On a cold and slippery afternoon this week, I found myself immersed in conversation about an idyllic summer house. And this time I could understand — or, I should say, almost understand — why some people who have tons of money would pay unbelievable sums for a summer rental. It really was gorgeous, with a long history, miles of lawn, and miles of white oceanfront sand.

The house being discussed was advertised last year at $450,000 for the month of July or $800,000 for the summer. I’m not sure people from other parts of the country would even believe that prices of such enormity (and I recognize that the word “enormity” conveys moral judgment) were really real.

It’s hard to talk about individual wealth without Donald J. Trump intruding. So I looked him up on the 2016 Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. Poor Donald. Forbes places him only at number 156, tied with Steven Spielberg, with net worths of $3.7 billion. Sad.

Other South Fork homeowners are higher on the list, including Ira Rennert, of the notorious Fairfield residential compound in Sagapon­ack, as well as Katharine Rayner of East Hampton and Ralph Lauren, who has a place in Montauk. I have the feeling they don’t rent out their summer houses. 

Trump has taken to calling Mar-a-Lago, his place in Palm Beach, Fla., the “winter White House.” He is reportedly heading there tomorrow for a vacation, two weeks into his new job. I don’t know if he ever rents the house out, or how he manages to live there part time while doing this, but the estate is now home to something called “Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club,” which is described on its website as “the epicenter of the social scene in Palm Beach.” (Like most of what our new Commander in Chief says, I take that boast with a grain of salt. “Membership at the club,” the marketing materials continue, “provides the highest privileges and an elite lifestyle reserved for a select few.” (Mm-hm.)

In 2012, The New York Times estimated that the net worth of America’s top 1 percent — and we heard a lot about the 1 percent during the presidential campaign — was nearly $8.4 million, or 69 times the median household’s net worth of $121,000. And that is only $8.4 million, with an “M,” while everyone on the Forbes 400 list counts net worth in billions, with a “B.” I have no idea what percentage of the populace the 400 represent, but it has to be infinitesimal.

But back to the East End. The gap between poverty and wealth here is not more extreme than in, say, New York City, but I think you could say that the relationship between the rich, the not-sorich, and the poor here is more intimate. And the gap is more extreme than it used to be. Who would have thought 20 or 25 years ago that there would be seven active food pantries between Bridgehampton and Montauk? 

In a recent Star story, Joanne Pilgrim reported that East Hampton’s pantry helps feed 260 families every week. If I were a New York State legislator, I would introduce a bill proposing a fee on exceedingly expensive rentals. A morality tax. Say, 1 or 2 percent on top of rentals above $100,000 per month? Surely the community could find a good use for the money, in meals for shut-ins, hot lunches for school children, scholarships for community athletic programs.

But wait, you say: The existing 2-percent tax on most real estate transfers, from which the five East End towns reap millions for land preservation and, more recently, for water quality improvement, is evidence that the wealthy already do contribute to the community’s well being. That’s true, but when you are throwing around $450,000 just for a July by the ocean, I doubt you’d notice a few thousand more for the neighbors who mow your lawns and wash your socks (and, in some cases, come from families who once owned the land that mansion sits on).

Time was that people here bent small oaks to mark property lines. They were called lop fences, and more than a few remain visible on roadsides if you know where to look. Or not look; what seems to be a lop fence can be found at the edge my house lot in Amagansett on a plot of land that has been in the family since the 19th century.

Best I can figure, these particular bits of work were not fences exactly. Rather, they were an easy way to mark boundaries that, if done correctly, would last for years. Trees grow vertically; a horizontal half-trunk is likely the work of human hands long ago, a kind of Bonac bonsai.

Old books that mention lop fences suggest that, in fact, they were just that, fences, or at least parts of fences made from brush. Stone walls, like those found as near as Connecticut across the Sound, are almost never seen here, appropriate rocks being hard to come by on the glacier-sourced sandbar that is Long Island.

The lop fence in my side yard should have been obvious to me. Growing up, it was a favorite climbing tree, and at one point I got in trouble with my father for taking an antique pew door down from the attic and nailing it unknowingly into its branches as a down payment on a tree house.

