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.

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.

The name Dita Von Teese meant nothing to me, so I thought of nothing as M. and I neared the marquee at the Gramercy Theatre, where the burlesque dancer would soon take the stage and command the gathered crowd. 

M. had an altogether different take, emitting a piercing “Ahh!” upon seeing the name, shock given way to ecstasy. Unwittingly, I had earned many additional merit points. 

Two weeks prior, we had attended Le Scandal, which stakes the claim to “New York City’s longest running variety burlesque show,” and had a splendid time, so, when I happened upon what looked to be similar entertainment, I secured tickets for Friday, the third of four sold-out performances. 

“She is so beautiful,” M. observed of Ms. Von Teese. Among other attributes, “she has such beautiful skin,” according to M., who is from Tokyo. And indeed, she does. The pearly-white-skinned performer led a troupe of the bold, the beautiful, and the bizarre at the Gramercy, which was packed as though hosting the rock ’n’ roll concert we’d attended there last month. 

The winters in East Hampton, they get me down, and I go to New York more than I used to, and think about the old sixth-floor walkup in Williamsburg and sometimes wish I had moved back, and tell myself that maybe I’ll finally do it in the fall. Or maybe I’m just full of hot air, as usual. 

But I’m free again, and I’m bored. Or I was, until M. and I found each other on a bleak December afternoon, day-tripping, once-and-maybe-future New Yorkers escaping our present, and most weekends since then have been devoted to thrilling, blissful rendezvous there. 

The city always takes me back, circling back to the beginning, everything old new again. On the abnormally balmy Saturday, we awoke near Times Square and found a Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner, and I savored the sweet jolt of an extra-large coffee like the ones I bought daily for years on my way to the office at 53rd and Seventh, or Ninth and Broadway, or 31st and Park Avenue South. Later, we circled Gramercy Park, the scene of so many early-childhood memories, and rode a subway uptown to stroll Central Park to the carousel, the setting of so many others. 

The night before, we had reprised an earlier adventure: sushi at Yama, downstairs at 49 Irving Place, the onetime home — at least, according to local legend — of Washington Irving, followed by an evening at the Gramercy. 

On that night last month, the theater hosted the Magpie Salute, an offshoot of the Black Crowes, a great band I saw more than a dozen times in the Nineties and Aughts. The Magpie Salute played many numbers from the Crowes’ catalog, each drawing myriad memories of late nights at the Beacon and Irving Plaza and CBGB and that private party on Spring Street in April of ’01, where guests including Mick Jagger and Howard Stern and Don Was and Oasis, and a couple of us from Billboard marveled at that defiantly live and loud rock ’n’ roll powerhouse. 

On that first night at the Gramercy, M. and I partied like it was 1999, dancing like Elton John and Mary J. Blige had done before us as we all listened to the playback of “Deep Inside” (her take on “Bennie and the Jets”) at Quad Studios in Times Square in, yes, 1999, and then drank our way to the Lower East Side and stayed up until 3 and slept late and spent a small fortune on brunch but God it beat waking up alone in East Hampton in January. 

“Who can tell, when he sets forth to wander, whither he may be driven by the uncertain currents of existence,” Irving asked, “or when he may return, or whether it may ever be his lot to revisit the scenes of his childhood?” I, for one, often revisit the old neighborhood, still trying, I guess, to get back to where I once belonged. 

M. cheered wildly for Ms. Von Teese and the others. Seeing her so happy made me so very happy too, and loosened the sorrow and regret to which I tend to cling. “How easy is it for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him,” Irving wrote, “and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles.” 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

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.

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.”

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.

The media had it all wrong. Don’t tell me the Steelers didn’t win that A.F.C. championship game with the Patriots. It just goes to show you to what lengths the lackeys of the press will go to distort the truth. 

While they may have their facts, I have my alternative facts, far more persuasive if you’d just hear me out. It all began when a Belichick operative set off the fire alarm early that Sunday morning in the hotel the Steelers were staying at, prompting them to jump out of their beds, risking injury. No wonder Le’Veon Bell had to come out of the game early with a groin pull.

