For all that I love my old house, and show it off when I can, it’s a burden that sometimes feels like it is getting away from me. 

Take, for example, the window screens. They had been replaced by the storm windows before this week’s snowstorm, but were left outdoors because I hadn’t figured out where to put them after the 18th-century barn in which they used to be stored was taken down and hauled off to be restored (eventually to be put up on the East Hampton Historical Society’s Mulford Farm grounds). Modern screen-and-storm combinations with metal frames may be easier to handle — you don’t have to keep switching them out, twice a year — but I just don’t think they belonged on an old house like ours. Right now, the wood-framed screens sit outside as the snow melts, leaning in a stack against the side of an exterior wall.

In the meantime, a new set of family treasures has been brought in from a now-vacated family apartment in Manhattan, joining all our regular furnishing,s which, as I like to say, “came with the house” (that is, are family inheritances from earlier generations). As the eldest of five siblings, my husband somehow wound up his family’s keeper of myriad random objects, from pre-Victorian silver-lusterware tchotchkes (anyone need a pepper shaker in the shape of Toby Philpott?) to heavy mahogany furniture (an Empire couch with no home). I’m not complaining about this abundance —but decisions have to be made.

On Friday, before the blizzard came, the movers arrived from the city apartment, toting in not only numerous chairs, including a rocker, and a few other pieces of furniture, but carton after carton of my husband’s paper files, books, and CDs and cassettes. Not to mention artwork and odd assorted white elephants, like the purple-sparkle clock with dice instead of numbers and the words “Las Vegas Time!” on its face, which has already been offloaded onto a 9-year-old grandchild. All of this was dispersed to various parts of the house, where much of it remains in boxes while we ponder what to do. The heavy, slightly rusted filing cabinet remains in the living room.

I’m not surprised that I was overcome with what might be called compulsive house-itis. I just couldn’t deal, as the kids say. I turned my attention away from all that was newly arrived and instead went about straightening drawers and closets that I haven’t seen the back of in decades. Why on earth did I choose to start thumbing through two fat files of recipes from the 1980s, which had been shoved under a kitchen counter? Maybe because it was a project that could be managed and finished quickly.

The fact that we emptied our dear old barn before the carpenters came to dismantle it had been almost a miracle. But it was necessary and got done. When it comes to the house, there is no such outside pressure, and I’m beginning to get worried that all of this will just sit where it is, gathering dust, as weeks turn into years. Some day, perhaps, we will organize a family work gang to go through the cellar, the attic, the storeroom, and all the closets, making decisions about what to keep where, what to give away, or, heaven forfend, throw out. Till then, I am just going for a nice walk. The sun has cleared away almost all the snow.

Waiting for the traffic signal to change to green at Wainscott Northwest Road on Monday, a dark bird soaring far above drew my eye against the gray and empty sky. From its size and broad and fingered wings, it seemed a bald eagle, likely a first-year juvenile, according to illustrations in the Sibley guide I looked at later on.

At the turnout at Georgica Pond, a man in a tan winter coverall and boots peered upward through a pair of binoculars. This made me glad, that someone else had seen it and had taken the time to stop and get a better look. 

A friend told me later that eagles carry the symbolism of impending change. I did not bother to look it up, as it made sense enough as an idea to stand on its own. There was a time not that long ago, really, when an eagle high over Wainscott would have been thought impossible.

The earth is going through what ecologists call a sixth great extinction. Human influence threatens the diversity of living creatures on every continent. Frogs, cheetahs, giraffes, polar bears, scores of birds may disappear by the end of the century, as climate change, invasive competition, and habitat loss alter the natural world. It is hard for me to know if eagles over Wainscott should be a pleasure to see or a dire sign. Ours is a narrowing world in which a few adaptable species can survive alongside us, in a landscape we have remade to our own liking, not theirs.

From what I know, the young eagles overhead in winter come to feed on Canada geese that arrive from the north each year to pick over the corn fields. They spend their nights on the larger ponds for protection from foxes and other terrestrial attacks. Geese do not mind being among people, at a distance, anyway. Hunting takes little toll, and stretched-necked sentries keep the feeding birds safe from the occasional dog.

More particular birds, like the summer beach’s piping plovers, are listed as endangered due to the loss of their favored breeding sites on pristine dunes. Canada geese, which can nest almost anywhere and feast greedily on suburban lawns, are probably going to be around for a long while, as may the eagles that, in turn, feast on them.