It does not look like all that much, a scrub oak of about 20 feet high with a trunk that divides about two feet off the ground. The lopped portion, called that presumably because some kind of axe-work was involved, juts out horizontally almost due south from the main trunk, and is nearly as thick.

It was only recently, walking around the property with an old survey, that it occurred to me that the climbing tree was most likely a marker like those I liked to go see from time to time in Northwest Woods. While not precisely on the line, as shown on the paper I carried, the tree was close enough. That the branch that had been split and bent more than a century ago ran from north to south sealed that conclusion.

My lop fence is a small one by local standards. If you take a drive along Springy Banks Road you can see quite a few of them, including the largest one I know, near where Hand’s Creek Road runs in. This lop fence tree is worth pulling over into the small town parking area nearby and getting out of the car to see. The portion that follows the ground seems as big around as a rhinoceros. Whoever made it must have been showing off, or at least had a lot of time on his or her hands.

Well, it is true. I am a liberal and I sleep in. But so did my father, who was a Vermont Republican. As in politics, so in dress. I still have his black linen tie, which he often wore with a white shirt and a dark jacket, to such an extent that a woman once said he “shrieked of conservatism.”

He was also very funny. Yes, the two can go together, though I agree that liberals, less concerned with original sin and all that, tend to be funnier.

I mean, life is pretty absurd when you think about it, so why not laugh. 

“Let No One Untrained in Absurdity Enter Here” is over my portal. And now, to complete the picture, I have a chair fitting my rank and years of service to swivel in. I saw the high-backed, leather (wait, let me smell), yes, leather throne downstairs yesterday. Affixed to it was a yellow Post-it with the name “Russell.”

And so I asked him. “Russell, is that your chair? If so, it’s a fitting reward for all your years of service.”

“It’s yours if you want it,” he said, acknowledging that when it came to hoariness and force of habit, I had him beat.

We trundled it upstairs and squeezed it through the doorway and set it down. I, in turn, took the low-slung, sprung ripped ersatz leather thing I’d sat on for God knows how long downstairs and, with some sheepiness, put it where the regal one had been.

I’ve just gone down to see if anyone happening to plop on it might risk injury and found that the back is now well adjusted and offers more support than I once thought it did. 

“Buyer’s remorse?” Russell asked. 

“No, no,” I said, “it’s just that I’m having trouble keeping up with all his change.” 

“Here today, gone tomorrow. . . .”

“Or the day after tomorrow. . . . The inauguration, you know. . . .”

And of course that reminded me of the film by the same name that Mary and I had watched during the recent all-night snowfall. Disasters can lighten your mood, I remember thinking at the time. At least fictive ones.

As for the non-fictive kind, one of which appears to be looming, at least I’ve got a plush seat to hold on to.

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. 

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.

By the time Bernie Sanders swept the New Hampshire Democratic primary and urged voters to go to Bernie Sanders.com to make online contributions to his campaign, Barack Obama had long since revolutionized presidential fund-raising by using the internet in the 2008 race to seek donations and to gather information and organize the ranks. (Time and Twitter moved on.)

It will come as no surprise if I say I admire Mr. Obama. These last few weeks of his tenure, and his eloquent farewell address — in particular, his willingness to address the topic of race head-on — have secured his place in my mind as an exemplary president and a fine human being.

So it was a bit annoying on Tuesday to receive an email, purportedly from him, asking for $1. Anyone who has gone to a political website in the last few years is likely to be familiar with the experience of inadvertently signing up for innumerate emails from candidates running for national office and, naturally, asking for signatures on petitions as well as, of course, money. 

As Trump supporters are wont to say: Isn’t it time to move on?

The small print at the bottom of the Obama email noted that it wasn’t actually anything to do with a presidential campaign, or really much to do with Mr. Obama, but was from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, although that wasn’t spelled out in the body of the text. The name of the organization is in any event somewhat misleading because it assists only those in or seeking to be in the House of Representatives.

The subject heading of the email — “unfortunately,” with a lower case “u” — drew me in. In part, it read: “Helen, I’ll make this quick — I’m emailing for $1.” It went on in what were supposedly Barack Obama’s words: “As my time in office comes to a close . . .” and so on.

