I ’ve been all a-twitter as the dismantling of the early-19th-century Hedges barn on our property — soon to be moved and reconstructed across Main Street, on the Mulford Farm — draws near. I’ve also been deeply appreciative of E.J. Edwards, my children’s great-grandfather, who saved the barn and moved it up Edwards Lane. Today, his descendants all agree that it is right and proper that the East Hampton Historical Society has acquired it for public use.

As we work on emptying the barn of two centuries of stuff, I’ve had a remarkable feeling of stepping back in time each time I enter it. Livestock hasn’t lived in the stalls for at least 70 years; it’s been even longer since grain was sent down the chute. But walking in the other day I could just about smell cows, horses, and hay.

 As habitual readers of this column might remember, I spent most of my childhood summers on my grandparents’ farm in the Catskills, where there was a three-story barn, a relic of its past as a dairy farm — although we kept only one cow in these roomy accommodations, and only briefly. You might find it amusing that my olfactory nostalgia centers on the smell of manure, but my memory of that smell is complex and entirely pleasant.

Four generations of family and friends have stored hand-me-down furniture, sports gear, toys, and household doodads in our Edwards Lane barn, not to mention bikes, fence posts, parade floats, air-conditioners, basinets, printing-press parts, grinding stones, antique post office boxes, sailboards, 80-year-old Flexible Fliers, girlie magazines dating to the 1940s, scythes, ice boats, storm windows, porcelain sinks, and, at one point, my late mother-in-law’s sporty hardtop. Trying to figure out what it all was and who it belonged to, or who might want to make use of it now, was no small task.

Recently, as the emptying enters its final phase, we’ve brought out a wonderful, ancient horse-drawn sleigh, some big old wooden barrels, and what a knowledgeable woodworker told me was a “chair vise.” Sure enough, checking out chair vises on Google, I learned they also are known as shaping horses and were common devices for making chairs and other furniture by hand. Any idea that the vise we found was a valuable antique, however, was dispelled when I told my son David about this 19th-century treasure we had unearthed. . . . And he replied, “Sure it’s a chair vise. I made it.” (I should have known. When he was a college freshman, he made chairs, and we have a few nice ones to prove it.)

The most challenging object still in the barn, though, is Jeannette Edwards Rattray’s huge kitchen stove. What to do with it? It turns out that the stove was made by the Kalamazoo Company in Kalamazoo, Mich., and was marketed as “A Kalamazoo Direct to You.” That’s right, the company, in the first half of the 20th century, shipped its steel-andiron cooking stoves directly to customers and offered a 30-day guarantee.

Ours, which probably dates to the 1920s, is covered in cream and ochre porcelain enamel, with a firebox on one side for coal and wood, and the slogan “direct to you” right there on the thermometer built into the oven door. My late mother-in-law — true to form in our family, reluctant to give up old ways and old things — cooked on this coal-andwood stove until her death in 1974. We removed it and stored it in the barn when we inherited the house and updated to a six-burner propane stove (which, by now a family relic itself, is still in use in the kitchen). The Kalamazoo behemoth has been kept under cover, with all its parts intact, I believe — including stovepipe — but the notion that someone in the family would want to actually use it someday seems a fantasy.

It’s available now at a wonderful discount. Would any of you like it?

I mean, it’s not like we can belatedly take the Kalamazoo Company up on its return guarantee: It went out of business in 1952.

It had been some time since we last thought about the Montauk Monster around the office. But on Tuesday, our memories were refreshed by a query from a National Geographic television program producer looking for images for an upcoming program.

To be clear, The Star does not own the rights to the infamous photograph taken by one of our former interns, the daughter of our Montauk correspondent. It was Jenna Hewitt who snapped the shot of an odd, mostly hairless animal carcass found while she was walking on the beach in July 2008. I passed the message from National Geographic on to her via her mom, Janis.

A funny thing about the whole Montauk Monster business is that The Star did not break the story. The what-is-it! coverage began with The Independent and took off from there. By the time we wrote about it, it had become a full-blown Internet sensation. TV crews arrived and interviewed Ms. Hewitt and other discoverers of the sad beast, Courtney Fruin and Rachel Goldberg. Ms. Hewitt told The Star that by a certain point the whole thing had given her a headache.

