They never should have done it. They never should have released the news that coffee wasn’t bad for you, was in fact good for you, so you might as well drink till your chromosomes start crackling. Because I have, will, and continue to. 

It was yet one more of those reversals of conventional wisdom that turn back the clock to a time when you could more or less wing it with health concerns — knock back that red wine or beer, even the smallest and weakest of chest-centered organs will pump with newfound vigor. While you’re at it, go ahead, stuff nuts in your mouth, squirrel-like, they’ll do nothing more than help blow that built-up plaque out of your arterial pipes like oil-mist from a Harley’s exhaust system. 

Salt? Never mind the coy thumb and forefinger pinch, break out the ladle — turns out too little will lay you low with a stroke. And why not lard up with proteins to stoke your body’s fires? Don’t worry about that panniculus of jiggling flesh at midriff, carry it proudly as a signifier of your wise all-things-in-moderation judgment.

All things considered, though, coffee is the best, as articulated seemingly semimonthly in the pages of what is surely the nation’s most informative, even indispensable, periodical, Bottom Line. Unfailingly devoid of advertising, each issue comes chockablock with fascinating factoids (“Did you know that medical error is the third-leading cause of death in the U.S.?”), mother-knows-best tips (“Nail polish stops window-screen tears”), and occasionally hair-raising reportage (“Can Your Cell Phone Cause Cancer? The Answer Just Changed From ‘Possibly’ to ‘Probably’”), all courtesy of a dozen or sometimes upward of a score of contributors and clearly laid out across 16 succinct pages. 

“Liver Disease Is Rampant” declares one recent headline, but turn the page and you have your near-cure under a one-word subheading: coffee. It’s good for reducing inflammation — cancer, too — and not only that, two extra cups of joe a day will cut the risk of cirrhosis by almost half (for you two-fisted drinkers out there). Worried about Parkinson’s? A family history of Alzheimer’s? Spark up the percolator.

But I could’ve told you this, or something like it, more than two decades ago, when I was still new to the pleasures of the beverage and a friend showed me a yellowing used bookstore find detailing how some sultan of yore once tested the physiological consequences of coffee by confining two sad-sack prisoners to a tower to drink nothing but cup after cup of the strong Turkish stuff. The ill effects were none, however; the captives simply sat around, talked, and drank in peace.

In my case, I must say it’s become a crutch. Got a writing assignment? As a matter of fact I do, and it’s now 11:15 at night as I type these words into a Google Doc, my left leg still hammering like a woodpecker’s beak from the Starbucks venti I drained hours ago. 

Most runners know of the benefits of drinking a cup of coffee before pounding the pavement — the blood flow, the alertness, the, uh, placebo effect. On my way to engage in my midlife crisis regimen of postwork 5K-ish runs, as I pass Sag Harbor’s most relentlessly frequented business, I think, “Boy, I should stop in for a quick cup of 7-Eleven coffee; I’ll sip it as I drive.” 

Hey, I’ve been reading on a computer screen all day while failing to keep up with the usual leaking-faucet drip of emails, what could be the harm?

Then in the mail the other day came a Bottom Line with this teaser on the cover: “Hot drinks linked to cancer; page 10.”

Just keep it under 149 degrees. You might be okay.

Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.

I had been saying that I was going to Nova Scotia, but that turned out to be one of those typically American mistakes about Canadian geography that so horrify our neighbors to the north: Prince Edward Island, which we visited last week, sits above Nova Scotia and is a province of its own. 

Everyone refers to the island as P.E.I., and I did, too, despite my aversion to cutesy short takes, acronyms, and the like. We had been told Prince Edward Island is like the South Fork of 40 or 50 years ago, but based on a week’s evidence I disagree. P.E.I. is another country not only because — as in all of Canada — its signage and governance are bilingual, with written French and English everywhere, but because the people seem to share a disarming temperament. They’re easy-going, warm, and engagingly friendly!

