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.

Abby Jane Brody, The Star’s gardening columnist, came into the upstairs office this week and told us about a horde of beetles that had descended on the milkweed in the native plant garden at Clinton Academy, next door. Milkweed borers, she said, make their living on the plants that give them their name, poking a hole in the stalks to lay their eggs. The adults, as I saw when I went outside to have a look, feast on the leaves and seedpods.

Milkweed is a key source of food for monarch butterflies, which, like the beetles, are an eye-catching orange and black. Abby Jane said she had seen few to no monarchs in the garden this year. This was not the story Sunday at Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett, where I went with two of my kids and some old friends and newer acquaintances for a late summer afternoon swim.

The wind was moderately strong, coming from the northwest, and one after another, monarchs came along the beach. They were flying sideways, with their heads pointed into the wind, as many as one every minute or two at times. Dragonflies seemed to accompany them, though moving more deliberately and in greater numbers. It made a pleasing spectacle, a daytime analogue for a meteor shower perhaps in the way we waited for one to appear and then loudly announced its arrival.

For our son, Ellis, who is 5, the urge to chase the monarchs and follow their wobbling paths to the west was too strong. He paid no mind to his older sister as she yelled that he should leave them alone. But try as he did, he was not able to put his hands on one.

Abby Jane was relieved to hearabout our beach sightings of monarchs. There have been reports in the news that their numbers are threatened. She suggested that I take some milkweed pods home to seed a patch of our own. She also said I should catch one of the beetles to show the kids, which I did; they were briefly impressed.

It had been a weekend for monarch sightings. On Saturday, I was among a small group who buried a box of Deborah Ann Light’s ashes at the foot of a pin oak on the Quail Hill preserve in Amagansett. There is plenty of milkweed there on the slope of a small field otherwise at rest. As each of us took a turn placing a white rose on Deborah’s box, and then shoveling it over with earth, a monarch flitted over and back.

It is remarkable that these small, fragile insects can get much of anywhere, flying astride the wind in their deceptively purposeless way, up and down, jogging back and then forward again. And yet they do. Almost as soon as one appeared over us as we went solemnly about our work, it was gone, riding sideways on the wind toward some destination we could only guess.

Ellis, our 5-year-old, started kindergarten last week. And, since he attends school where, and in the same building, I did when I was about his age, a lot of memories are being stirred.

Most of what I remember has to do with my friends at the time. We were all at the Hampton Day School, which occupied a former potato farm on Butter Lane in Bridgehampton. Later, Hampton Day briefly became the Morris Center School, then was taken over by the Ross School as a campus for its lower grades. Ellis’s room this year is in the old four-square farmhouse, the same space where my friend Mike and I exchanged blows those many years ago.

We could not have been more than about 8 when it all went down. I was drawing a drag race car, and Mike strolled by to make a comment. “That’s not how you draw a car!” he said.

I responded that if he said that again I was going to hit him. He did, and I did, striking him alongside his perky little nose with my pencil. By way of reaction, Mike ran into the school kitchen and smashed a dish. But he got even, poking me with a pencil on my cheek a few days later.

To this day, we both have more or less matching graphite marks, which we inevitably point out to one and all when we are together and have had a few drinks.

Upstairs in the same old farmhouse is where Milo McFarland and I found a cache of marbles in a bathroom access panel. We divided the spoils between us. I still have my half in a metal box in the basement where I keep my tools. Mike and I have remained close; Milo died in 2002, and we had long lost touch by then.

The cycle of life and death is fresh in my mind this week. Mike’s mother, the late Deborah Ann Light, will be remembered in a gathering at Quail Hill in Amagansett, which was, if anything, my second home during the early ’70s. She was an imposing figure, tall, yes, but more so for her manner, a kind of knowing imperiousness with which she viewed the younger generation’s varied transgressions, of which there were plenty.

We weren’t bad kids exactly. It’s just that we chafed at the constraints of this place and found relief in various kinds of mischief. Later, when Deborah had moved to East Hampton Village and Mike and I were older, there were more shenanigans; we only found out much later that she found this stage of our youth amusing. If she imparted a lesson it was that it was okay to do one’s own thing, but, under no circumstances were we to be overly dumb about it.

We will celebrate Deborah’s life this weekend. Then, on Monday, I’ll take Ellis back to school, back to the room where, once, I was a child as well.

About a year ago I briefly had  an idea that I would like to lease a new Volkswagen TDI, one of the models now at the center of a massive fraud scandal. I decided against it, opting instead for a Chevrolet Volt.

