening session in the hammock outside, the return of the osprey, whose piercing calls, flying over my yard, make me look up, the annual dragonfly swarm. The freezing nights of coal black that make the stars pop. 

I’m uncertain this is a thing I should admit, but if you asked me to outline my life’s highlights, they would be many of these things: another time sitting in the kitchen doorway listening to a thunderstorm roll in, another cozy day in the house both lulled and enlivened by the motion through my windows of the falling snow outside, a summer dusk sitting out in the garden dirt weeding, a glass of rosé at hand, when the year’s first screech owl starts its eerie song. The always startling discovery of the long-lived garter snake that comes out of the stone basement wall to sun itself on my doorstep each year.

The things that happen again and again, and the special ones: turning back home after leaving only a moment ago, to find a tall egret stalking up my walk (as if it was waiting for my departure to call for a party at the house, I always said); the night I sat in the yard with a little dog on my lap and realized two screech owls were overlooking us in the tree, and then watched another two, and another two, fly in. The moment, waking after a sweet nap in the hammock, me and a deer only a foot or so away locked eyes and, in unison, both let out a shriek of surprise. 

And there was the surprise of finally knowing about the massive tree in the woods out back — a giant Ent-spirit, I’m certain — only after it was felled in a storm, its root system upended, its massive structure calling my attention to that impressive thing I’d been living near, unknowingly, all this time. Somehow I’m proud of that, and all these things. I feel, despite other myriad, abiding questions about life, that I’ve landed in the right place — or one right place. 

I love the things that endure: knowing the treetop shapes that surround my little world, feeling the arc of the year through the changes and benchmarks of nature. 

Recognizing the different cheeps of the woodpecker hatchlings either fussing for attention or excited by a parent returning with food. Seeing what changes and what lasts — will the barn swallows be back this year, the orioles? Will the phlox on the old cottage site come back, the tiger lilies, the iris patch? Where will the tall comfrey stalks pop up, or the milkweed?

I’m blessed to have neighbors who also care about these things, who mark time this way, who share their observations. It bonds us in this little enclave as we swap those moments, helping each other define our place in the year, in this world. 

We know our trees — my stalwart linden, catalpa, and centurion cedar, the massive pines and maples across the street. We trade tidbits like currency, sharing the little gifts and gratitude for our lives on this patch of land.

Once upon a time I walked into this empty house a young woman who’d just, astonishingly, signed mortgage papers, who’d just signed on to I knew not what. I poured champagne into a paper cup and sat down on a milk crate in a cold and empty shell that lacked heat and had most recently housed a squirrel or two. And embarked.

I believed a home base, a home place, would not bind me, but set me free. So many things have turned out differently than expected — for just about everyone, I’d guess. 

There’s so much to be said for a deep knowledge of a place, for decades of sunsets over the same view. It gets deep, not old. Sometimes, though, you only know the shape of those deep roots when the wind exposes them and shakes things up a bit. 

So what is it about moving around and learning a new lexicon of place? That’s the other half of the balance, maybe the thing that keeps things grounded — and a subject for an essay all its own. 

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.

A handful of parents, a batch of schoolchildren, and a pair of grandparents, including me, went to East Hampton High School on Sunday to see “In the Heights,” this year’s musical, and to say we were glad we had done so would be an understatement; we were blown away.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the genius behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Hamilton,” composed the music and lyrics for “In the Heights” back in 1999, as a student at Wesleyan University. After making it to Broadway, the musical won four Tony awards before touring companies took it across the country and abroad. It tells a story, in song, of three days on a single block in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. The coffee from the bodega is light and sweet, and the mostly Latino residents, who come from different national backgrounds, are facing the future, which is changing.

The two leading roles were played by freshmen, Alfredo Chavez as Usnavi De La Vega, who owns the bodega and really can rap, and Talia Albukrek, as Nina Rosario, who has a sweet and very expressive soprano. People tend to gush a bit too much about student performances, even those that in truth aren’t that remarkable, but it would be hard to overstate the excellence of this cast. Talent after talent shone across the footlights. 

Even those in character roles drew smiles of admiration and — no kidding — not a few tears of emotion from the audience. The director, Laura Sisco, integrated each in a way that not only recognized differences among the male and female ensemble dancers and chorus but highlighted them. Inventive and lively choreography let them whoop it up, especially in a nightclub salsa scene. 