Of course, I did find myself making comparisons. Like the East End, Prince Edward Island has a three-month resort season (although it’s now true that ours stretches to May and September), and many businesses there that cater to tourists close up, as many of ours do, after Labor Day. Also, we’re both into potatoes. Some 88,000 acres in P.E.I. are planted in spuds, I was told, providing one-quarter of all those grown in Canada. I told anyone who evinced even mild curiosity that eastern Long Island was once known for its potatoes, too, but that our fields these days mostly sprout McMansions. P.E.I. also grows wheat, barley, and canola. Lobster remains a common denominator; the P.E.I. lobster is a bit smaller, on average, than those that are still harvested by the boatload in the Gulf of Maine. And we feasted on mussels and Malpeque oysters.

In much of Canada, especially the west and north, aboriginal people are a powerful presence, but on P.E.I., as on Long Island, aboriginals’ presence isn’t very evident to visitors — in our case, the Montauketts, in theirs, the Mi’kmaq. Tourists on P.E.I. tend to be from Ontario or Nova Scotia, or from Japan, of all places. What draws droves in tour buses all the way from Tokyo? The timeless appeal of the “Anne of Green Gables” books, which schoolgirls everywhere clearly still adore.

Then there are the Acadians. As a child I learned about their plight in the 18th century from Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” but I didn’t know that others, who sought safety in the Canadian Maritimes, suffered expulsion and tragedy, too. We visited P.E.I.’s Acadian museum, on the west end of the province, which described what befell them, as well as their eventual return. Today, those of Acadian descent savor their own culture and support public schools where French is the first language.

As for the landscape, it is similar to what ours used to be — in that the classic P.E.I. vista is an open stretch of potato fields ending in beach-grass-covered dunes and ocean waves — but there are many very distinct differences: For starters, their soil is red (really red! there’s even a folk song about red dirt, and shops selling “dirt shirts” dyed with soil). Much of the province unfolds in gorgeous rolling hills dotted with cattle; we watched combines as they mowed hay, leaving behind picturesque rows of big, round hay rolls instead of haystacks. We visited a goat farm, and a mill making wool blankets. Ocean dunes and empty beaches stretch for uninterrupted miles on the north coast.

In addition to Acadian culture,  a musical throwback to the Scots and Irish who settled in P.E.I. certainly makes it very different from eastern Long Island. A ceilidh (pronounced KAY-lee) is basically what the Nova Scotians call a “kitchen party”: a good-humored musical evening. Ceilidhs are popular tourist attractions, and they seemed to occur every night in small community halls rather than pubs. 

The one we attended was led by a talented musician on accordion, piano, and guitar, and an Irish jokester and storyteller on harmonica and accordion. The audience sang as directed and clapped and stamped its feet with gusto. Two young women showed off their step-dancing prowess. A 50-50 raffle was introduced with a song and explanation that the money went to the women’s institute that ran the hall. A man from Ottawa won $90 Canadian.

Another surprising difference between P.E.I. and home is that the surf there, arriving on the beaches over multiple sandbars — and, coming down from the north over the Gulf of St. Lawrence without as broad a fetch — is too low and mild to attract surfers, who don’t seem to exist. Despite the warmth of the water, we saw none (and hardly any evidence of yoga chic).

Then there is Charlottetown, the capital — a town, really, rather than a city — which boasts old  buildings that have not been torn down, three bookstores, a used-comic-book store, and a candy store called Freak Lunchbox, which sells every imaginable sweet, from the familiar to the intentionally disgusting (to the delight of my grandchildren, and the disgust of grandma). Of course, there was also an “Anne of Green Gables” store and “Anne of Green Gables” chocolate shop on Queen Street, the main commercial thoroughfare.

At The Star, I have tended to disparage travelogues readers sometimes send us for publication, thinking I’d rather pay attention to the opinions of someone who isn’t “from away,” a term that is still used in P.E.I., as it still is, in some circles, here. Still, I really want to tell you about my trip to Prince Edward Island . . . and I will try to bite my tongue next time I scoff.  