Volt drivers, the dealer told me when I was first looking at the car, are a kind of cult. Nearly 12 months into the three-year lease I signed, I know what he meant and might add that we are a smug cult now that Volkswagen has been found cheating on emissions tests.

According to the Sierra Club, whether an electric car produces less climate change pollution than other cars depends on where you plug in. If your area’s electricity comes from a lot of coal-burning plants, your  electric car may be no better than a conventional one when it comes to the amount of CO2 produced.

Where all the power comes from on Long Island varies as PSEG contracts shift, but federal figures for New York and the neighboring states are pretty good, with generally less than 3 percent of net electricity generation from coal. The other top sources are, in order, natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric. By the way, solar and other renewables come in at less than 4 percent in New York, according to the Energy Information Administration. Considering the power supply, on balance, my Volt is doing well for the planet.

Chevy Volts and vehicles like it are not purely electric; a small generator kicks in when the battery is depleted, which in my case is after about 45 miles in warm weather. Having taken a few trips in the Volt, I have dipped into the fuel tank a few times, but even when I have this added up to only 120 miles per gallon for the 14,000 or so I’ve put on the car so far.

During the last 12 months, I used just over 100 gallons of gas in the Volt; had I leased the Volkswagen Jetta wagon I had my eye on, I would have been in for almost five times that much by now. Plus there’s the bonus of all that nice smugness. I’m sure I can squeeze a few more miles out of that.

“‘Rose, pure contradiction,joy...’”I began as Mary looked up from her porch chair on the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 15.

“That’s from Rilke’s headstone.” “...‘To be...sleep....’ Ican’t remember . . . ‘to be...nobody’s sleep. . . .’ ” “You’re right about that,” she said, brightening. “Nobody slept last night — we were all worrying about Johnna.”

Later that night, at around 9, the parturition news was imparted from California, to wit, that our grand- daughter, our eighth grandchild, had, at last, arrived.

And, of course, we all want to know the name.

Even before the mother began pushing, I was pushing for Mary, or at least a name with Mary in it. Their surname being Norris, I thought Marianna would be nice. Marianna Norris would go trippingly on the tongue, I thought. But, as  I’ve been told many times before it’s not about me. It’s about them and what they want. And, besides, there are so many people to please and it is their baby after all.

“I remember being so grateful after Johnna and Georgie were born that it was all over,” Mary said. “But then I realized: It’s just begun!”

We’re all flying blind here, and, unlike the bat I wrote about last week, we don’t have sonar. We bump about.

But there’s the rose and there’s joy, and who could sleep under that many eyelids? The baby, I’ll bet. And presumably the mother and father too.

Pretty heady stuff those exit lines of the poet’s. And so was this entrance, with everyone waiting, waiting.

So, I’ll be exchanging the rah-rah- ing for ahh-aah-ing these next two weeks.

And wait impatiently for the time when she hits her first tennis ball.

At a time of year when everything — the lack of crowds, the halcyon weather, the start of school — coalesces to underscore how good the life we lead is, we might tend to take it all for granted. But despite manifestations of extreme inequality (some members of our community depend on food pantries to eat, while others invest in second — or third, or fourth — homes that are far beyond anything we might have considered reasonable in size and cost only a few years ago), we share so many privileges here on the South Fork.

It is more than the gorgeous weather and traffic-free streets that have prompted these thoughts. As I write, today is the second day of the Jewish New Year, with the observance of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, arriving next week. From the time I was a child, I have eschewed formal religion, but some profound messages have sunk in. The Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy instruct Jews in giving, or “tzedakah,” a word casually defined as charity, but which biblical scholars have explained is derived from the Hebrew word for justice, which I guess is the more accurate definition of the ideal that the observant are expected to pursue.

Never having studied Islam, it hadn’t immediately occurred to me that the Qur’an might also instruct its believers in justice. Searching the web, however, I found a text that explained that the Qur’an “not only lays stress on such great deeds of charity as the emancipation of slaves, the feeding of the poor, taking care of orphans, and doing good to humanity in general, but give sequal emphasis to smaller acts of generosity.”

Of course, Christians share the Old Testament and share similar traditions. Although church-going has, for the most part, declined in this country, congregants can be counted on to be charitable and to do the right thing for others. And many of us certainly try to, in the words of a popular hymn, “Brighten the Corner Where You Live.”

These ruminations may imply that I am turning to religion (supposedly the thing to do as one ages). But no, it is just that I am strongly reminded this week of the commonalty among the major Western religions at a moment when their basic tenets are being distorted in war and in the brutal treatment of refugees in Europe.