While specific to a time and place, the plot resonates here, where many families are immigrants concerned about increased scrutiny and where the schools are learning how best to educate a diverse student population. Everyone present at the Sunday matinee, whether onstage or in the school auditorium, surely felt the emotional reverberations of telling this story of community and diversity in these times.

 We were touched even while laughing as we learned, toward the end of the play, that Usnavi’s late parents, who were from the Dominican Republic, named him for painted words on the ship bringing them to America: U.S. Navy.  

At the conclusion, Usnavi — who has come into some unexpected money and seems to be winning the heart of the girl of his dreams (played by the charming Ciara Bowe) — decides to stay in his home, the Heights. He sings:

Yeah, I’m a streetlight!

Chillin’ in the heat!

I illuminate the stories of people in the street

Some have happy endings

Some are bittersweet. . . .

Ms. Sisco, who runs the Creative Edge, a dance studio in Montauk and Amagansett, had directed her first musical at the high school, “Rent,” last year. Her skillful execution was enhanced by the efforts of Karen Peele Hochstedler, the music director, Brian Niggles, the set and lighting supervisor, a few other professionals, and many students who helped construct the realistic and ingenious set (“Wow!” people around us said as the lights went up) or joined the pit band.

Counteracting any impression that the show — with its unusual polished and knockout set — had cost the school district a hefty sum, Ms. Sisco said the budget was just slightly higher than in previous years and that many things were “repurposed, recycled, borrowed, and created.”  

The fact that it had such a strong impact, she said, was probably because of the unusual length of time devoted to character development. “As a team,” she said of the kids, “they did research and shared experiences.”

Ms. Sisco said she and the other adults involved were “really trying to elevate it to the next level.” And, oh, how they definitely did.

People used to be surprised when I said that the beach along the southern reach of Gardiner’s Bay has eroded at about a foot a year since about the time I was born. When my parents had a small house moved to the property in the early 1960s, there were just over 400 feet between Cranberry Hole Road and the high tide line. One of these days, I’ll go look at a neighbor’s recent survey on file at East Hampton Town Hall to know for sure, but I’d say the distance is no more than 360 feet today.

The funny thing about the beach is that it is relatively stable most of the time. Before the 1938 Hurricane, folks from away looked at the setting along Dune Road overlooking the ocean in Southampton and assumed that was how things were going to be for a long while. Sept. 21 of that year arrived a beautiful sunny day; by night, something like 275 houses and a dozen lives had been swept away.

Gardiner’s Bay beaches can handle an ordinary winter. But when the wind rises to a gale and holds from the northeast for several high-tide cycles, it is another thing entirely. The worst storm I recall, a three-day blow, took 12 feet of dune. Now I watch a stunted cedar just back from the edge. When it falls, I’ll know the jig is up.

Back in 2012, as Hurricane Sandy approached, my friend Jameson Ellis and I went onto the dune with the idea of placing one of those self-operating game-hunter’s cameras on a tree to record the action. It had started to blow hard from the east by that time, and we could find nothing we thought stable enough to strap the camera on. 

Yellow-tinged water was moving laterally, from east to west, along the dune. We went back to the house fearing the worst and carried my tools from the basement up to the second floor in case the bay flowed in later. There was nothing else to do. Sandbags would have been pointless, and there wasn’t any place to get them anyway.

Oddly enough, the beach survived Sandy just fine. What changed was my perception. I had always said that moving the house back from the beach would be my kids’ problem. 

For whatever quirk of nature, the highest part of the dune in the 1960s is long since on the bottom of Gardiner’s Bay. Now, each foot landward that the bluff crest creeps is lower than the last. Soon enough even someone standing in the driveway of our house will have a glimpse of the water.

These days, the feds require houses in our coastal floodplain to be elevated something like 15 feet above sea level. In some parts of Long Island, the Rockaways, for example, this has spawned a new line of work for businesses — driving pilings into the sand and such, then placing existing houses on top of them. The first floor of the neighbor’s house, whose property survey I mean to have a look at, is level with my upper deck; the view from their second floor makes my house look like a miniature model, like those in the Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road.