I came home from work two Tuesdays ago to find my 8-year-old daughter wearing a fancy summer dress, with her hair brushed nicely after a day at camp. “I’m ready to meet Hillary,” she announced.

When I told her that I did not think that would happen, she crumpled. “Why not? You said she’s here. You said we might see her.” 

Ever since learning that Hillary Clinton would be visiting East Hampton, Jade had been hoping she would have a chance to meet her. It’s my fault for mentioning that it was a slim possibility. I mismanaged her expectations. A failure of Parenting 101. 

It’s a curious thing, her fascination with Hillary. She’s the only famous person, aside from Elsa from “Frozen,” whom Jade has ever wanted to meet face to face. 

On Primary Day, she told me, “Mom, you have to vote for Hillary. We need to have a girl president!” 

“Woman,” I reminded her, but it floored me, first that she had any idea what was happening in national politics, and then that she had such a strong opinion of who should get my vote and why. A simple reason, and a lot of people would say that’s not enough, but clearly the significance of this election for women is not lost on little girls. 

Trump, she says, “is too bossy.” 

I’ve heard kids the same age as Jade chatting on the beach about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and which one they thought stood a better chance of winning and for what reasons. 

My son, who’s 6, refers to the whole thing as “the Lady and the Trump.” 

Pundits and pollsters would do well to listen to what children are saying. It’s hard to kid a kid. 

I’ve never met Donald Trump, but had the chance to meet Hillary as a much younger reporter. And like many who live in East Hampton, I’ve seen her from afar here a number of times. I know someone who’s related to someone who’s a close friend and someone else who’s a friend of a friend, and so on and so on. In Jade’s mind, it stood to reason that a meeting was assured. 

When I was not that much older than she is and obsessed with all things Beatles, I would beg my parents to drive me by the Eastman estate, hoping I might see Paul McCartney just going out or just returning. Where I got my intel, I cannot be sure; we had just moved to East Hampton and knew only a handful of people. There were tall hedges surrounding most of the property, but as I recall there were some gaps by the tennis court, so when we drove by for the second or ninth or 23rd time, I would pay particular attention to the tennis court area. I’m pretty sure, though I cannot be certain, that once I saw his calves and his feet, but I never met him or saw his face in the height of my obsession. To this day, that’s one celebrity sighting that still holds a thrill. 

I didn’t go to such lengths to help Jade satisfy her desire to meet Hillary. There were no Spielberg estate drive-bys, we didn’t wait with a banner outside one of her fund-raising destinations, but boy did I kick myself when I saw Doug Kuntz’s photo of the Clintons smiling as they shook hands with a friendly passer-by at the Georgica Beach parking lot. Had we been in the right place at the right time, it could have been Jade. 

Back at home that Tuesday night, Jade sadly accepted that her face-to-face with Hillary was not in the cards this time around. The fact that she was so confident it could be is a beautiful thing. My daughter is 8 and she believes a woman could be president and she believes she will meet her. 

There will be a next time, I hope, and my smart and determined girl, a future leader to be sure, will be ready. 

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor. 

A biblical-grade plague descended on Montauk in recent days, according to residents and visitors. And what has people talking is not the oversupply of bros and hipsters. 

Swarming black flies have suddenly appeared at Montauk Point and on north-facing beaches in stunning numbers. As far as I know, these are not the same dreaded black flies of New Hampshire and Maine — those things leave swelling welts; the Montauk menaces just hurt like hell.

I first met up with the flies with my son, Ellis, at Hither Hills, where we had gone to snorkel and look at fish on Saturday. Going into the water, there was no sign of what was to come, but when we emerged it was as if we had stumbled into a nest of hornets. 

Slapping at our legs and arms, Ellis and I ran to my truck, jumped inside, and started to go. The problem was that a good three dozen of the flies had followed us into the cab. It was difficult to fend them off my exposed ankles and drive at the same time, let me tell you.