Let us count our blessings. Politically, here at home, our fights are about how to achieve an appropriate “quality of life,” not about how to protect our lives from harm. Yes, airport noise and beach trash might inspire passionate emotions, but these problems are also reminders of just how lucky we are and, perhaps, just how insulated from the violence of the world. Is it merely money that insulates us? Or is there, in fact, something in our system of government that — despite all appearances to the contrary — allows foes and debating factions to live relatively peaceably side by side? I don’t know.

I do know that how we react to headlines alerting us to others’ hardships depends on the values we learned at our elders’ knees, as much as it does on our ability to be of practical help. We don’t have to support those organizations that provide food or medicine or shelter to those in vulnerable circumstances. We don’t even have to read the headlines. But most of us do.

Recently I’ve noticed yard signs around town advertising the business of a prominent building company: “Live the Life,” the signs beckon. Is the good life we lead really defined by bulging, multimillion-dollar Shingle Style mansions? Or is it defined by our common will to extend a hand of friendship to our neighbors (or, at least, not to kill them)?

When the Republican  candidates began to talk the other night about sending in the Sixth Fleet, strangling Putin, strong-arming China, and bringing Mexico’s bordercrossing legions to heel, I walked down the hall to see on our other TV the Pirates-Cubs game, which was such a nail-biter that, inspired by the debaters, I prayed Zeus would hurl a thunderbolt at Jake Arrieta. “I’ve got to stop this — it’s a terrible addiction,” I said to Mary the next morning. “No, it’s not drinking, it’s the staying up to all hours watching the Pirates play. They loaded the bases in the eighth, there was one out, and then...Idon’tknow . . . everything unraveled . . . arrrggghh.”

She wasn’t hearing any of it. How could she, tending as she was her hair with a dryer shaped like one of those creatures from the Burgess Shale.

Joe Zucker, a lifelong Cubs fan, thinks it will come down to a onegame wild card play-in at Wrigley. Neither of us — the Pirates always lost when I was growing up in Pittsburgh, and the Cubs never won, but who cared — is used to this Empyrean sphere, one in which Yankee fans have lolled about for years.

“What will be will be,” I say to myself. Though I can’t let it be.

Someone will save us, McCutchen perhaps, it is usually he, or Kang, or Polanco, or Marte, or even Sean Rodriguez (who looks more like a pirate than anyone). I can’t watch, I must watch.

It’s the same with the Steelers. And the other night they were both playing at the same time, which meant I was running up and down the hall, from one TV to the other, only to be doubly eviscerated at the end. I left Pittsburgh so long ago, but it — whatever that is, the trees, the buckeyes, the stogies, plaid-lined jeans, the Red American Flyer, Isaly’s iconic conical ice cream scoops, pistachio being my favorite, and the cigar smoke that wreathed Forbes Field on game day — has not left me.

Salem witch trials. During the dark days of the Red Scare, in the 1950s, Arthur Miller wrote his fictionalized account, “The Crucible,” about them, and the city of Salem, in Massachusetts, recounts the terrible story in museums and in a “Witch Village.” The Salem trials took place in 1692. Nineteen people were hanged, one pressed to death, and four died in prison. You can’t visit Salem without being confronted by what the law-abiding citizens thought and did.

Not everyone who lives in or visits East Hampton, however, knows that we had our own accused witch. After a trial in Connecticut — which was the colonial-government seat for the settlers of eastern Long Island, much closer by water than New York City — she was acquitted of having caused a death by witchcraft and advised to return home and live peaceably. 

Her name was Elizabeth Garlick, and three East Hampton residents want to make sure her travails are not forgotten. Hugh King, Loretta Orion, and Aimee Webb, who hope to write a book about Goody Garlick, were the moving forces behind a conference about her, which the East Hampton Historical Society held on Saturday. 

Of course, in my line of work and because I’ve lived here as long as I have, I had heard of Goody Garlick. I even named a dog Goody in her honor. But I was intrigued by what might come out at the conference and decided to attend.

Goody Garlick was tried in 1657, 35 years before the Salem hysteria. The conference presenters, in addition to Mr. King and Ms. Webb, were Daniel Cohen of East Hampton, who seems to have read the entire first volume of the town records, which cover the years between 1639 and 1679–80, and Walter Woodward, a professor at the University of Connecticut, the state historian, and the author of a book about John Winthrop Jr. It was Winthrop who sagely ruled there was not enough evidence to convict East Hampton’s supposed witch.

It’s hard to imagine that everyone in the Old and New Worlds in the 17th century believed in magic, but a mix of science, religion, and magic was the prevailing way of explaining the world. Even Winthrop, an educated and compassionate man who was actually asked by the people of Connecticut to be governor, was an alchemist. Think of that!  