“We’ve had invites. It’s fun, but it’s August, and we work in restaurants,” Ms. Hewitt said. Classic Montauk.

By then, we were on the story, though trying to frame it for our readers more as a media frenzy phenomena than a mystery. The Star’s nature columnist, Larry Penny, had taken a look at the photograph and conclusively dismissed the carcass as a dead raccoon a bit worse for wear for having been in the surf awhile.

Things took an interesting turn, though, when the thing went missing. Two men had taken the bloated and stinking thing away and left it in a wooded backyard to decay, apparently intending to salvage its bones to encase in resin and sell as art. As best as I can remember, the remains were never seen after that, as fitting an end to the story as could have been hoped, I suppose.

Of course, on the Internet, nothing really ever ends, and the Montauk Monster will live on in the vast, vast universe of cyber-speculation. Why, it’s even got its own Wikipedia page, and that’s more than I can say.

If a parking ticket in Southampton Town isn’t a first-world problem, then I don’t know what is.

It all started when I decided I was too lazy to drive UpIsland for a party two Saturdays ago, and opted for the Long Island Rail Road instead of what Google Maps was showing to be an hour-and-36-minute drive. The party was to have a “Back to the Future” theme, and its outcome had me wishing I could travel back in time a couple of hours and tell my lazy self to suck it up and drive. UpIsland, I partied like it was 1985. When I returned about 24 hours later, there it was on the windshield: Written overnight, clear as day, was a $100 ticket for illegally parking in a lot that required a permit.

I started to panic. A hundred bucks is a lot of money for a single, 30-something Long Island girl living east of the Shinnecock Canal. I began listing the things I’d have to sacrifice in order to pay the fine. Ten months of Netflix? Twenty or so trips to Starbucks? Cancel my Ipsy cosmetics subscription? The horror. Maybe I’ll sign up for media access to this week’s gallery openings and theater events. If I can eat a few meals in the press room, at least I’ll save at the grocery store. (Note to my editor: I’m just kidding.)

My next instinct was to get defensive. The Long Island Rail Road website does not list any parking restrictions for the Bridgehampton station parking lot, and anyway, many UpIsland towns and villages allow permit-free parking in train station lots on the weekend. Such an agreement is said to encourage tourism to New York City on Saturdays and Sundays, so I thought it was a safe assumption that Southampton Town, too, accommodates westbound travelers in this way. I was incorrect, but my indignation survived long enough to temporarily inspire thoughts of fighting the parking ticket.

Then I started to get angry at myself. I might have a lazy streak, but mostly I’m an overachiever and a perfectionist to a degree of sickness, so to have this black mark on my record felt really frustrating. Okay, maybe it’s not as much a black mark as it is a little gray smudge, because there won’t be any points recorded against my driver’s license. Still frustrating, though, because this totally could have been avoided.

If I were to tweet this, I’d surely hashtag it “firstworldproblems.” It’s bad enough that Starbucks in East Hampton is closed for renovation right now. What’s next — how to avoid pairing navy blue with black in my O.O.T.D.? Too many costumes to choose from on Halloween? Zumba, yoga, or kickboxing for my Saturday morning workout? To quote from another overused hashtag, the struggle is real.

When perspective finally started to set in, I realized this whole parking ticket situation wasn’t so bad after all. The fine could have been higher, or the car could have been towed. Or worse: There could be no fat to trim in my budget whatsoever, and I’d really have something to worry about. So I opened my checkbook, made out a check, and stuck it in an envelope with the ticket.

Damn, I’m out of stamps, and I’ve got to mail this by today to get it in on time. First-world problems indeed.

Christine Sampson is a reporter for The Star.

My husband and I live with tunes of the past. He’s worse than I am, or is it better? He wakes up almost every morning with a song and his repertoire is vast. He’s got Broadway tunes, folk songs, camp songs, and even old radio commercials — like one for G.E. lightbulbs — rattling around somewhere waiting to be unleashed. And he never can explain why a particular song comes forth

On the other hand, I don’t start waxing musical until I’m wide awake, and then I tend to wander around with bits of melody in my head that won’t go away. Today, for example, it was the first line of a song Jenny sings in “The Threepenny Opera”: “There was a time and now it’s all gone by. . . .”