Monday night, getting out of the water after surfing near Montauk Point, it was even worse. Hundreds of them, drawn, it was clear, by the moisture on my skin and surfboard, rushed in. Cursing and stumbling, I made my way as quickly as possible back up the trail. The bug spray that I had stashed with my flip-flops did nothing at all, diluted, I assumed, by the saltwater still on my skin.

It is kind of a fitting thing, I suppose, right when the waves are getting good, thanks to Hurricane Gaston far out in the ocean to the east and surfers have a little more time to get in the water, that a new challenge, like the flies, arises. There’s a bit of poetry in that, cussing like a sailor nothwithstanding. 

Perhaps someone among our readers knows where a bundle of damp beach things came from and will tell me. I found it on an upholstered stool near the living room door one afternoon in early August, and accused my 15-year-old grandson of knowing who left it there. He had arrived that day alone and left on foot and was as puzzled as I.

The bundle contained a thick, dark-blue towel about six feet long with a handsome insignia on it for Fighting Chance, the Sag Harbor organization that aids those struggling with cancer; a pale-orange T-shirt made of nylon and elastane with the brand name O’Neill emblazoned across the chest, and a red pair of GapKids extra-large boy’s bathing trunks. The shirt and trunks were obviously much too small for the 15-year-old and ridiculously too big for either of my 6-year-old grandsons.

I took them to the laundry room, where they have remained, and when I picked them up to take another look, a week later, they were still damp. August certainly was muggy, wasn’t it?

None of the neighbors is a young man, and no one seemed to have visitors who would fit into the trunks or shirt. Could this be one of those cases in which random roving summer visitors wander into the wrong house? You do hear about people coming home and finding strangers napping in the flower bed or porch swing.

Well, if anyone can claim these things, please give me a call. They looked almost new, and the swimming days of summer are nearly over.

Another August mystery, at least for me, is how the term “August people” became ubiquitous. I must lead a pretty sheltered life in the summer — hiding out, as so many of us do, to the point of almost becoming antisocial — because I hadn’t heard these words used pejoratively until a recent Star staff meeting. 

About a month ago, when a Bloomberg journalist phoned to ask for my opinion on what the nickname for this summer would turn out to be — something usually comes to the fore, like “the summer of the Surf Lodge” or “the summer before Sandy,” in reference to the hurricane — I suggested “the summer crowding got out of control,” which she said was too obvious to catch on. (She was right. It’s not exactly catchy. And heaven knows we’ve been saying the crowding has been “the worst” every summer for 15 or 20 years now . . . though this year, honestly, I think the cultural consensus is that it’s finally and indisputably true that we’ve reached maximum capacity. Anyway.)  

Later, I asked around and found that a number of friends and colleagues thought “August people”could be used for the whole season, to indicate it really had been the most dire: the summer of the August people.

Unpleasantries were described: a tenant who screamed at a landlord, claiming he was spying on her, when he arrived to pick up the garbage; a woman at a shop counter who angrily demanded her change be made more quickly; more and more drivers refusing to give way when obviously appropriate; neighborly pleasantries greeted with snarls and snubs; “namaste” being turned into a passive-aggressive come-back . . . and on and on.

“August people” as a concept was explained by the theory that visitors become tense and unpleasant, and occasionally aggressive, because they are desperately trying to squeeze the last few drops out of a waning summer (for which, in some cases, they have paid dearly). But this year, I was told, the August behavior had begun in July.

It was the summer of rudeness, they said.

Now, I’m not sure I buy it that the rudeness was turned up a notch, but I don’t really have anything better to suggest.

But while we’re on the subject: If you read my account here last week of the first Hamptons Institute panel at Guild Hall, at which the audience booed and hissed, you might be interested to hear that the second panel, on the Supreme Court, went smoothly, with nary a catcall. The audience was quiet and respectful of what the panelists had to say, and Alec Baldwin was engaged and engaging as moderator. It was August, yes, but everyone acted just like April.