When he was considering where to place the house before I was born, my father asked some old-timers how the area had fared back in 1938, and he chose a site on a rise as far back from the bay as possible. Other property owners who came along later were not so prudent. Today, a house off to the east is almost fully on the beach. Several more are but one bad storm away. My place will join them someday, but it has a few years to go before I call in the pile drivers.

Recently, I moved some of the Durants’ volumes, about 20 pounds’ worth, from my office bookcase to make room for others equally as edifying. 

I have been majoring in edification these many years, trying to make up for lost time. Soon, I will have read all, or most of, the books that I ought to have read, and in fact was assigned to read, 60 years ago. And then I can become atomized in peace. 

At any rate, I was just looking over some notes I made from the Durants’ “Our Oriental Heritage” and found:

“Confucius said that good manners, too, must be a care of the government, for when manners decay the nation decays with them.” 

Speaking of which, I didn’t watch the decayer-in-chief’s speech the other night. And though the president’s tone apparently was less grating, I gather he — as Dick Rodriguez, The Star’s former linotype operator, used to say about our editorials — didn’t say anything.

Meanwhile, before our tax breaks out here vanish — mortgage interest, property taxes, state taxes, and things like that — I am seeing how far above the rumored future $30,000-per-middle-class-family tax deduction I can go. I’m treating it as a challenge, and it’s one I think I can rise to. First thing we do is deduct all the books — Mary’s too, for she talks to me about them — as a professional expense. Hearing aids as well, for if I didn’t have them I wouldn’t be able to hear her when she talks to me about her books. Nor would I be able to improve upon the language of my interlocutors.

Actually, I do have some new hearing aids now, behind-the-ear ones, though much tinier than the cumbrous bananas I used to wear, which enabled me to hear conversations up to 50 feet to my rear as lips flapped away two feet in front of me. 

These hearing aids, I’m happy to say, are great improvements on those old ones. When I pee it’s a symphony, gusts of wind make me jump (as they do O’en), masticating’s a delight. . . .

It’s a cacophony, that’s for sure, but I don’t want to be a walking gated community, I don’t want to wall myself off. I’d only make — and I don’t mean to be unmannerly — one exception. 

Last week was the first birthday of the rest of my life. 

Well it’s not like I just got over a disease and I now have a new lease on life. Nothing like that. This was the first “celebrated” birthday in my life that I had not been with one or both parents, or, as an adult, in the company of an important boyfriend, significant other, or spouse, a first celebration solo. 

Those of you freshly called “widows” and “widowers” know that the first birthday after the loved one is gone is a weird one. That first solo birthday is not actually an event you embrace or enjoy. Mostly you want it just gone (like the first Christmas: too many changes, too much missing). In my personal memory that first year was a blur, not fast, just blurry.

But, having passed all the firsts in the year after the death of my husband, I am now on to the next chapter. I find I am no longer thinking in the plurals of “ours” and “we.” This new chapter is called “My, Me, Mine.”

My birthday, thanks to an invitation from a wonderful pal, was spent in the Virgin Islands. (The irony of a widow in the Virgin Islands was not lost on me, by the way.) I was invited to hang out for a long weekend with her and mutual friends at her fabulous house on St Thomas. Or, was it a coincidence that it was my birthday. How lucky am I? 

The house is at the far east end of the island, overlooking the St. Thomas yacht club across the small and oddly named Cowpet Bay. Palm trees, turquoise water, and good buddies. What a treat to leave the East End winter for that east end.

I slept listening to the tropical tides lapping at the iron shore below the infinity pool, which was 10 steps away from my sliding door. I watched a rainbow during one of those crazy tropical storms that last minutes. I put on a mask and snorkeled and paddled off the beach at Magens Bay and watched two sea turtles having a lunch of seaweed about 10 feet under my tummy. I slathered on sunblock (near the Equator, you know) and stayed hydrated (ditto). And the clouds, well, the clouds are fantastic, and the sun kind of does go down like thunder, though there is a bit of dusk after it is gone, contrary to Kipling. 

Being a loosely knit group of three dames and sometimes four, and two guys but sometimes three, some of us did one thing, some did other things, all did some, and at times I was solo beside the pool, which, can I mention again, overlooked totally turquoise water, clear as a bell and dotted with boats I could wave to if I felt like it. 