I was jolted out of my bed once, and it can be very disconcerting. We were in a fleabag hotel on the Left Bank, and the clerk told us after we’d all trooped down the narrow staircase in our robes and whatnot that the good news was there was no fire and that the bad news was there were still three hours until breakfast. That’s the French for you. Patriot fans too for that matter. Very smug. 

And did you read that the Steelers’ coaches’ headsets were jammed throughout the game with Trump’s inaugural speech? No, no, I’m sure you didn’t.

I can’t tell you to what lengths Belichick and his apparatchiks will go.

Of course I didn’t watch the game. (Well, that’s an alternative fact if truth be told.) I was not about to be snookered by the media so easily. Instead, I drank margaritas and read about Odysseus’ return — posing as a vagabond, biding his time, and brimming with alternative facts — to Ithaca, where Penelope’s suitors were (like the Patriots) banqueting in his hall and lording it over everyone. 

So today, as dawn’s rosy fingers parted me from honeyed sleep, I refused to credit the verdict of my own eyes when I picked up the paper. 

“Such scores simply do not exist,” I said to Mary. “I’ll have my coffee now.” 

Later, with loins girded in Terrible Towels, I offered up a burnt offering of 10 pounds of chip chop ham to Hephaestus.

Jay I. Meltzer, a revered nephrologist and retired professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, used to warn his patients, and I dare say still does warn anyone who will listen, about the urgency of having an ongoing relationship with a doctor. You need to know your doctor well, he always says, and your doctor needs to know you, especially when you become ill. 

I was reminded of this advice when my stepson Bob was stuck in an UpIsland hospital for four days, beginning last week, during which neither he nor his family could figure out who was in charge of his case: the emergency room doctor who admitted him, a surgeon, or a consulting gastroenterologist. 

Bob had wound up in this hospital not far from his home after symptoms of an undiagnosed complaint became hard to bear. It never is good to be sick, but it is absolutely awful to be stricken unexpectedly and wind up in a hospital you never heard of without a doctor you rely on. 

I don’t need to describe his condition, but standard tests — a C.T. or CAT scan, X-rays, blood tests — did not seem to provide good answers. It’s hard to be objective when someone you care about is suffering. In this case, the possible causes and potential treatments were described incompletely, and that added to the anxiety and unease. 

Worrywart that I am, I headed straight to the internet to see what the hospital’s ratings were. What I found out was scary. The hospital, and I quote, “reported 13 MRSA infections in 73,752 days its patients spent in the hospital between 01/01/2015 and 12/31/2015. This is 364 percent worse than national rates.” The hospital also reported 83 C. difficile infections during the same period, and the report said, “This is 57 percent worse than national rates.” This information came from Consumer Reports, which I have to assume is reliable. 

Checking further, I found that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called C. difficile “an urgent threat to patient safety,” while MRSA infections, despite not always being serious, can be life-threatening. C. diff and MRSA? I really started to get anxious.

Despite the lack of any definite diagnosis, by Monday morning, the fourth day Bob was there, he was scheduled for surgery. The next thing we knew, however, that decision had been overruled by the consulting gastroenterolo­gist. The about-face and confusion were enough for Bob, his wife, and other members of the family to agree he should be moved to Stony Brook University Hospital. I had held off telling anyone about the Consumer Reports statistics until that morning, after hearing that the doctors couldn’t agree on surgery. On the fifth morning (actually it was the middle of the night), Bob was transferred, and as of this writing is being treated at Stony Brook, with reassuring results. 

All of this got me wondering what Dr. Meltzer might have to say about the Affordable Care Act and its imminent repeal. Not being able to select and keep the doctor of your personal choice has been one of the main bones critics have picked with Obamacare. Of course, with the new administration and the anti-Affordable Care factions in Congress still totally mum about what their alternative plans might be and how they could do better, we have no idea what the future of health care in America will be. 

One thing seems certain, though, and that is that the insurance companies, released from some of the Affordable Care Act’s rules and safeguards, will have more power to control our choices. I’m not sure this bodes well for maintaining long-term relationships with our physicians, but I’m pretty sure it is going to stir up a fair amount of anxiety and unease among the millions of Americans who might be left out of the bargain.

