“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter.” 

So wrote Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast,” the writer’s recollections of life in 1920s Paris among fellow expatriates and the “Lost Generation” that survived the First World War. 

Upended, lately, by assorted turmoil including the insomnia that has afflicted me on and off since college, I awoke, disoriented, in the evening, a few Fridays ago, to the news from Paris. 

Had it really come to this? Young adults slaughtered at, of all places, a rock ’n’ roll concert, that boisterous, communal expression of youthful exuberance, of freedom? It had. 

I thought of lazy, early summer days in that city, 13 lucky years ago and midway on a long journey home from India. Fresh from the choking filth and chaos of Delhi, I wandered near-empty streets in the predawn silence, was languorous in the sunny afternoon at the Jardin du Luxembourg, and in the evening savored pints of beer on the cobblestone streets at Montmartre. 

Seven years on and just after another Indian excursion random impressions endure of a few days in Lyon and then Paris, five or six of us on a boozy, blissful junket. On the last night, a few of us seeking out and staying late at a subterranean jazz club. In the morning, a lone exploration through narrow, winding streets to a photographic exhibit of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 exile to Cap Ferrat in Nice. In the taxi line outside the Gare de Lyon, an elderly woman stood, patient and radiant in a classically chic blue dress. And everywhere flowers and shady terraces and conversation and wine. 

I thought of a night and a day in Mumbai, two years after another nihilistic band of nobodies, on the eve of another Thanksgiving in America, had gunned down random human beings in the hours before their own violent demise. To the slayer comes a slayer. 

How hideously apt, and aptly hideous, that the philistines assaulted laissez-faire concertgoers — and many others — in the city of both light and art. Fitting, too, that the clash of present and primitive took place where the United Nations Conference on Climate Change would, barely two weeks later, set a course for the future. 

On Monday, according to The Times, President Obama said that the conference represented “an important turning point in world history,” and that he believed, “in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late.” 

While at least 170 countries have announced a plan for future fossil-fuel emissions, The Times reported, India’s leader, Narendra Modi, said that his country plans to double its use of coal by 2019 and triple its 2005 carbon emissions by 2030. (On Monday, the U.S. embassy in New Delhi recorded air pollution levels “well into ‘hazardous’ territory,” Reuters reported.) 

Syria’s civil war, which has drawn and further radicalized French and other European nationals, may have been sparked, in part, by climate change, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The “worst drought in the instrumental record,” the report stated, caused “widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers.” The water shortage, said National Geographic, drove up food prices, sickened children, and forced 1.5 million into Syria’s crowded cities, “just as that country was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war.” 

A movable feast or a future of famine? Free expression or mass extinction? 

“You expected to be sad in the fall,” Hemingway wrote. “Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.” 

But, he added, “When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.” 

“This isn’t political,” Josh Homme, a co-founder of Eagles of Death Metal, the ironically named band that was performing when the slayers came to Paris, told Vice magazine. “We’re going to recruit people to be part of life, to be citizens of the earth,” Mr. Homme, who was not with the band that night, said of their future plans. “We have a chance to come together.” 

Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.

From time to time my West Coast niece and nephew post family photographs on Facebook, where I am surprised by a young version of myself. I am pleased the photos were saved and are retrievable, but am reminded that I still haven’t figured out how to print photographs that arrive these days via the Internet. 

Before it became easy for anyone with a cellphone or iPhone to take photos and save them electronically, I had family photos, particularly of the grandchildren, printed, framing some and putting others in albums. Now, however, they are somewhere in the ether, which isn’t the same thing.

Recently, however, I learned that my family had a different saving habit when a box arrived from a cousin in Dallas that threw me for a loop. It contained more than 400 penny and 2-cent picture postcards (with post card as two words) to and from relatives and friends, some of whom I may not ever have known. They had been mailed in the 1940s and ’50s. 

It was easy to know there were more than 400 in the box because Cousin Harriet, or someone in her household, had divided them, bundled them with rubber bands, and written down how many were in each stack on little pieces of pink paper. 

According to Harriet, who filled me in by email, of course, my parents had saved the postcards and given them to her when she was about 10. She’s just a few years younger than I am, so you can guess how long ago that was. What I don’t understand is how or why my parents — actually, it must have beenmy mother — convinced others to send their postcards along.

Taking a random look at them, I found one with a picture of a bathing beauty that I had mailed from Atlantic City to my brother, who apparently had stayed home. “Believe it or not, I miss you. . . . Milty is cute. He belongs to a frat so we hope to make time.” I certainly don’t remember any of that.