My room faced the sunset, which bounced off that bay and off the infinity pool and gave me no end of pleasure as I took pictures of reflections. One afternoon, in the pool, I looked over the edge and down in the vegetation and palm trunks and there were iguanas in courting mode, bobbing heads and looking like Jurassic Park. My imagination was, at times, in overdrive. Where was my camera when I needed it?

St. Thomas is one hour earlier, so my island time was different from their island time, and while I was in a place where I could sleep as late as I wanted to, I was awake before dawn. Who knows why. 

I was aware of the moment when the night peepers outside my window shut up in favor of the early morning birds doing their vocal exercises. (Discretion being the better part of living another day, for the peepers.) I heard the tiny sounds of birds landing on a sugar-water feeder. Sneaking outside I tried to get a good picture of the many hummingbirds that were having their breakfasts. All this surrounded by flowers in colors that are so glorious they have no name and a tiny little lizard on the screen. 

My birthday dinner, surprise, was at a long table, beside the marina near the ferry to St. John. A band and a bunch of new friends and funny cards and gifts totally topped my special day. The singer with the band tried really hard to get my name right when she sang (to my total embarrassment) “Happy Birthday” to me, so I can say that a Doral, Duvall, Donnell, and Doowall was/were all serenaded along with me. My birthday cake was a slice of local pie with a candle. What could be better than this?

About 20 minutes from the house, in downtown Charlotte Amalie, there are nifty old warehouse buildings with wonderfully painted arched doors housing all the local color and duty-free stuff your heart could desire. The harbor is bustling. Gigantic cruise ships come in and disgorge countless thousands of sea-legged folks who want to spend their retirement savings on gemstones and designer luggage. The cruise ships look like the mother ship from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” when they cruise out, lights ablaze, much like a slice of pie with 72 candles, all lit up. What a sight — bedazzling and keeping the economy going, but also clogging the streets and venues so the locals stay home, if they can, on the days the ships come in. (We did that.) 

Two local friends drove us around, thus we were able to get to a beach that was too far to walk to (Magens Bay) before church let out, so as to get a good parking place. We got dropped off at the ferry to St. John without having to figure out where we were going to park, and we always took the scenic routes so I could take pictures. 

Now, pretty much everything is scenic in its own way, and while I would have walked around on my own, the roads terrified me. They drive on the wrong side of the road and they do it really fast. There are no shoulders along these narrow lanes, just bushes, views, oncoming cars, free-walking chickens, and, yes, East Enders; there are deer on this island, too, and there isn’t much room for one car much less one coming the wrong way around a bend. 

I was astounded that anyone could or would do this driving, but they do and they can, and that was also a birthday present: that I didn’t have to drive, anywhere. For that I am really, really thankful.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.

At a time when Americans are lining up on opposite sides of what seems to be an increasingly wide divide, it was heartening that the film “Moonlight” won the best picture Oscar on Sunday night. The story of “Moonlight” follows the physical and emotional trials besetting a boy growing to manhood in one of Miami’s poorest black neighborhoods, Liberty City. I had seen it in the fall when it was featured at the Hamptons International Film Festival. On Saturday, I was fascinated by the man who adapted the “Moonlight” script from his play “In Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue,” Tarell Alvin McCraney. Forget Horatio Alger, Mr. McCraney’s magnificent trajectory may prove that this country still is a land of possibility after all.

Mr. McCraney was destined for the creative life from the time he was in high school, at Miami’s New World School of the Arts. Like Chiron, the protagonist of “Moonlight,” he was tormented as a child for being gay. Mr. McCraney’s mother, like Chiron’s, battled drugs. Unlike Chiron, however, Mr. McCraney was a surrogate parent for three younger siblings. He nevertheless got a B.F.A. in acting from DePaul University in Chicago in 2003, and then became a graduate student at Yale, where he studied playwriting. Acclaim first came while he was at Yale for a trilogy of plays set in Louisiana among the Yoruba: “In the Red and Brown Water,” “The Brothers Size,” and “Marcus, or the Secret of Sweet.” Skip ahead some 13 years, and he is now to become the head of Yale’s School of Drama, in July.