You might be inclined to think that, given the lyric, this song came from a deep, if unconscious, melanchony feeling about time having fled, and you might be right. I am also apt to hear a Noel Coward song that begins with “Where are the songs we sung” or “Long Ago and Far Away” by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin.

But the truth is that there’s some fun and pretense going on. “There was a time and now it’s all gone by” when I used to fantasize about performing in this or that musical, and at least Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” is among the best.

At other times, the music in my head brings a sense of satisfaction rather than longing. Chris and I try to see every live performance from the Metropolitan Opera that is screened in high definition at Guild Hall. Two weeks ago, the opera was Verdi’s “Otello,” with a stunning performance by a young Bulgarian soprano, Sonya Yoncheva. Her “Willow Song” was heartbreakingly beautiful. “There was a time” when, as a voice student, I learned the “Willow Song” and I remember just enough of it now to enjoy the memory.

“Tannhauser” is coming up this Saturday, and I suppose I could offer to sing a bit from it, too. In high school, I auditioned with three others for the New Jersey All-State Chorus, singing part of “The Pilgrims Chorus” from the opera. I still remember with pride that a judge not only gave us good marks but said I held the group together.

Truth is, I used to be called on in (was it?) third grade to come to the front of the room to belt out “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” if the morning assembly at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School ran short and the bell hadn’t rung, and I’ve sung in choirs and choruses ever since. But it is the slow ballads that continue to reverberate.

But enough. You don’t have to imagine what any of the songs in my mind would sound like if you could hear what I hear. Just go to YouTube and listen to the greats.

This month marks a year since I last set foot in Manhattan.

A lot has happened.

Last December, at seven months pregnant, the diagnosis of an “irritable uterus” rendered me unable to lift anything remotely heavy. A brisk walk, a gentle yoga class, even picking up my 2-year-old son, resulted in hours upon hours of painful contractions followed by more than a few panicked trips to the emergency room to make sure that I wasn’t going into early labor.

Needless to say, my movements became more restricted and solo trips into the city seemed absurd.

Flash forward to March, when our daughter, Violet, arrived during the last snowstorm of the season.

People often ask, when ostensibly making polite conversation, if we’re considering a third child. My response, followedby a long, uncomfortable pause, is “absolutely not.”

Two kids is no joke. With one kid, you can sort of fake it. Your body quickly adjusts to sleeping again. Your old life eventually comes back into focus, at least somewhat. But with two children, life seems altered irrevocably, and most days still seem a puzzle whose pieces I have yet to make fit.

My husband and I live in perpetual fear of illness. We’re essentially one bad head cold away from the whole thing falling apart.

I often wonder how people go about deciding exactly how many children to have. As the only child of my parents’ marriage, I reveled in the attention it afforded, but as the years wear on, I also feel the burden of it.

For my son, Theo, I wanted him to have the experience of growing up with a sibling close in age. It’s a wonderful thing to pick up the phone as an adult and reach someone who has the shared trauma of growing up in the same household. As parents, we obviously can’t dictate their degree of closeness, but it’s my hope that Theo and Violet will, at the very least, look after each other.

Shortly after our daughter’s arrival, a friend of my husband’s sent the following note: “I hope this finds you well. I know it finds you exhausted. The thing I miss terribly going from one child to two children was the nap. It was difficult to coordinate two nap schedules and as a consequence the Dad Nap was eliminated. The Dad Nap is an essential part of parenting and sadly with two dependent children, it is a very rare thing.”

My only amendment is the Mom Nap, which has similarly fallen by the wayside.

He ended the note by writing: “Remember, and I say this to truly comfort you, your next good sleep will be in your grave.”

Exhaustion aside, we’re still finding our rhythm among who, exactly, does which increasing number of domestic chores. To his credit, my husband nearly always pulls his weight and seems, for the most part, not to mind it.

Still, I keep having the same nightmare, in which something terrible has happened to me and my children no longer have clothes that fit or fingernails that have been trimmed (I buy their clothes and clip their nails).