I was sorry to miss the third panel, but from the live-streamed version on YouTube, it seemed the audience had reverted to form.

Shorebirds, sanderlings, probably, dashed ahead of the uprushing water at Wiborg’s Beach on Monday evening as storm waves broke all the way out to the horizon. Hermine, which started as a tropical depression in the Florida Straits about a week earlier, had crossed into the Atlantic and by then had drifted to within 200 miles of Long Island. 

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center began paying close attention to the system on Aug. 28, first calling it tropical depression nine. By last Thursday it had strengthened to a tropical storm and was threatening the Gulf Coast of Florida. Hermine eventually made landfall near St. Marks, Fla., with winds of about 80 miles an hour.

On Saturday, after Hermine’s winds had declined, it popped out on the Atlantic side, regaining some strength and starting a halting course more or less northward into our area. By the beginning of the week, the forecasters were calling Hermine a post-tropical cyclone, meaning that it was no longer behaving like a tropical storm and was not nearly a hurricane. Its effects began to be really felt here on Labor Day, with fast moving clouds, light rain, and a riled-up ocean.

Although much of the weekend crowd had left early because of news reports and an evacuation order issued in error by the county, there were plenty of people on the beach, watching the spectacle and taking pictures with their phones. 

The sanderlings seemed nonchalant, racing in on their fast little feet to probe in the sand as a wave receded, then taking wing and flying quickly back up the beach when an other wave approached. Their quick reactions probably explain why they appear indifferent to us on the beach.

Shorebirds are a tough lot. There’s one that I sometimes see on the rock jetties at Georgica taking waves on the head as it picks around the seaweed for something to eat. With all the invertebrates to be had, a dunking is well worth it, in an evolutionary sense.

The sanderlings were at it again when I checked the beach the next morning. We might head to the shore to look in awe at the power of it all; for the birds it is an abundant free meal.

The phone rang and, seeing it was my daughter, I answered it. Why, she wondered, was I not already at the Hampton Classic?

I was going, I was going, I said — not with unbridled enthusiasm though — in a little bit. And were we prepared for the storm, she asked. Of course we weren’t prepared, I answered. 

Well, if it turned out that we needed anything, we should not hesitate to call. I told her we would, marveling at the ease with which round-the-clock weather channels can induce widespread panic.

I’ve lived here for practically half a century, and there’s only been one time when we’ve been without power for more than a day or two, and that was because the Long Island Power Authority’s map of our neighborhood hadn’t been updated in a generation, which, because they thought it was sparsely populated, and with mostly summer homes, landed us at the bottom of the list, until Bill Leland set them straight. 

Yes, yes, I know, someday, someday. . . . It was the same with Mary’s mother. For years, she predicted the market would crash, and, after years and years, it did, and she could at long last say I told you so. 

Gloom and doom will eventually get you somewhere. Sell, sell! Evacuate, evacuate!

Are we like sheep? Sheep passing in the night? Sheep pissing in the night? But then if there are no lights, there is the lawn. Lights are a boon, yes, but, as I said to Mary’s sister, Georgie, the other night, with a certain bravado, “There are two things I can’t live without — women and paper towels.”

I expected she might reply in kind, though, skipping men, she acknowledged that paper towels were indeed a necessity.

At any rate, I finally ambled over to the Classic. And, lo, to my surprise, found on arriving that they’d started the Grand Prix an hour early! The rumored storm had prompted the change. I, clueless, as ever, hadn’t gotten the emailed word. 

But I had only missed the first rider, the weather was beautiful, and the class was over in record time — in well under two hours. It was with a light step then that, soon after, with my head filled with just the right number of facts, I left the showgrounds, eager to celebrate with Mary the end of summer. 

Sometimes it pays not to know before you go. Jack Graves

I have always been able to draw. Not Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci draw, but I have always had the knack to make a thing look like the thing it is supposed to be. 