There are postcards addressed to a family named Koyt in Newark, others from one of my mother’s nieces to her parents, one addressed to my parents on my grandparents’ farm, and one that a friend named Shayna sent to me in care of another friend, whose name was Ruth, apparently having forgotten my address. Shea said she was having a wonderful time in Chicago, and wrote: “Play Dead!” I’ve no idea what we thought that meant.

One postcard in the box made sense because it was likely to have been added to the mix. It was addressed to Harriet’s parents, who lived in the Bronx. The picture is of a hotel called the Aristocrat in Miami Beach. 

“Dear Elfrieda and Sammy,” Sam’s sister Dotty and her husband, Frank, wrote: “We arrived safe and sound, but dead tired. Train was late starting and later getting here. The weather is fair but windy. Did you have a nice time at the affair? Will write more tomorrow. Love to you and the children.”

Someone could make a profession of studying these postcards, but it’s not me. I’m afraid that what I have to do is find someone who is 10 years old and give them away.

Leo the pig will not be 4 until the spring, but he already weighs about 10 times as much as his Texas trailer park breeder-slash-con artist claimed he would.

Regular readers of this column might remember Leo. He joined our household a couple of summers ago over my protests and after we sent a too-big check. My wife, Lisa, and eldest child had found out about supposed teacup pigs on (where else?) the Internet. He would only be about 10 pounds, they said. “And he won’t have tusks!”

Right.

I said he would end up about the size of our Labrador mix only with shorter legs. Lisa said he would stay small. We were both wrong.

The last time I was able to pick up Leo and step onto the bathroom scale with him, he weighed about 80 pounds. That was six months ago. Though he does not get fat-producing quantities of his special pig food, the lawn and fallen acorns are an endless source of calories, and his belly now clears our tile kitchen floor by only about two inches. Weasel, the Lab, tops out at just over 60 pounds.

Leo’s tusks are not really that big a deal, though we worry that one of these days he is going to get annoyed at Luna, the pug puppy, or Lulu, the little, long-haired mutt, and give one of them a slice. Instead, the problem is Leo’s hang- up about chairs, pots and pans, and anything else in the range of his snout. Place any object within about 16 inches of the ground, and Leo is going to flip it over or try to push it around. He has left a trail of broken chairs in his considerable wake and the lower shelves in the parts of the house he has access to are oddly bare.

In the aggregate though, Leo is less of a pain in the neck than the dogs. We have an understanding, he and I. Once he is fed in the morning and has received his requisite ear and chin scratching session from me and maybe an apple core or two, Leo heads back to bed. Later, he will go outside to graze and take care of his pig business on more or less private portions of the lawn. Meanwhile, the dogs follow me around, scrabble noisily among themselves over toys, leave their droppings wherever they please, and shed all over the place.

Indifferent, Leo shambles back inside and gets back into bed by the fireplace. By the time I leave the house to head to the office, he’s asleep again.

It’s a heck of a good life. Maybe I’m just jealous.

You need no further evidence as to the extent of global warming than the hot air given off in the Republican candidates’ “debates.”

That alone ought to raise the earth’s temperature by perhaps as much as 2 degrees.

These man-made emissions will mean the sea level will rise even more and sooner than expected, threatening the G.O.P. base’s castles in the sand. And, of course, the world’s riparian poor, whose accommodations are less substantial, will be swept away as the waters trickle up.

Trickle-down economic theory plus the trickle-up consequences of environmental missteps, then, ought to restore balance to the food chain and relieve the pressure that overpopulation has put on our precious resources.

“. . . You take exception to this exceptionalism, you say? I’m sorry, the borders are closed, no demurrals may pass through my cranial checkpoint. Seek asylum for your ‘buts’ elsewhere. . . .”

Well, enough imaginings provoked by closed minds — one of the worst threats to life on earth that there is at the moment.

If peace of mind cannot be achieved collectively speaking, then our species is at great risk. Five major extinctions have been said to have occurred in eons past. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the sixth, rather than caused by meteor strikes or volcanic activity, were owing to closed minds.

Only together can we reverse the trend, by championing diversity and creativity and an egalitarian spirit rather than the evil of nihilism and its attendant propaganda, which often is cloaked as the word of God.

Bernie Sanders is right when he says it all began with our invasion of Iraq. It opened Pandora’s box.

“Hope was the only good the casket had held among the many evils,” Edith Hamilton wrote of it in her “Mythology.”

“And it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune.”

Yet we cannot rely on justice descending from on high. In the end, it’s just us, it’s just up to us.