My generation is a funny, in-between one. While it was never a question that I would have a career and work outside the home, the roadmap to getting there seems to work a bit differently for each mother I know. Despite being told to Lean In at all costs, we also haven’t figured out basic things like paid maternity leave and child care subsidies to ensure full workplace participation, but maybe that’s a separate conversation altogether.

Shortly after becoming a mother, an old therapist told me that I couldn’t accomplish everything I wanted to do at exactly the same time. Essentially, that if I wanted a big career while my son was still little, I needed to come to terms with the necessity of someone else raising him.

I’m recently back to working part time, but I’m still saying no to more assignments than I’m saying yes to, mostly because my plate feels overwhelmingly full. Having done this once before, I know these early years pass by in a flash and that the time spent with these little people feels like the best work I’ve ever done.

Finding that elusive thing called balance has proven tricky — since the target, well, it keeps shifting. A dear friend who lives in London and is also a mother of two young children, runs a nonprofit and recently departed on a weeklong trip to Africa.

For a month prior, she composed a detailed list of what was to be done each day — when extra pants needed to be packed in case of accidents at nursery school, which frozen meals could be reheated on which nights, and so on.

In all, six people were brought in — her husband, two grandmothers, one part-time nanny, one dog walker, and one housecleaner — to cover for her. By contrast, when her husband leaves town (he travels extensively on monthly business trips), he simply packs a bag and leaves town. A similar phenomenon exists in our household.

We obviously have a ways to go.

My dream is to wake up in Manhattan, childless for a few hours, and a morning filled with exactly nothing to do.

Amanda M. Fairbanks, a reporter for The Star, is recently back on the job after maternity leave.

Trying to explain why I like the film festival so much, I came up with a backstory: The Star was among the first public voices to welcome its arrival in East Hampton in 1993. Many year-round residents were wary that first year, fearing the festival would bring traffic snarls and unwelcome crowds of gawkers, possibly even harming local businesses.

Like others, Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., the village mayor then as now, was cautious about the introduction of an annual event that might push summer’s hassles into the relative peace of October. Mr. Rickenbach didn’t want East Hampton to turn into Hollywood East. “How much can the village of East Hampton saturate itself with?” we quoted him asking. When it was all over, he said he was more optimistic but was reserving judgment and wanted to “hear a post-festival critique on what exactly was the economic impact in the village.”

The Star praised Joyce Robinson, Naomi Lazard, and a few other forward-thinking individuals who inaugurated the festival. In an editorial titled “Break a Leg” — before the festivities began, lo those 23 festivals ago — we wrote there was “every reason to expect the festival will be a humdinger.”

In the end, it didn’t end up blocking traffic or annoying townspeople, and it stirred up only two political brouhahas: One was about the Town of East Hampton’s giving it $10,000 (Supervisor Tony Bullock defended the gift); and the other about sculptures of a giant fly and smiling duck that were rolled “up and down Main Street to promote the screening of a long-forgotten flick called ‘It’ll Have Blinking Eyes and a Moving Mouth.’ ” The mayor said the sculptures “were not indicative of what East Hampton is all about,” and the village administrator, Larry Cantwell, who is East Hampton Town supervisor today, found them to be a violation of the village sign ordinance and ordered them banished. He would probably laugh today reading that he said the village’s strict regulations “are what keep East Hampton from looking like 42nd Street.”

From the organizers’ and filmgoers’ point of view, the first festival was a “smash.” At least that’s what a Star headline said. The only reported gripe among audiences themselves was over a sneak preview of a movie that wasn’t revealed until the curtain went up; people were expecting something like “Shindler’s List” but got “Body Snatchers,” Abel Ferrara’s zombie thriller, instead.

The festival certainly scored big when Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese spoke at a packed Guild Hall seminar. “You take the audience through life and death, and bang! They come out on the other side,” Mr. Scorsese said.

Toni Ross, at the time president of the festival’s board of directors, was credited with its being an “inclusive event, not an exclusive one.” Four feature films and six shorts, all with local filmmakers, actors, and producers, were shown on the first day, and admission was free.