My heart soared as the Wainscott light changed and I began to drive east, the eagle still in view. Whether what I felt should have been joy or despair, I did not yet know.

—

This column has been updated to correct the name of Wainscott Northwest Road.

Mary’s great-grandmother, a star of stage and the early screen, reportedly said — or so the family story has it — on passing by the open casket of a woman who had in life borne the burden of her severe lameness with good humor, “She never suffered as I have.”

Wonderful, no? And so, the other day, I, who was the first of us to contract the wretched cold that several days hence was to render Mary wretched too, said she hadn’t suffered as I had. 

She has by now, I’ll warrant, which is why I said on New Year’s Eve in turning out the lights well before midnight that I hoped 2017 would be better — better certainly than the final week of 2016. 

As I said last week, being bedridden had given me the chance to read most of the “Book of Joy” interviews with the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu, who link joy and fellow-feeling and forgiveness with suffering, and say that it goes deeper than happiness. Am I to think then that those who suffer the most are the most joyous? Pride always finds a way!

Archbishop Tutu had a story about pride and humility too — of three bishops beating their breasts at an altar, saying they’re nothing, which, in turn, inspires a lowly acolyte nearby to do the same. “When the three bishops heard him, one elbowed the other and said, ‘Look who thinks he’s nothing.’ ”

Perhaps it was good that I was leveled so in the past 10 days, my ego, especially when it came to tennis, was becoming unruly. But now it’s time to rebuild — with a broader point of view, I hope. 

(O’en, his pink tongue lolling to one side, is looking up as I write, as if to strengthen my resolve.)

Or will it be quips as usual? Which reminds me of another of the archbishop’s jokes: When a bishop about to ordain candidates for the priesthood was told by one of them that he’d had trouble finding a book on the virtue of humility, the bishop said he needn’t look any further, that he had written the best one on the subject.

There are worse fates than lightheartedness. Though it’s warmheartedness that ought to prevail.

Given the plethora of exotic foodstuffs available these days from the five corners of the world — as well as the continual reports about what foods are good for you (or not) — it is understandable that people are changing what they eat. 

Household menu updates are, of course, most common at New Year’s, when dieting is a ritual. No one is about to diet at our house, but we read about food a lot and try to stay within healthy bounds. Healthy doesn’t mean simple, however, around here. My family has always been interested in unusual foods harvested in the wild, and in daring seafood experiments, but in recent years some new-to-me ingredients with hard-to-pronounce names have begun to appear regularly on our stove, thanks to the cookbooks of Yotam Ottolenghi, of which my husband is enamored. 

Given recent “artisanal” food trends, I shouldn’t have been too surprised when I read about a new restaurant in Greenwich Village called Springbone, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Bones from grass-fed beef and free-range chickens simmer for hours and hours to make a broth that is the basis of almost everything on the menu. 

Maybe, if you are “of a certain age,” like me, you would expect that all meat-based broths could properly just be called, you know, broths — no need to add the explanatory extra word, “bone”: After all, no one ever made a real chicken or beef or mutton broth without a bone, right? My guess is that this new trend in cuisine is so named because younger generations, raised in the factory-processed era, had never had a chance to become acquainted with how broths and soups have traditionally been cooked. (And maybe, I guess, it just sounds cooler that way?)

Springbone is the second “bone broth” eatery in Manhattan, following Brodo, which means broth in Italian. Springbone and Brodo, in turn, have followed the many Vietnamese pho restaurants in the city, which rely on broth, and on Japanese ramen restaurants, like Momi Ramen in East Hampton. 

The bone-centric menus of Springbone and Brode push bone broth into the Paleo-diet realm. You remember the Paleo diet, don’t you? It is based on the alleged mealtime habits of our most ancient ancestors: no grains, no sugars, no processed foods, and little, if any, dairy. Springbone, though, offers gluten-free grains and vegan dishes, too, including a tasty-sounding “house-made avocado mash” with seaweed flakes and za’atar. (Za’atar is one of the now-favorite spice mixtures on our shelves, thanks to Mr. Ottolenghi.) Both Springbone and Brodo boost the novelty factor further by offering broths infused with surprising ingredients, including turmeric, coconut oil, and even Bloody Mary mix. You can sip their broths from a coffee cup, too. 

I may have been fascinated by Springbone because it brings me back to my childhood, when my mother or grandmother would make “beef tea” for me when I was home sick in bed. I would guess that they used little more than an inexpensive cut of meat — bone in, no doubt — and an onion. 