I like my winter holidays cold. Though the weather we’ve had out here has been good for the thermostat, it just doesn’t feel like the holiday season. The warmer climate takes away from the essence of Thanksgiving. 

Even though I’m not that old, I’m already spouting tales of yore, tales of a morning one Thanksgiving when we woke to a blizzard. My husband had to use our Jeep’s four wheel drive to pick up some of our guests and drive them to our house out near the Montauk Lighthouse for dinner that year. I don’t remember how they got home, but that, too, is the essence of a good holiday.

The 20-pound turkey is in the fridge, the pumpkin pie is in the oven, the potatoes and turnips are peeled, and the celery and radishes are washed. I think I’m ready, but whatever will I wear? No longer do I need a nice new sweater for the holiday outfit. A light, frilly blouse is something I’ll pull from my closet.

To those who deny global warming I would like to extend an invitation to visit us on the East End to see how the seasons have changed. We no longer have a spring, and autumn weather lasts well into December. A white Christmas is not to be, according to meteorologists, and the cold weather will not arrive until January, they say.

Since my body temperature tends to run about 10 degrees warmer than others’, this isn’t good news for me. I use to like warming my hands in front of the fire, but I no longer do that. I feel as if I’m one of those people who might spontaneously ignite one day. You might not want to stand too close to me in the I.G.A.

So many things have changed since I was a kid, and those are words I never thought I would say. When our parents would start a sentence by saying, “When I was a kid . . .” we’d roll our eyes and tune them out. But it’s true. You look back wistfully on things that you learn your own kids will never experience, such as ice-skating on our ponds and building igloos out of mountains of snow. And even though we would be dead tired at the end of a snow day and have frostbite on our fingers, those are the days that stay with us.  

What will our kids remember most about these days? Will it be the time their smartphone fell in the toilet? Or the day their Instagram pictures received a negative comment from someone they don’t even know? Will it be the time they missed a text about a change in meeting places and ended up all alone one night, or the time their laptop crashed?

Our holidays weren’t spent looking at a small screen. We were laughing at the neighbor’s mother who had too many martinis and burned the turkey and ruined their dinner. We spent the day going from house to house seeing what desserts were left over, and there were no dietary restrictions. Back then, if someone had a gluten problem they would keep it to themselves and not eat what they weren’t supposed to. This way we would never know whose stomach was making those noises and who was responsible for stinking up the room. 

I find myself yearning for a cold walk in the woods, so I when I return home I can light a fire in the woodstove. I’m yearning to pull out my winter boots and the coats that I haven’t worn in so long. Hopefully on Thursday, the weather will get a bit brisk and I won’t pass out from heat stroke when the oven is turned on for so many hours. And you never know, maybe the meteorologists will be wrong. It’s not like that hasn’t happened in the past. 

Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The East Hampton Star.

Speaking for myself — as a mother, and perhaps for my generation —I am both horrified and perplexed by the dystopian worlds that young people immerse themselves in (I hesitate to say enjoy) these days on television, in young-adult novels, and in popular films.

I’ve sat through too many cinema previews for screeching, special-effects battles in galactic space between aliens and the remnant populations of human beings after Earth has been destroyed. What pleasure you get from watching these extraordinarily loud movies I do not know. I do know that they are usually rated PG-13, which of course means that much younger children will sneak in or watch them later, on demand. 

Am I the only one who finds the whole aliens-or-zombies-or-evil-wiz­ards-have-taken-over-the-world plot line to be not just a downer, but a total bore?

 The word “dystopian” wasn’t in common use when George Orwell’s “1984” was published in 1949, or when the book appeared on reading lists during my college years. “Apocalyptic” was a familiar term in the 1970s for describing events and the world gone wrong, and even more so after the film “Apocalypse Now” about the Vietnam War was released. Today, it feels like the kids are obsessed with the end of the world.

What is the appeal of “The Hunger Games” and its sequels? I think I speak for my peers when I say I am not very interested in watching teenagers battle to the death. According to a movie guide for parents that I just consulted, in “The Hunger Games” you can observe the following edifying spectacles: A boy’s neck is snapped, an arrow is seen sticking out of a chest, a girl is killed by poison, another by a flying spear, and yet another after being swarmed by wasps. The heroine, Katniss, is attacked by dog-like beasts and then, with apparent mercy, shoots a boy that the beasts have torn apart. Sounds like fun.

What do our children believe the real world is like? 

I have been pondering these questions recently, and over the last week or so the answer seemed to present itself. 

The French president, Francois Hollande, and the Islamic State (or “Daesh,” as the French prefer) agree that they, and we, are at war. 