Sprinting down the asphalt path at Lowenstein Court in Montauk late Monday afternoon to get a look at the ocean before the light faded, I had a passing thought about how excited many of us who live on the East End get about a good northeaster. I was clearly guilty of that as I ran from the car to take a few photographs, then back to the car to check them, then back to the shuddering wood walkway to take some more.

At lunch earlier that day at John Papas in East Hampton, I got talking about the weather with an acquaintance from high school whose name I had forgotten. In my defense, he had forgotten my first name, referring to me only as Rattray, and asking how my brother was doing as if to fish for a clue about which of us I was. I left before I could ask a waitress, who seemed to know him, who he was.

At any rate, he told me that he had been up to the beach that day to look at the ocean as the surf came up and that until recently he had been taking a 92-year-old woman there from time to time as well. “She just liked to look at the water,” my old friend said.

Jean Stafford, the great novelist who lived on Fireplace Road in Springs for many years, wrote an introduction to a picture book about the sea that made note of the local habit of driving to the beach just to see if it was still there. If I recall, she was both amused and a little perplexed. 

The storm wind that wrapped East Hampton in its fists on Monday was blowing hard as I stood on the walkway. Salt spray pelted my coat as the whitewater rushed forward. Grinning and giddy, I turned to protect my camera. A quarter mile to the west two men and two dogs stood on a low dune, watching as successive surges grabbed at the s­and.

It is easy to get swept up, in the figurative sense, by the sight of a riled up ocean. The roar of waves breaking to the horizon goes straight through your coat and into your chest. What the agitated sea represents, whether death, mystery, or power, is hard to say, but we watch, and it is difficult to turn away and head back to the car and shut the door. 

This week’s snow notwithstanding, this winter has been a letdown, at least as far as ice goes. For skating the only option has been to pay for time on one of the local rinks. Likewise, the chance that there will be iceboating this year declines every day that we get closer to March.

In the mid-1970s, when my father was given our first iceboat by George Fish, a doctor and family friend with a house overlooking Three Mile Harbor, it seemed that every winter would dependably produce enough ice to sail upon. Mecox Bay was the center of a considerable flotilla of boats, some large two-seaters, most, like our second boat, DNs, so called after the Detroit News, in whose shop the first of the relatively inexpensive, light and nimble craft were built. 

Many of the freshwater ponds were good. Memorably, one glorious season, homeowners in the Georgica Association let us use a landing on Georgica’s west side to get to its beautiful glassy surface. Three Mile Harbor froze as well one year or two. We sailed from Hand’s Creek across to the main navigation channel and back again, passing baymen spearing eels through holes they had cut in the ice. We sailed on Montauk’s Fresh Pond and on Poxabogue, anywhere that had a big enough slab. We don’t get ice like that much anymore.

The iceboat that came from Dr. Fish’s garage was a Mead Glider, a two-seater probably built in the 1930s and repaired and altered over the years. We called it the Bat, for its batwing sail, which had a single batten that ran from the mast out to the leech, or loose, edge. Its hard ware was largely cobbled up from toolbox assortments and not necessarily up to the stresses of sailing over a hard surface. 

One winter day at Fresh Pond, in about 1978, the Bat struck a pressure ridge in the ice, and the mast came down on top of my father and my friend Mike, who, as he tended to do, and still does from time to time, howled in protest.

It was last year or the year before, on a Monday in early March, that we last sailed in the Bat. I had left it at Mecox after the weekend, and my friend Jamey and I met there to take it out for a ride as a light snow began to fall. 

By the time we lifted the sail, the snow was falling in heavier clumps; sailing through it was marvelous, we could not see the edge of the horizon nor tell the difference between ice and sky. More snow came down, and as we rumbled along, we had the sensation of flying through space and that the clumps of icy flakes were stars.

The bat and the DN are stored in the barn behind my mother’s house. As I said, it would surprise me if we sailed this year, but the boats are ready, and so am I.