I grew up believing that beef tea was an old-country remedy, because my grandmother had emigrated from Moldova, east of Romania. It turns out, however, that Miss Beeton’s famous “Book of Household Management,” which was published in 1893, recommended it, too. As late as the 1920s and 1930s, beef tea and its cousin, consommé, were popular across America not just at sick beds, but at the start of family meals. (That was the era of bone-based gelatin aspics, and jelled consommés, too, come to think of it.) Well, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. My grandchildren love a good broth-based noodle soup from Momi Rami, but somehow I doubt they’d be thrilled if I appeared at their sick bed with a cup of beef tea!

The summer’s drought ended the last of whatever miracle had been holding up the old beech tree outside my office window. Two weeks before Christmas, Kevin Savastano and his crew arrived early on a cold Friday morning, as promised, to take it away.

For years, the tree had been a seasonal curtain on my view of Main Street and the comings and goings at the library. From my desk, I look out due south toward the Town Pond Green flagpole. When the leaves were on the old beech, I could not see much, but in the winter, it was different, with a view clear to the Mulford Farm.

Kevin stopped in the office on Tuesday, looking for a check for the work, and said  the beech had been imploding and had it not been removed it almost surely would have fallen apart this winter and damaged the Star building across the narrow driveway.

Not knowing what to look for, the beech had seemed all right to me, at least in the spring. Yet by the beginning of autumn, branches had begun to fall. 

There is a bright line between life and death, I often think, but it is less obviously so for a tree. When we humans are alive, even barely and in our dying days, we are clearly alive. I think of Richard Higer, one of our most faithful letter-writers, who died on Dec. 5 of pneumonia. Mr. Higer rarely, if ever, missed a week to share his opinions with our readers. His last message, full of his left-of-center thinking, arrived at my in-box on Nov. 26,

Looking out our front-office window on a rainy Tuesday, Kevin Savastano told me that two European beech trees just up the way at Woods Lane will soon have to be taken down. I went out for a look later; even in dying, trees hold on to their majesty far longer than we do. There was nothing about their massive gray forms with rainwater slicking down their bark that said their time had come.

With the big beech that had been outside my window gone, I can see farther down Main Street to the pond. I can see each branching twig, bare of its leaves, as it reaches into the lungs of the sky. This is when trees seem vastly more interesting; there is no discernable structure to a tree in June. Summer’s cloak hides what is really going on. January lets us in on the secrets.

Finally, that year is over. But will it ever fade to black and be gone? Or will it prove a harbinger, someday to be known as Year One of the Bad Times?

I think I speak for many of us when I say 2016 was a horrible year. Personally, it was particularly hideous. I wonder how others have been coping with its ceaseless parade of death, of violence, of ever-more-dire warnings of climate cataclysm. How did they weather 2016’s political campaign, surely the ugliest and most dispiriting of our lifetimes, and how do they manage the gnawing, ever-present anxiety over what is to come? 

I listen to Marvin Gaye. A lot of Marvin Gaye. Above all, of course, “What’s Going On.” Surely the greatest soul album ever, it is on a near-constant loop of late.

To listen to this 1971 release on New Year’s Day 2017 is to know a curious condition: at once saddened by its lyrical content and ecstatically moved by the music to which those lyrics are set. Last year’s lesson, I regret to conclude, is that for all the world’s incremental progress — in scientific discovery, in health and human rights, in the eradication of poverty — we’re still the same people, after all, making the same mistakes.

Like Stevie Wonder, his colleague on the Motown Records roster, Gaye broke free from the label’s insistence on pop sounds palatable to white audiences, refusing to record again until “What’s Going On,” the song, was issued. Upon the single’s success, he quickly recorded the rest of the album, giving birth to a poem of deepest sorrow and yearning set to a 35-minute symphony. To these ears, the artist had never sung with such passion, nor would he again. 

On one hand, the album feels like a requiem. “There’s too many of you crying. . . . There’s far too many of you dying. . . . Say man, I just don’t understand / What’s going on across this land. . . . Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas / Fish full of mercury. . . . What about this overcrowded land / How much more abuse from man can she stand?”

And yet, musically, “What’s Going On” is a genre to itself, an amalgamation of languorous rhythm and blues, lush, dreamy strings, and sensual percussion grooves such as no one had heard before. Can one listen and not feel moved to dance?