At the Academy Awards on Sunday, Mr. McCraney took the stage with Barry Jenkins, who directed “Moonlight,” after the award for best adapted screenplay was announced. Mr. Jenkins also grew up in Liberty City, and although they did not know each other there, he understood the autobiographical aspects of the story. Accepting the screenplay award, Mr. McCraney said they had had less than a month to shoot the film. Speaking of Mr. Jenkins, he said, “This man did it in 25 days with a cast and crew that was in and out in Miami in the dreaded heat. But we did that with love and compassion and fullness.” Because of the unheard-of mix-up in announcing the best picture, the “Moonlight” principals did not get to the stage to speak again. Earlier, however, McCraney had said, “This goes out to all those black and brown boys and girls and non-gender conforming, who don’t see themselves. We’re trying to show you you and us. So thank you, thank you. This is for you.” 

Along the way, Mr. McCraney has written six other plays and worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, for which he has directed a pared-down “Hamlet” and adapted “Antony and Cleopatra.” And, since 2013, he has been able to devote himself to his work as the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.

The director Joseph Adler, who met Mr. McCraney when he was a high school student in Miami, speaks of him this way: “Even though he’s gone on to international acclaim, the fact that he wants to come back makes him unusual. And he hasn’t changed a bit. His humility, compassion, and genuine concern for people are remarkable. . . . By that I mean profound, lasting, meaningful works along with what is as, or perhaps more, important: the ability to touch, inspire, and give back to those in the here and now. He is a gift-giver.”

Leo the pig does not do much in the winter. Actually, Leo, a house pet of unusual size, never does much at all. It’s just that on these early mornings, when I sit at the kitchen table thinking about what to write as he stands idly by, his easy ways are more obvious.

If I can generalize about pigdom from having watched Leo going on five years now, their dominant motivation is in their stomachs. Sun up or not, as soon as Leo hears me stirring, he scrambles out of his bed near the fireplace and with a string of loud grunts and whines demands to be fed. If one of the dogs gets near he gets downright operatic. “Shut up already,” I think, “or it’s the knacker for you.”

Leo is not dumb, as basic as his needs may be. He knows how to push open the front door to let the dogs in or out, and has my predawn moves around the kitchen memorized. If I veer away from what Leo believes is the plan, howls ensue; oink has very little to do with it. I feed him first lest he turn up the decibel level, and then get around to what I need to do. The dogs, polite, wait by their bowls. But Leo has a thing for dog food, too, and expects me to scatter some kibble on the kitchen floor for him to find. It’s like an Easter egg hunt, I suppose, the highlight of his day. The wet nose marks on the tile dry up soon enough.

Beyond food, Leo’s interests run to pushing the furniture around to get my attention when it is time for a scratch or for sleep, in that order. In his middle age, Leo chews on the woodwork less frequently than when he was young. However, anything new that we place in the house where he can get to it gets a good working over. 

As I type this morning, Leo has knocked down a mop and is appraisingly pushing it around the kitchen floor. Next, it’s over to the bathroom to see if anything interesting has been left in the wastebasket and to pull down the towels. This will have taken a great deal out of him, and he will head back to bed shortly. By the time the kids are up and getting ready for school, he is back in his bed, eyes closed as if he had not already made my morning a living hell. “He’s not so bad!” they will declare when I complain later on.

David Brooks lamented the other day that Americans are tending to stay put, while in the past they moved about quite a bit, were more adventurous. The short answer to that, I think, is health care’s exigencies.

When you had Blue Cross-Blue Shield, it didn’t cost much, and you could change jobs and locales without worrying about that coverage lapsing. My father did many things, quitting and moving on, he told me, whenever he got bored, which he often did. I think health insurance was not the issue for him, or for his generation, that it is for us.

In fact, I’m not sure health itself was the issue in my parents’ day that it is for us. You took what came and didn’t expect that much. Life spans were shorter, but now, especially given all the improvements in medical science, we’re clinging more to life. (I’m always reminded in this regard of what the French woman said: “Do you Americans want to die of good health?”)

Also, I don’t think people, people in general, were aware in the past of the seemingly endless list of diseases, physical and mental, that can attack you. Every parent knows of them now, and they’re rendered all the more fearful and timid because of this knowledge.