I chuckled with recognition when I noticed that The Star’s earliest news clippings about the festival were written by none other than Sarah Koenig, a reporter here that year, who more recently made us all proud as a member of Time magazine’s 100 most influential persons of 2015, as the co-creator and host of “Serial,” the wildly popular podcast in which she explored the guilt or innocence of a young man convicted of killing his girlfriend. (Sarah started here, and she has made journalistic history. Can someone get that plot green-lighted?)

A lot of things have changed in the 23 years since the film festival got going. Single film tickets have gone up about 100 percent, from $7 to $15 for adults, and the all-inclusive “Founders Pass” has gone up 50 percent, from $1,000 to $1,500. Prize money has grown, too.

Some 41 features and 30 shorts were screened at the first festival, compared with more than 140 films from 41 different countries this year. Filmgoers gathered in front of the East Hampton cinema before it opened on the first day in 1993, and banged on the door. Today, there are several ticket offices and tickets can be purchased online, but the line on the first day tickets were sold ran down the block.

As for movie stars, the festival is host to many, although you really wouldn’t know it from the lack of fuss and bother on Main Street.

There is nothing new under the bun,” I said in my best Ecclesiastes manner as my sister, who’s rehabbing a back injury in Pittsburgh, and I peered down at the health care facility’s limp culinary offerings.

“Maybe they think that by serving up such awful stuff you’ll be all the more determined to make a speedy recovery,” I said, before I alit on a gambit of my own. “I know,” I said, “I’ll read you some of my columns.”

At last, a captive audience! I had brought several years’ worth in a manila envelope, and before she could say, “Don’t speak,” I began, of course, with the one about Gary Bowen’s and my recent men’s B doubles championship at the East Hampton Indoor-Outdoor Club.

And then I segued into the Memorial Day one, the one, you know, that begins with my saying to Jen Landes that “all of a sudden, our chances of being in an accident have just increased a thousandfold. . . . Honk if you love peace and quiet.”

I spared her the column about the fascinating lovemaking of slugs — no slam, bam, thank-you ma’ams there! — in favor of one about me telling the historical tourists that my time at The Star dated to the Late Paleolithic period, or perhaps to the Early Cretaceous.

Turnabout, of course, is fair play. So, the next day she read me three Psalms, the 131st, the 26th, and the 23rd, her favorite.

But this was no green pasture in which she was lying down — it was a hospital bed in a dreary place, the type of place from which, whenever I find myself in one, I instantly want to flee. Having suffered a compression fracture of a vertebra, she can’t do that yet. My mission, then, was to cheerlead — or to bore her so with my readings that, without any seeming agency on her part, she would leap from her bed and walk.

We talked of the old house, which I had driven by one morning on my way to see her, its bricks pink in the sun on the hill. It seemed a blessed place. Though parents and grandparents are no longer within, it lives on, stolid and upright, as they were.

Of God my sister is fond, but I said to her in taking my leave last Thursday, “I’m putting my faith in you.”

This week, amid juggling pre-election stories, it has been project time in the Rattray household. Evvy, our sixth grader, volunteered to make one of the party games for a school Halloween party, and so, after spending Tuesday trying to make sense of campaign finance reports, I raced home with a slab of builder’s blue foam.

We were to have started on the project Monday evening, but Evvy got the green light to go with her grandfather to see the pumpkins at the Bridgehampton Lions Club contest then get dinner. Instead, we set to it a day late. Truth was, her celebration was not for a couple of days, but she said it was due early.

She is calling the game Poke the Ghosts and Pumpkins, and, as best I understand it, kids in the lower grades at her school will choose from among a grid of 50 paper-covered

plastic cups, each ripping through one to discover a prize. Other sixth graders are filling the cups and capping them; our part is making a large foam grid to hold it all.

As I write, I am waiting for her to get out of bed to see about painting it. After spending about two hours the night before helping her mark out lines on the foam and then cut 50 holes with a drywall saw, the enclosed porch where we went at it was filled with tiny pieces of blue debris. Ellis, our 5-year-old, who lost a first tooth later that night, took each of the leftover circles of foam and assembled them into a rectangle by the front door. It was an “app,” he said, as in something one would use on an iPhone.