The climactic final track, “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” is a five-and-a-half-minute shock wave of frustration, a multitracked Gaye pouring out humanity’s anguish. To listen, four and a half decades later, on the first day of 2017 was unnerving. “Make me want to holler / The way they do my life / This ain’t living / No, no baby, this ain’t living. . . . Crime is increasing / Trigger-happy policing / Panic is spreading / God knows where we’re heading.” It has a familiar, troubling ring. 

In what has become a sad refrain, Marvin Gaye was shot dead. One of America’s innumerable victims of gun violence, the artist, strung out on heavy, prolonged cocaine use, had intervened in a dispute between his parents. Allegedly afraid for his life, his father, an alcoholic minister with whom he’d had a most arduous relationship, shot him twice.

We hurtle, or stagger, into 2017, and I can’t help but feel an ominous mood of upheaval in the offing, of disorder and possibly violent change. 

“Father, father, we don’t need to escalate / You see, war is not the answer / For only love can conquer hate / You know we’ve got to find a way / To bring some loving here today.”

That part is up to us. Unless, of course, we’re still the same people we were in 2016, making the same mistakes.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama seem to agree that joy springs through suffering, and so, I suppose, it’s appropriate that I’m reading “The Book of Joy” at the moment, while in the throes of a wretched cold.

There is probably no better time, for I — the “I” that I thought of as being so spry — have been flattened, and quickly too, beginning on Christmas Day. A good time, then, to read about the importance of reaching out to the world — as O’en, our 6-month-old white golden retriever, has done since day one — rather than simply reach out for another cough drop.

Joy, the two sages say, goes deeper than happiness, inasmuch as it has its roots in the commonality of mankind. 

We are the same person, says the Dalai Lama. We are who we are through others — that’s ubuntu, says the archbishop. Joy, then, is about more than simply feeling good about oneself and being content with one’s good fortune.

I had always thought of sportswriting as “the joy department,” as in celebrating the moment, being in synchrony with the creation, that sort of thing, but that may have been at the expense of reality, in which joy and suffering are intertwined.

I’m still not going into the frigid surf on New Year’s Day, though! That’s for those further along the path than me. I will be there at Main Beach to celebrate, yes — and I did mail in a donation to the East Hampton Food Pantry today — but not as a co-sacrificer.

Such rites, I suppose, have their roots in mankind’s earliest times, though there was a lot more blood then. Yet the point remains, as the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu say, that we’re all in this together — even as we reach for another cough drop.

The grandchildren were visiting one day last week when one of the boys noticed a large box with a bull’s-eye logo on it, and came running. “Target,” he shouted, “Is it for me?” Yes, I know this is a visual age, but I was still surprised. Thinking he was just too smart for his own good, I grabbed the box and slid it under a bed, out of sight. 

I believe in shopping near home, but had ordered something from Target that didn’t seem available anywhere in this vicinity. When the package arrived, I noticed that it looked awfully large for what I had purchased, but I didn’t get around to opening it until Friday night, the night before Christmas Eve.

Oops! Instead of the very specific and specialized Lego set I’d paid for, the box contained two children’s cardigan sweaters, size 7-8, two T-shirts with silly branded “Star Wars” images, and two pairs of snow pants, one with a bib. UPS had dropped off the box at the right house; it was addressed to me, but it contained Christmas items bought by a stranger in Maryland.

You can imagine how long the wait was when I called Target to speak with someone who might help. Eventually, a person who was pleasant enough — considering the pressure he must have been under, some 36 hours before Santa’s arrival — told me there was no way to get the right present in time, even though I had clearly paid for it. I was able to give him the name of the woman for whom the box had been intended (her name was on the packing materials), and he told me she had called a day or two earlier and her replacements had already been sent. 

As for my grandson’s longed-for Christmas present, nothing could be done; it was just too late to get something from the warehouse to UPS for delivery the next day. The customer-service person ordered a replacement anyway and said if I was lucky it would arrive the day after Christmas. (It didn’t.) 

I wanted to be a good Samaritan and send the snow pants and T-shirts and the the rest of it back to Target, but I didn’t want to pay for shipping. This time, the man on the phone was unmoved. He could send me a return label only for what I had ordered, even though it hadn’t arrived. Going back and forth with him, I felt the pressure rising. He wasn’t going to send a return label and that was that. Did Target want me to throw it away, I asked indignantly? “Just give it away,” he said. Give it away? All right, then.