Daniel Cohen hasn’t lived in East Hampton all that long, but no one can accuse him of being a know-nothing “from away.” I dare say Mr. Cohen is as knowlegable as any bona fide Bonacker about East Hampton’s earliest days. He was the first to speak at the conference, describing what set the stage for an innocent woman to be accused of witchcraft. He summarized East Hampton society as “disciplined, exclusive, and male-dominated” — no surprise, but, of course, the devil is in the details.

 The town meetings in those days had what might be called universal jurisdiction. Women were outside the circle of men, who decided everything. (They even legislated against cutting grass on the dunes.)

Mr. Woodward’s talk was centered on the philosophy of the time, describing the culture’s misogyny, which made it easy for elderly, poor women to be tried as witches. Even highly educated men were terrified, he said, of powers they could not see, powers attributed to Satanic magic. 

Goody Garlick was the first accused witch to be spared death in Connecticut, and no one was executed in that state after 1662. Salem, on the other hand, suffered from what Mr. Woodward called community pathology. Presumably, it didn’t have a John Winthrop on hand to impose some measure of reason.  

At one point in the program, Mr. Woodward showed slides of horrific torture devices, including one, a chair, for primitive waterboarding. One could make a comparison to more recent uses of waterboarding, and modern-day circles of exclusion and power, but I will leave it to readers to flesh out that analogy.

October is here, and instead of framing Goody Garlick in the context of American traditions of torture, it would be much more fun to remember her come Halloween time. Perhaps we’ll see a few Goody Garlicks trick-or-treating along Cooper Lane this year. Halloween, after all, is about assimilating and making palatable things that otherwise would be pure horror.

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.

The closing of Waldbaum’s was a long time coming. The company had been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for a while, and the growing neglect that comes with that may account for why so many of us out here were left wondering why Waldbaum’s hated us so much.

We have high hopes for Stop and Shop, which is taking over the East Hampton Waldbaum’s and several others on Long Island. With its East Hampton opening slated for tomorrow, I hope it’s not too late to offer some advice about what I hope can be done better.

Waldbaum’s had a lot of problems. The parking lot hadn’t been repaved in what seemed like decades, unless you count the black paint job it got a year or so ago, so it made sense that the carts felt like they’d all been run over by a truck. Did corporate ship all the bad ones east or were they just beat to death by that parking lot? Only a handful had four wheels that touched the ground. If I’m going to spend $200 a week in a grocery store, I appreciate a cart that drives straight. It was when wrestling my cart around a turn that I felt most hated.

Most of the aisles, already too narrow for two carts to pass in opposite directions, were made even narrower by a variety of displays, making cart navigation even harder. There was hardly any room to line up or bag groceries at the checkout aisles, resulting in a maddening scrum of carts on even a moderately busy day. The roof leaked, the freezers and refrigerators broke down often, the store seemed stuck in the 1990s at best, but still I shopped there, and as much as the hate was sort of mutual, I felt a little sad when it finally closed.

I’ll miss some of the employees, most of whom I knew by face but not name, and some of the distributors, who were so accommodating about bringing out a favorite product that had disappeared from the shelves. It wasn’t their fault. I’ll miss the store-brand dryroasted unsalted jumbo cashews and the Greenway organic yellow corn chips. But there is a lot I won’t miss and I’m hoping Stop and Shop will try a little harder. I know we can’t expect everything in a week. This is a longterm project.

Dear Stop and Shop:

I hope you have destroyed all the shelves at the former East Hampton Waldbaum’s because they were too deep. We need wider aisles. Two carts should be able to pass each other in an aisle without knocking down a toilet paper display.

I hope you have sent all the carts to the junkyard and will reopen with new ones, not damaged castoffs from the Hampton Bays or Riverhead stores. If we don’t have to think about how hard it will be to push a full cart, we might buy more groceries.

Please repave the parking lot, if not immediately, then very soon. A wellpaved parking lot makes an excellent first impression. Plus, the new carts will last longer. Also, please tell your employees not to fill the parking lot with their own cars. It’s hard enough to get a space in the lot.

You’ll also need to repair the roof. It leaks. And maybe put in a new bathroom so mothers with children who just can’t wait won’t have to warn them not to touch anything.

Please, please, please provide more space to line up for checkout and for bagging.

Please clean the deli department.

Please consider a natural and organic foods section, and possibly a self-checkout area that functions more smoothly.

Good luck. We’re rooting for you!

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.