One of the pleasures, if hectic after a long day, of being a parent is helping with school projects. Of course, the eternal question is how much to do and how much to leave to the child. Evvy, to her credit, sawed at the foam board until her arm got tired. I took over then and finished up. And Ellis never stopped taking the pieces for his app.

Then I vacuumed. And I’ll probably end up driving the thing to school. That will be part of the project, too.

Last week my broken dishwasher committed suicide.

Yes, I was home at the time. No, I was not in the kitchen.

I had come home around 7 p.m., read the mail in the kitchen as I fed the cat dinner, and headed upstairs to look at emails and sort pictures in my office.

An hour or so later I noticed my eyes were scratchy and there was an acrid odor of smoke in the air. My house is by the train tracks and if the wind is blowing a certain way there is kind of a train smell, which we “trackers” ignore. But this was making my eyes tear a bit so I went downstairs and opened an outside door to sniff the breeze. I still smelled it, so I called my closest neighbors and left a message: “Do you smell something smoky?”

Then I went into the kitchen.

I was just sort of taking inventory as the smoke detectors were not whooping and the cat was just being a cat. However, the dishwasher, which had totally stopped working six weeks previous, was spewing stinky smoke and its little “on” light was shining green.

I called the fire department.

“No hook and ladder,” I said. “It’s electrical and I am looking at it.” I could hear the fire alarm before I hung up the phone. I live in town and could hear the firemen coming from Cedar Street 30 seconds later. I opened the doors and turned on the outside lights.

My neighbors had heard my phone message and they arrived as the firemen did — very quickly. Within two minutes of my call there were about eight wonderful firemen in full gear in my not- that-big kitchen. Bravo, guys!

By this time the green light (which I had not touched for six weeks) had gone out and, while it was stinky, there was

no smoke spewing and no actual firefighting to be done. Some of the guys set about opening every door and window to air the place out (did I mention it was stinky?), and one limber fella got on the floor to make it so the dishwasher could be pulled out.

They were all sure I had done something and I swore up and down that I had not. A moment later the dishwasher relit its little green light and spontaneously began to once again spew smoke. Well, that got everybody’s attention and the electricity to the house was turned off and flashlights were turned on. More windows were opened and fans were found.

They really had thought I was a crazy lady who didn’t remember turning on her broken-for-six-weeks dishwasher! Ha!

In the dark, with flashlights playing on the soon-to-be-murdered appliance, I explained, again, that it was a 15-year- old dishwasher and that it had stopped working (full of dishes, of course) in the middle of August. I told them that after having a mini tantrum and determining with a neighbor that it did in fact not work, I ordered another one for delivery in October, when I knew I would have an open day to take it, re-learned how to wash dishes by hand, and forgot about the dishwasher . . . until the night it decided to commit suicide. Twice. Once for me and once for the firemen.

It was a horrible disaster averted. I could have been asleep (don’t want to think about it) or gone to the movies or been away (don’t even want to contemplate it).

Finally the fire gentlemen dragged the dishwasher, now totally disconnected, out to the front yard, where it sits waiting for the appliance giant to take it away when the new one is delivered next week.

I should mention here that the totally functioning smoke alarms did not go off during this entire adventure. The fire- folk thought maybe I hadn’t changed the batteries or had disconnected the smoke alarms or done something else dumb, but our kindly judge-fireman checked every single one of them and the batteries were all connected and the smoke alarms worked when prompted, but they were not in the kitchen. One is now.

So what saved it all? My nose, my teary eyes, and the lovely men of the fire department!

What did I learn?

When an electronic thing breaks — hair drier, waterpick, fridge, or dish- washer — unplug it. How do you unplug a dishwasher? I have no idea, but I won’t ever leave a broken one plugged in for six weeks, that’s for sure.

Thanks to the neighbor King family and thanks to the gents of the East Hampton Fire Department. I knew you were cool, now I am telling the world.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.