The masked vigilantes of Anonymous have declared cyber war on Daesh, too.

Babies are drowning in the Aegean sea, as their families flee starvation, bombs . . . and Daesh.

Did I meanwhile hear Donald Trump say that if elected president he would send all Syrian refugees home?

It is a scary, scary world.

I guess it makes sense that young people should focus on imaginary horrors, instead of real ones — horrors that can be overcome by a brave teenager with a laser gun or arrow, and good aim.

Evvy, our middle child, was delighted Monday after school when she learned that she was a winner in the East Hampton Town Trustees Largest Clam Contest. Her 12.3-ounce hard clam was big enough to claim the top spot among kids in the Accabonac division, and earned her a basket of prizes.

We had missed the judging Sunday at the American Legion Hall. I had to take her little brother up the Island for a jiu jitsu belt ceremony, and things like clam contests tend to be my area in our family division of labor. Clamming, too, is my thing, though Lisa was happy to watch from the truck when we were out scratching around on the Bonac Crick flats on the first official day of the competition.

Getting out in the sand-and-salt mud this time of the year is a pleasure, as long as you are properly prepared. Digging for the contest began on Nov. 7, and, as the weather was fine deep into the fall, the kids were happy enough to get suited up and get into it. 

Evvy pulled on a pair of waders and grabbed my clam rake. Ellis, our 5-year-old, who had an entry as well, a single tiny clam he was able to find with his half-sized rake, wore a wetsuit with a windbreaker on top. My job was to move back and forth between them, offering encouragement and keeping the slowly filling basket close at hand.

A couple of days later, a friend and I went scalloping, but I took a break and spent about an hour clamming, hauling up a quahog that was hands down the largest I had ever dug. Thinking that fewer people might have taken part this year becausethe contest had been moved from October to November, and that I might stand a chance to win, I went to Stuart’s Fish Market to enter. I should not have bothered.

As it turned out, Susan Ceslow’s winning clam, from Napeague Harbor, was more than a full pound heavier than the one I found, getting pretty close to twice as large as mine. Even that harbor’s youth winner’s clam could have mopped the floor with mine. As Laura Donnelly says in her food column in this issue, these things are b-i-g big.

Oh well, maybe next year for me, but, as I said, Evvy’s over the moon.

I told Jen Landes, who’s conducting a survey as to whether males are more inclined than females to put flat lids on their coffee, and whether, conversely, females are more inclined than males to put on raised ones, that she could put me down as a raised-lidder.

I generally don’t participate in surveys, but I thought I should stand up and be counted when it came to this one on liddership.

“Of course,” I added, “that I go for the raised lids may be owing to the fact that I’m older now and have less testosterone.”

I’m not unhappy about this seepage; I think it has increasingly connected me to life, to its infinite variety, as well as to its often baffling vagaries. 

Here today, gone tomorrow . . . flat lidders, raised lidders. . . . I hope there will come a time when we can get beyond what seems to divide us and celebrate our mutual affinities. (Bearing in mind, of course, that the raised-lidders were right!)

In the end, you’ve got to laugh, if only to keep from crying. And so I said to the nurse, while being elaborately prepared for a col­onoscopy at the hospital the other day, that I thought they were piling it on a bit. “When these screenings were done at the doctor’s office,” I said, “it seemed like you just went in and they’d say, ‘Bend over.’ ”

“Bottom line, they’ll say the same thing here,” she said, hooking me up to an IV.

Soon it was over and I was told I was fine — at least until Health Republic’s “explanation of benefits” came in the mail.

“I’ll see you when I’m 80 then!” I said, on the way out the door with Mary, cheered by the thought that I’d not have to sip two bottles of magnesium citrate for another five years — on a par in my dread department with having to cover another U.S. Open at Shinnecock, where again, I presume, I’ll have to scope out the holes from beyond the ropes.

It’s all connected, you see!

“I tried to talk with the dead last night, but the dead, being dead, gave no reply.”

I wrote that sentence over 20 years ago, channeling, I suppose, a little Edgar Allan Poe, with a dash of John Lennon. I had just returned from a walk on a damp, frigid fall afternoon on the beach at Ditch. The dead I was thinking of, at that moment, was my Tante Frieda. 

When I was born, my mother was in ill health. Frieda Evers, my father’s maternal aunt, came to live with us, to take care of the three children, while my mother recovered.

She had come from Germany at the height of that country’s post-“war-to-end-all-wars” economic meltdown. She carried with her a stack of trillion-mark notes, the worthless currency printed by the German banks.