What I find annoying about these emails, in addition to the $1 thing they always try, is that I don’t remember ever having given money to the D.C.C.C. before; in fact, I’m quite sure I never have. As a rule, and as a journalist, I have never registered in any political party. Nevertheless, it seems I must have made some sort of donation in the past that flagged me as someone who could profitably be entered into the email pipeline, forever to be tapped on the shoulder and asked. 

Whatever side of the political fence you fall on, it is likely that you, like me, have received many insincerely personalized messages in the last year, with pleas from candidates whose names you barely recognize, from all over the country.

But really, do any email recipients in 2017 still believe patently silly statements like this one in Tuesday’s email? “We still need 35 more Democrats from 11937 to step up before Friday.” Still need 35 for what? I get the Zip code, but why Friday?

I know the word “algorithm,” and can throw it around, but I don’t have a clue about algorithmic procedures. Which brings me back to the internet. If an email from an organization with which I have no quarrel and which is signed by someone I admire contains information that is less than 100-percent factual and reliable, how am I supposed to believe information that comes from it at more important moments? And what am I supposed to make of the email promises of those whose points of view I do not even share?

A new house is going up across the street from mine. It is large, with separate two-story sections joined by a steel-framed atrium or what might be a barn-like social space or indoor swimming pool. It’s hard to say. 

When my parents first moved the small cottage that would be my boyhood home onto a waterfront lot that had come down through the Edwards family, theirs would be the easternmost winterized house on Cranberry Hole Road. The stink rising on an east wind from the Promised Land fish factory made living any closer unthinkable until the bunker boats sailed away for good in about 1968, and the migrant laborers who ran the giant steam boilers moved on in search of other work.

As kids, my brother, sister, and I were allowed to roam in the vast unspoiled sandy heath across Cranberry Hole Road, which extended, interrupted only by the railroad tracks and the thin strip of Montauk Highway, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Fragile shells and rounded stones were proof that the low dune landscape had once been a beach, presumably at a time of higher sea level or before the Napeague isthmus reached out from what we know as Hither Hills to join with the Devon highlands.

After a rain, we knew to check a place in the lee of a dune where bits of Native American pottery and charcoal were likely to have been exposed. I collected them and quartz fragments that my father explained had been left over from one of the original inhabitants’ toolmaking. 

There were two spots in the wind-scraped dune where clay fragments and stones had accumulated, only a few feet from where my neighbor is putting up a weekend place. I realized much later that the lithic debris had come from a day’s or even just a few hours’ work. Over time, as I accumulated pottery shards, it became obvious that they were from a single, unusually thin-walled vessel. Marks made with a scallop shell in the soft clay before it was fired were the only decoration.

The remnants of the fire that might have been under the clay pot were small. They were perhaps from a night’s rest or single meal taken on a break from toolmaking rather than a long encampment in the dune. 

Early Saturday, after a cup of coffee and piece of toast, I put on my coat and walked to the ocean. The route from the end of my driveway is roughly south-southeast, over a portion of town nature preserve into Napeague State Park. For a while, I followed an abandoned fish factory rail spur then crossed the main Long Island Rail Road tracks and the highway. 

Deer bones lay in several places in the dry leaves. I followed deer trails through the pine woods south of the highway before coming into the open grassland and onto the ocean dunes.

On my way home, I heard music and the sound of hammering as I stepped off the rail spur. Workers at the new house had arrived. A percussion-heavy track with Spanish vocals floated over the bearberry. I waved to a man on a ladder as I passed and thought about the last people who had worked on this spot a couple of hundred years ago, or a couple of thousand.

The man waved back, and I went on my way.

Mary was reading the other day about “inemuri,” the Japanese tradition of napping on the job.

“You’d be highly respected there,” she said.

“Well, I’ve never entirely gone to sleep on the job,” I said. “I’ve always jerked myself awake.”

“So you think.”

It is true. I tend toward narcolepsy, the more so as I age, while she is plagued at times by insomnia, brought on by feelings of being alone in the universe, or, contrariwise, by the knowledge that things are going very well.

Hers is by far the worse ailment, to my mind, and I would love it if a cure were found. None has yet. She is simply too smart, too keenly aware of how fleeting everything is, though the eternal round, while it may offer solace in the Orient, offers cold comfort to her. 