My grandson had told two or three different Santa Clauses that what he really, really wanted was this particular Lego set, so I was upset, but couldn’t really do anything about it until the next day, Christmas Eve, when I formed a search party.

The Wharf Shop in Sag Harbor, one of our favorite stores of all time, had all sorts of toy treasures, including a quite impressive selection of Lego sets, but not the Ghostbusters Ecto 1 and 2 set (whatever that might be!) that was my grandson’s dream.

But, guess what? 

All’s well that ends well. 

Stevenson’s, Southampton’s very fine toy store — it used to be Lilywhite’s — had the very thing in stock. One left. Exactly what I was looking for. Undeterred by pouring rain and wind on Saturday, I made it to Southampton, and Christmas was saved.

I gave away the Target clothes and felt like Chris Kringle himself.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Leo the pig. Regular readers know all about Leo, a supposed teacup pig that now, at age 4, has grown to what I estimate to be 130 pounds.  

My oldest child had found a Texas trailer park breeder on the internet who promised that the cute pink piglet would never exceed 10 pounds — money back guaranteed.  As I have written before, I said it was impossible that he would remain small, and, anyway, we did not need a pig as a pet. I was overruled, even if these four years later I am proven right.

The question now is what to do with him. I did not want Leo in the first place, but the way things turned out, he has mostly become my responsibility. Most mornings, well before my alarm goes off, Leo is up from his comfortable bed near the fireplace, looking to be fed. 

He makes his desires known first with a round of loud grunts. Next, if that does not get me out of bed, he increases the pressure by knocking over whatever he can, be it kitchen chairs, the metal bathroom garbage basket, or his self-filling water fountain on the porch. He is smart that way; I get up and fill his bowl as the dogs stand by wondering for all the world why they did not think of that themselves.

Truth is that I don’t mind feeding the pig and the dogs all that much. The bigger problem is that Leo enjoys chewing the woodwork. Some time ago he discovered the pleasure of snapping chunks off the shingles on the enclosed porch. An antique chest is increasingly distressed with teeth marks. He has chewed nearly all the way through the edges of the few stairs he can reach. Normal outdoor pigs root in the ground; Leo prefers to express his creative urges in the warm indoors.

We could move him outdoors, but with the cold months ahead that would be cruel. Plus, if we gave him a heated pad to sleep on or a shed to hide in, he would soon chew through the wires and electrocute himself or burn down the shed. The couple of animal rescue farms we got in touch with said they were full up with pigs. 

Keeping Leo seems out of the question. We are down to only a few pieces of furniture on the level of the house that he can roam in, and he smells so bad that having people over for dinner or a drink is impossible. 

My best plan, though I doubt I’ll get around to it, is to borrow a pony trailer and haul Leo back to Texas. If we are not going to get our money back, at least we might get the satisfaction of dropping him off at the breeder’s. Anyway, it would make for a hell of a story.

The late boys basketball coach Roger Golden, when I asked what it was he loved about basketball, said, “The gyms are warm.”

And indeed it’s so, especially in Bridgehampton’s, that tiny black-and-gold bandbox that has a precious quality that you don’t find in the more modern, ill-lit, cavernous ones. 

True, Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees, winners of nine state championships, with perhaps yet another on the way, deserve (have deserved for years) a regulation-size gym, one sanctioned for playoff games that the team would otherwise have to contest on the road. But it will be sad to see this jewel go. 

Well, it won’t go — it will remain an auditorium, with its curtained stage, the momentary resting place sometimes of the backsides of players intent on making layups, at one end, and, at the other, two wide doorways through which the ball can be inbounded more easily than when pressed up against the padded “Killer Bees” wall in between.

The gym is interesting, too, for the fact that, while it provides a warm and intimate setting for the lucky fans often jammed into it, it can at the same time be frightening for teams not used to playing in such close quarters. You’ve got to be good, really good, to win there because there’s no room to breathe. Hold on to the ball and you’re done. There’s no time, no space. Pass, pass, shoot. 

The games have a prizefight aura without the crushing blows that attend boxing rings, though crashing into the wall, however much padded, is not a fate you’d wish upon anyone. It happened in last night’s game with Port Jefferson to J.P. Harding, and it was nice to see him get up and make both free throws. 

Afterward, everybody comes out onto the floor and it’s a wonderful feeling, like a warm embrace.

A feeling that I doubt you’ll find many places in this world.