A kindergarten teacher in her native land, she became a nanny in America, taking care of families with newborns, with my family being first and foremost. Shewould be with us several months, and then go away for a stretch of time, tending to another family.

She was an integral part of my father’s family when he was growing up, and became so with our family, as well.

Tante Frieda had a bedroom opposite my sisters’ room on the second floor. It was furnished entirely with dark, Gothic German furniture, including a big rocking chair. Beth, Cathy, and I used to jump into that chair, the three of us, and rock wildly back and forth. 

Tante Frieda doted on me. I could do no wrong. Murder? “Das weife ich nicht,” she would say.

She was Lutheran, and quite religious. That only added to the anarchy that was our unformed understanding of faith, what with a Jewish mother and a father whose family had left the Catholic Church. 

She had a foldout couch, and sometimes I would sleep in her room. She read to me at bedtime, either from the Bible, or a well-worn edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” or perhaps from Hans Christian Andersen.

When I was 7, my family moved to Forest Hills Gardens. She took an apartment nearby, and continued to join us for Sunday dinner. For the first few years in Forest Hills, I occasionally slept over in her apartment on that foldout couch.

As I went into my teenage years, I became a wild thing. There was nothing she could tell me that was of any import. I saw her less and less.

She began falling down and moved into the Wartburg Home in Mount Vernon. She died when I was in my late teens, and was buried in a cemetery outside Philadelphia. There was no funeral.

Many years later, I went to that cemetery to find her grave. Carole was with me.

We figured out where her grave was from the maps. She has no gravestone. 

I don’t remember now what it was, walking on the beach that chilly day over 20 years ago, that made me want to speak to her for a moment, to hear her voice. 

Just one second, one tiny moment. That’s not asking too much, is it?

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star.

I remember the first Thanksgiving in Amagansett, long ago, after I was married but before our children were born, primarily because it was my first experience cooking a goose; I’ve still got a small scar on my right thumb testifying to inexperience where goose fat was concerned.

For a number of years, when the children were small, we “gathered together” at Jimmy and Dallas Ernst’s art-filled East Hampton house on Lee Avenue, where friends were numerous and even a huge dining room table could barely hold all the dishes carried in. One particular memory of those years involves a splinter in the bare foot of my daughter, which was extracted by the great artist himself, Jimmy, with the toe delicately sanitized for the operation with gin.

As the children got older, we began to make a huge Thanksgiving party our own Rattray family ritual, with stalwart friends and guests over the years swelling the ranks so that only half of us could fit at one of two long tables while others balanced plates on their laps in the living room. At its peak, we had three or even four dozen revelers, and often the evening would end with everyone singing old standards while beating rhythm on pots and pans. I remember the year Tom Paxton sang to the children, and sometimes we played word games after dinner. What never changed was the menu — and who would do what.

We started with oysters Rattray. The boys opened oysters and Imade a green sauce using a traditional Rockefeller recipe but substituting sorrel for spinach. The turkey was always fresh, not frozen, and we usually had a sausage stuffing, getting the sausage from Villa Italian Specialties. It was always good but never 100 percent perfect. (Maybe there is no such thing.) As the group became bigger, we added ham, which had to be a Hatfield from Pennsylvania; no Smithfield for us! My daughter would insist on a goopy, molasses glaze, adding (to the pretend horror of some, but to the delight of the palate) Coca-Cola to the mix. The butcher at the old Bridgehampton market where Citarella is today would special-order the Hatfield ham for me, and he continued to do so after that I.G.A. closed and he moved to the East Hampton I.G.A.

Joanne Rabinowitz wouldn’t let anyone else mash the potatoes. She also made the lightest pumpkin mouse for dessert, year after year. Others brought Brussels sprouts or creamed onions or squash baked with honey. Bess became an expert at her great-grandmother’s chocolate sundae pie. (It isn’t really chocolate, but, in fact, a mousse of vanilla custard topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. The recipe can be found in one of the ancient Ladies Village Improvement Society cookbooks, but, like many olden-days recipes, it is extremely vague.) As the years went by, my husband, Chris, added steamed persimmon pudding. Marilyn Appel ordered the wine.

Times change. As I anticipate Thanksgiving this year, images of the tens of thousands of migrants who are fleeing poverty and war in another part of the world make it very clear how much those of us here, in the safety of East Hampton, have to be thankful for.

This will be the second year in a row that we have not been home for Thanksgiving. Sharing the day with my oldest friend and her relatives last year, in Connecticut, was a sweet holiday, and we are headed there again this month. But I can’t help missing the boisterous hubbub that Thanksgiving at our house became over the years — and the oysters, and the chocolate sundae pie, and the ham.