As a grammar school student, faced with high school, my parents encouraged me to apply to the High School of Music and Art. Uh-oh, a portfolio was needed for that. 

Now, I could draw, but I was never the easel painter artist who followed a muse and just had to create. I was always the fulfill-the-assignment kind of drawer. So, for the portfolio I had to make as a seventh grader I listened to my mother (who acted as my art director) when she suggested I look at the spots in The New Yorker and try to do some stuff like that. (Note to The New Yorker: Thanks.)  And then she said, “Just look around and draw what you see — a shelf of stuffed animals or a pile of shoes.”

She reminded me it was not so much the subject as how the subject was drawn.

That summer I developed an eye for clutter (seventh graders are really good making clutter), and I developed what later was called “a tight hand.” In short, that means a confident pen line without the sketchy wobbly bits, a pen or pencil line that could draw the contour of a chair or even a face without needing or wanting to stop. I got into Music and Art, and I continued to learn how to look. 

As for drawing, I got a few “art jobs” after college, all really in part because I could draw small and tight. An employment agent was the one who told me I had a tight hand, and she sent me to a job designing custom rugs. There I needed to be able to draw and then paint a very realistic rose three-eighths of an inch across. (Take a ruler and look at it and try it. It ain’t easy.)

Tiny roses and shaded acanthus leaves were added to my skill set. Meanwhile, as gifts for my parents’ friends in Orient, in the summer I would continue to draw people’s houses. Many of the large houses you see on the hill as you drive on the causeway toward Orient were rendered by me in pen and ink during those summers.

One of the best jobs I ever had was for an art materials company. I was doing graphic design for them but part of my job was, amazingly, to draw whatever I wanted, Photostat the drawings, color them in using the product (Bourges paper), and give the samples to sales reps to use on the road. Perfect, no? 

Finally I landed a job at Glamour magazine doing promotional graphic design. My portfolio of drawings got the attention of editorial art department, and (freelance) I became the illustrator used by Glamour for the whole of the 1970s. Eventually, I could draw how to bone a chicken, roll out a pie dough, how to short-sheet a bed, rewire a lamp, and how to put your hair up in pin curls. I had to draw exercises from Polaroid photographs and figure out how to illustrate trimming your own bangs. 

I invented a few characters who could not cope with the “sticky situation” of the month, and my drawings even got fan mail. Thanks to a collaboration with that art director, Michelle Braverman, I was the illustrator for the “How to Do Anything Better” guide and I got to draw stuff for money.  

In the 1980s that knack for what my father called “expository drawings” led to some cookbook illustrations for the author Maria Robbins of Springs, whom I had met through my husband. 

Her cookbooks led to other cookbooks and when Maria’s editor moved on and changed jobs I managed to stay in her phone directories. 

Every few years some crazy pregnant exercise book or “bread machine cookbook” or book on how to help your special needs child integrate learning with fun would need illustrations and I would get a call from that very loyal editor. Then I would haul out the very same pens I had used in college and at Glamour (Rapidograph 00 point, India ink) and do the assignment. They were always fun and I always learned how to draw something new.

Full time in East Hampton for many years now, I still practice “seeing” in my capacity as contributor to The Star and I still draw stuff. 

Fast-forward to March 2015, with many, many little books under my belt and a good relationship with my very loyal book editor. (Thank you, Maria, for the path to Marian Lizzi of Penguin Random House.) On that day in March, my friend Mo Cohen at the Ladies Village Improvement Society, where I volunteer, pointed out an article in The New York Times business section about a Scottish lady who was making a name for herself drawing coloring books for grown-ups. 

“Mo,” I said, “I can do that. I can do a coloring book, I can do that!” (Thank you, Mo. I might have missed that article had it not been for you.) 

I went home and emailed Marian Lizzi. “I can make a coloring book for you,” I wrote. 

She wanted to see samples and I sent some of the cluttered interiors I had always drawn. The next day came this message: “Can you give us 60 in a month?” 