Whenever the season changes, I think of a woman who worked at The Star some years back who arrived every day more than impeccably dressed. To be sure, she was fashionable, but every outfit also seemed brand new. She would tell us she had a relative who worked in retail and could pass along nice things, but that didn’t seem to account for it. I couldn’t help wonder if she sent every garment to a thrift shop after wearing it once.

As for me, I hold on to my clothes for a long, long time. Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes not. One now-vintage dress I still own and wear occasionally in summer is a sleeveless, full-length Marimekko number in a purple and, yes, turquoise print that I bought way back when Marimekko had a shop in East Hampton, where Domaine Wines and Spirits is today, or thereabouts. It had to have been in the 1970s. It’s gratifying to find a past purchase still holds up in taste and quality. There’s definitely nothing wrong with an old but simple cashmere turtleneck, either. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, the quality of cashmere turtlenecks has dropped precipitously in recent decades, and in this case older is actually better.

Of course, most of us are apt to save clothing worn on ceremonial occasions. For men, that might be an army or navy uniform, or a varsity jacket; for women, the dresses they were married in. I’ve got two of them, although I never wore either a second time and don’t expect I ever will. One — an electric-blue satin shift that you could imagine being worn onstage by a member of the Supremes — is hidden in a closet tucked away in the back of our upstairs storage room; I think the last person to wear it was my daughter, at about the age of 12, when she tried it on and accidentally ripped one of the seams. She kept this youthful accident a secret for 20 years at least — which shows you how often I’ve seen the first wedding dress over the decades. My other wedding dress is kept in the back of my everyday closet, in my bedroom, and when I get a peek at it now and again it does rekindle joy.

Unfortunately, there are many more things crammed in these closets that once looked good, and once fit perfectly, but don’t anymore. Do I really need my high school drum-majorette outfit? How about that ’80s shearling coat with the prizefighter shoulders?

I’ve just had another birthday, and my husband and daughter gave me new clothes as presents. I particularly like a funnel-neck pullover from J. Jill in lavender-gray. It looks modern to my eye. I am aware that my family gave me clothes because, despite the crammed confines of my bulging closet, I am known to frequently bemoan the fact that I have “nothing to wear.” The seasons are changing. It’s time for me to purge my closet. I haven’t done it in years.

If you peruse the racks at the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s Bargain Box, it is clear than many stylish women make it a habit to deposit their not-veryold outfits and accessories as a donation. I imagine this habitual kind of closetfreshening being penciled into datebook calendars, Martha Stewart style, twice-yearly. While I’m not certain if my own discards could be classified as desirably vintage (and I know for certain they don’t fall into the “nearly new” category), I am steeling my courage and letting it all go.

The start of fall, however, was not simply a signal to get our belongings in order. It took a sad turn.

We had expected the small, shaggyhaired black terrier we adopted at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons at the beginning of summer to be with us for a long, long time. She was young, and we named her Sookie. She was adorable, cheerful, sweet, amusing, even captivating. Outdoors, she had boundless energy. Indoors, she loved to climb up onto laps. We all agreed she would make an outstanding circus dog: She could rise up on her hind legs and dance around in circles to greet newcomers. She charmed everyone.

The only thing we didn’t love about Sookie was the fact that she was so determined to hunt. She loved the chase. She tried really hard to catch a chipmunk under the backdoor steps, and managed to dislodge with her snout a shingle on the outside wall of the sun porch, when attempting to bring a creature to bay.

Before bringing Sookie home, we had made all possible preparations, installing a fence around a large part of the garden, making sure the gates had latches. On the first day she lived with us, Sookie ran into her yard and raced around with a kind of obsessive glee. We all said the yard and house were dog heaven.

She disappeared the night of the eclipse, the so-called blood moon. One minute she was in the kitchen saying hello, the next minute she had trotted outside to do her accustomed rounds. When she didn’t come running back into the house when called, I searched the yard with a flashlight. It took a few minutes to realize that someone had left the gate ajar. She had bolted, chasing a squirrel or chasing moonbeams.

She was found two mornings later in the driveway of a nearby house.

Dark dog, dark night, dark road.

We don’t know what life on the streets of Rincon, Puerto Rico, where she was found before being shipped up to ARF, was like for her, but she had a happy time in East Hampton while summe lasted.