So you stay put, and ante up, and hope that the antibiotics will work. Before we went to Mexico, I was almost put on them, having had a tenacious cold, which would have been a cruel irony inasmuch as, when on them, as you know, you have to stay out of the sun and cannot drink. In the end, I found the margaritas salvific.

Though while the climate there is far more, I think, to Mary’s liking, she’s always talking of moving to Canada, while I, who wilt in the heat, keep saying we should move to Mexico. She’s worried we might run afoul of the cartels, but I think frostbite would be worse.

Of course, we’ll stay put (this place being among the nicest places to stay put in), and ante up, and hope that the antibiotics work.

Late on Sunday afternoon, only a few people were left on the trail down to Amsterdam Beach. 

It had been unusually warm on the East End, with the air temperature getting close to 60, even near the water. I had a photograph to take for the news section, and, as the shadows of the day got long, I pulled into the parking lot off Montauk Highway.

The trail was well traveled. Footprints through the muddy places suggested that a score or two of people had been through earlier. Where there was no mud, the ground was slick and hard from innumerable boot soles. 

Even on a winter day the way though this Montauk preserve was tunnel-like. At one point the trail fell from a low hill through a Sistine Chapel of green-leafed hollies. Fallen shadbush trunks lay here and there. High-bush blueberries posed ready for warmer days ahead.

Walks like this often leave me with a sense of melancholy. Amid the trees or dunes it is easy to forget the present, then, rounding a bend, a too-big house comes into view, and I remember. I think about the native people who came here first, then about what Montauk must have been like 100, or even 50 years ago. It is hard not to be a little sad. The people who came before us must have always known the raw, open experiences I can recall dimly from childhood, but that now are only to be found in small moments in the parks and preserved spaces. We are lucky to have them, but still.

Turning to the left and onto a trail that wound down to the beach, I came upon three young men in shorts, sunglasses, and T-shirts. One carried a football. Talking among themselves, none replied when I said hello.

I walked to the east a bit to take a photograph of the old Warhol place, where a new owner has asked the town for permission to build a swimming pool. It had been awhile since I had been out that way, and it seemed tidier than I remembered. I stood on a tall rock out front of the main house and looked at the ocean.

On the way back up to the road, I took a left fork, the second part of a loop trail that I had not been on before. Judging from the lack of footprints, far fewer people had taken this route that day, and I wondered if they had just been more comfortable going back the way they had come. And I thought about making my own way through the woods.

Asked by a colleague, with whom I share a birthday, how I’d spent mine, I said, “On the tarmac, in Houston — they couldn’t get us to a gate for the better part of an hour and kept thanking us for our patience.”

A few hours of fitful sleep at a far-flung Hyatt down a road clogged even worse than the Expressway on its worst day, and we were back at the airport, at 5 a.m. 

When, on nearing La Guardia, the pilot said we’d be circling for a while given the godawful weather, I clasped Mary’s hand (not the one with the heavily bandaged forefinger, which earned us preboarding status when she said if it were banged she’d probably bleed all over everyone) and asked if we had gotten around to updating our wills. When, every now and then, I see our lawyer at the dump, I say we’ll be in soon. I’ve been doing this now for about 10 years. 

Oh, and when I say “we,” it is really she who sees to much of the dreck of our lives. And thus I wrote to her last night on her Valentine card: “Roses are red / violets are blue / I’m so exhausted / I bet you are too.”

It’s a long way to Zihuatanejo, it’s a long way to go, but it’s worth it. We love the Las Brisas hotel there, and the people. And though its structure, a sort of half-pyramid set into a high seaside cliff, may remind one of ancient sacrificial rites while ascending the steep stone stairs, it also is a paradise — a conflation that the crepes flambées we had at the Coconuts restaurant in town illumined. 

“The sun, the sea, and thee,” I would say to Mary, looking up from yet another transcendental margarita. “Rather than shut up and listen,” as Sean Spicer has said, “we should shut up and look. If everyone did, what a wonderful world this might be.”

We had never, in all the years we’ve been going there, seen the baby turtles released. That usually happens around Christmas. This time, we saw the baby black leatherbacks make their unsteady but inexorable way into the vast, vast ocean twice, swept away at last by the ebbing surf. It was a wonder, yes, even more so than the Super Bowl, though on a par with the birth that day of our ninth grandchild. May her life be blessed as ours have been.