I could, and I did, and the clutter of my life became a coloring book.

Eight months later there are people in Indonesia and Malaysia and Russia and Brazil coloring my drawn pages. Some share the colorations with me, and their work makes me so proud that my work is out there for them. A lady wrote to me to say coloring helps with the pain of her fibromyalgia. 

The ripple effect of ink on paper is quite remarkable. The pen is truly mightier than the sword.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer and illustrator for The Star and the newspaper’s East magazine. Her coloring book, “Color Me Cluttered,” was published in 2015. 

“This is the day the Lord hath made / rejoice and be glad in it,” I said to Mary as we and the puppy, whose first outing to Louse Point it was, took turns remarking on the glorious, cloud-filled sky, the light-green marsh grass, the gentle shore, the dark water, and the darker treeline beyond.

The light was clear, making everything stand out so singularly. It was the best day of the summer.

I made as if to frame it with my hand, remarking that one couldn’t do it justice, that it was best to let it remain in our minds’ eyes. 

“Ralph Carpentier could do it justice,” she said.

We reminded ourselves to go see his paintings at the Marine Museum. 

Jimmy Reutershan, Ev Rattray, Stuart Vorpahl, Ralph Carpentier, Rusty Drumm . . . all of them of this place, and who, while gone, remain in our minds’ eyes.

We agreed, yet again, how lucky we were. With surroundings like this, how could you not feel blessed? With surroundings like this, how could you cling to dark thoughts? How could you not let them glide by on the breeze?

And so, not all that far from the intemperate traffic and the strolling legions of leisure, you find yourself exclaiming in your backyard: Look at this! A miniature version of a bathtub toy, as Jane was to say later, bright orange, several inches long, with big spots on its back and a relatively large head with big black dots — eyes, we presumed. 

Mary put a photo of this comical being on Facebook, and, almost instantaneously, one of her friends identified it as the caterpillar form of a spicebush swallowtail butterfly, which mostly are found, they say, on the Florida peninsula.

How lucky we were. And in our backyard too, not all that far from the madding traffic and the strolling legions of leisure. I could only compare the sighting to the love-making slugs on our chimney of yesteryear.

And not long after that I saw a hummingbird — just for a moment, but enough to know it was so. I ran to tell Mary the news.

The slugs taught us about love, our cat how to die, and all the beings with whom we share this place are teaching us how to live.

Listening to coverage of the presidential race, I have been struck by a repeatedly heard observation that Hillary Clinton is remote, frosty, not someone you would want to have a beer with. Maybe that is true; presidential candidates sometimes come off far differently than they really are in person. Someone I used to work with years ago who knew Bob Dole said he was a hoot — warm, funny, and a joy to be around. The presidential race press corps, back then, too, decided he was a stiff.

The frequent view expressed by journalists and pundits seems at odds with the little that I know firsthand about Mrs. Clinton, whom I heard speak at Tom Twomey’s funeral last year.

Hillary and Bill Clinton were friends of Tom Twomey’s, but it still was a surprise when she and the former president appeared through a side door at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton Village and took seats near the front. Though I took no notes at the time, what she said did not matter as much as how she said it.

 She spoke extemporaneously and with deep feeling, linking Tom’s role as a local leader, fund-raiser, and activist to a kind of American tradition of people who knew how to make things happen in their communities. I was impressed by how natural it seemed to her. Bill Clinton was supposed to be the smooth, gregarious one, but, it seemed that she had a gift as well.

Richard Ben Cramer, the author of “What It Takes,” about the 1988 primaries, said that a vote for president was the least rational vote Americans ever made, given the scale of the job. This year, when fear seems the central theme, this is more true than ever.

My take is that the fear cuts both ways. Donald Trump fans the worst imaginings of certain segments of the population in his bizarre bid for the White House — and on the Clinton side, fear seems as powerful a motivating force, if not greater, except that the anxiety is that a maniac might take over the White House in January. If anything is going to get out the vote, this might be it.