Neither of us believes in reincarnation, though she has professed the wish at times that I come back as a woman. Then I would see, then I would have my eyes opened! I’ve always shuddered at the thought . . . before dozing off. 

On that subject, she has learned over the years to check closely when my head’s bowed intently over a book before putting a bowl of hot soup in my lap.

“Just practicing, you know, so that I’ll finally get some respect at the office,” I say on coming to.

Meanwhile, I can say truly that she has suffered more than I have, if for no other reason than she is so much more aware than I of the suffering of others. She should, then, be the more joyous of us two, if I read the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu aright. 

But her loving heart can keep her awake at night.

I have a love-hate relationship with winter. Every so often I mull about moving to an always-temperate place, someplace where momentum doesn’t get lost for half a year, where my outward self, the one that flings open the door and steps outside barely awake, stays active all year and the half-outside life I adopt during the season — and the swimming — never ends. 

But then winter comes, and there are so many things, a list that surprises me: the play of light and shadow on the bedroom wall on a weekend afternoon; reading in bed under the skylight; the torpor of warmth and well-being when settled under a blanket after being outside in the cold; the creak of the trees, those ancient Ent-beings with their gray wrinkled trunks, when it is supercold and there is not even a frost-breath of a breeze but they are moving ever so slightly, and their molecules are so cold, constricted, sap so slow — the science of it, I really should know — that just the flexibility required to stand pushes a deep-wood sigh out through their surface. 

I don’t do the transition well: There’s too much to do and the cold sneaks up on me. How many years have I bought fall bulbs, and been out there as, or even after, the ground was frozen, trying to augur a hole and get them in? Used to be, I’d set Halloween as a benchmark for getting it done. Then Thanksgiving, then my birthday, a short time later. 

This year, I didn’t buy bulbs at all. And out there, under a dusting of snow, is a tarp covered with a pile of crinkly brown leaves, just a dollop of all the others I never — not yet — raked up. 

It’s January; I’m ready to forget about it. I’ve got most of the terra-cotta pots in so they don’t freeze and thaw and crack and, I think, the outdoor shower is off. Hoses away. 

All of that’s a burden, in the days when the door is shutting on the pleasure days — the days of a bay dip after work, of some hours lying on sand dreaming and writing, of the soft and gentle air as I lie suspended in the hammock. 

And yet — there’s a gentleness about winter, I’ve got to admit. There is time in winter, or at least at first I think there is. A release from the obligation to be out, to do. Much less bustle in town, itself a blessing and a more and more critical antidote to a longer and longer, and more annoying, “high season.” 

I love the bare treescape best, I think — the exposed shape of charcoal branch bones against a vaporous sky. It’s close, though, because I do adore the lacy spring trees, the curl of unfurling leaves, the frilly buds and blossoms of pear and cherry and apple. But I’m not a Sally Sunshine kind of girl, so though I love the nascent look of spring, the promise — the summer green is nice, but too blatant to stir me — it’s the winter trees I love. 

I’m enamored right now; not inclined to write about the hate part of the equation. Winter’s been going along . . . a bit of snow, and then a thaw, some bracing air but nothing too hard to take. 

It’s the lockdown I hate —- the underside of the closing in, the shutting down that I savor. Long weeks of ice and snow and trouble, winter toil, trouble getting around, trouble getting to work, trouble getting the car cleared off, trouble, now, making sure that I don’t fall and get hurt. Those weeks or even months when one more challenge, one more trial, will sail me right over the edge.

That winter, though, when for ages I never got farther into the driveway than the edge of the road, and followed a barely shoveled path in my snow boots, dragging my bags and bundles to and from work, that winter on Valentine’s Day, there was this: a heavy snow falling, but I was still headed out, meeting some other singles for a dose of friend-love and dinner. In my big puffy coat, lower legs stuck crookedly into the snow like unsteady sticks, I fell slowly onto my side on top of the snowbank and it held me gently there. Big flakes hit my face and the stars were bright ice chips in the sky. Wrapped up and comfortable, I stayed a minute, long enough for the gift of a fox, soft-footed on the covered road and eye level, running by. 

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.