Perhaps you have wondered while making your way around why there appears to be next to no poison ivy in our fair village. That is not likely to be an accident, as this marks the 68th anniversary of the first annual Poison Ivy Eradication Week, declared for the first seven days of June in 1947 and each year thereafter by representatives of both the Town and Village of East Hampton.

Above the names of Supervisor Herbert Mulford Jr. and Mayor Judson L. Banister, as well as the town justices and village trustees and the respective clerks, officials issued a call to each landowner to “make a concerted effort to destroy poison ivy on his own property and to report to the Town or Village Clerk the location of ivy which is not being eradicated.”

It went on, “We also urge everyone to take the greatest precautions to protect himself from the poison ivy while spraying or destroying the ivy.”

My source for this, by the way, is the remarkable online archive of The East Hampton Star for the years between 1918 and 1968. Issues are searchable any which way from a link on the East Hampton Library’s website. There were some 180 references to poison ivy when I checked.

Poison Ivy Eradication Week in 1947 got off to a running start, The Star reported, with an objective to eliminate “this nuisance to summer vacationists.” The Ladies Village Improvement Society led the charge, with help from the Boy Scouts, American Red Cross, two garden clubs, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars Ladies Auxiliary. Details about how they all went about the task were not provided, but the L.V.I.S. ran advertisements in several May 1948 issues of The Star reminding readers that it was time once again to spray for poison ivy and recommending the use of 2,4-D, a weed killer that is still on the market, although we now know it is more ecologically sensitive to avoid chemicals and pull it out by hand.

The effort begun in 1947 appears to have worked, at least in the village. I can think of no obvious patches of poison ivy along Main Street or any of the places my friends and I explored here as a teenager. Get north of the bridge, however, and it pops up in the hedgerows and can be seen climbing trees. Our family’s place, down by the beach near Promised Land, is nearly overrun with the stuff. That and ticks, which are a subject for another day.

So, what’s so bad about a man wearing a fedora? To listen to some, men in fedoras in the Town of East Hampton are a sure sign that civilization as we know it has come to an end.

“Here they come, with their fedoras.” You would think, the way people talk, that the fedora-wearing crowd was a bunch of weird cultists instead of young people having fun. I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s because I am older than many of the people I work and associate with. When I was a child, my father wore a fedora. The sight of a man in a fedora is not alien to me.

The subways that I rode when I was growing up used to have signs that warned men to hold onto their hats. One such sign was at the Third Avenue end of the I.R.T. station for the 7 train from Queens. (If I really wanted to date myself here, I would tell you that I.R.T. stands for Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the first subway operator in New York City, which opened in 1904, though I was not there for the opening.)

That sign showed a man holding onto his hat, as I recall. The reason for the warning was that every time a westbound train burst into the station, there would be a huge gust of wind that would blow straight up the long escalator to 42nd Street. Goodbye, fedora!

As I said, my dad wore a hat, as did most men. Just take a look at photographs of crowds from the 1950s or earlier. Practically every man is in a hat.

Then came the 1960s and beyond. My hair, as with that of most young men, was long, long, longer. A hat over that? Forget about it!

And so, the fedora disappeared, as did the cute signs in the subway. (My favorite sign, looking back, was the one in the cars that read, “Little enough to ride for free, little enough to ride your knee,” accompanied by a drawing of a happy mommy with an even happier baby bouncing on her knee.)

Hats are civilized. There are rules regarding hats. When you walk into the East Hampton Town Justice courtroom, you darn well better have that hat in your hand and not on your head or you will get a swift reminder from one of the guards.

Recently, I walked into White’s Drug and Department Store in Montauk and tried on a fedora. Nice. I plunked down the 15 bucks and went on over to the other side.

I am now one of them, and you can tip your hat to that.

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star who covers police and courts, among other things.

“All of a sudden, it got more exciting — don’t you feel that too?” I said the Friday of Memorial Day weekend to Jen Landes, our arts editor. “I mean, our chances of being in an accident have just increased a thousandfold! All of a sudden, the stakes are raised, the level of intensity has soared. As in wartime or in lovemaking, or in lovemaking during wartime, the blood is flowing, no longer congealed by winter’s icy clutch. In the next few weeks I’m going to be really alive, giving full rein to my emotions rather than simply going through the motions.”

And with that, I was out the door and wheeling into traffic just in time to see a woman who’d rolled through a stop sign near the flagpole remonstrating vehemently with blameless drivers heading east and west on Main Street. “It is you, madam, you who are at fault!” I was about to call out, but she, still raging, was gone, thus denying to me what Philip Roth has called the ecstasy of sanctimony. Choler interruptus.

And then, of course, there’s the local news of late: They say they own us, that they can do what they want with their property, they say they can make as much noise as they want on arriving and taking off. Oh, ecstasy of sanctimony! Does not the communal good exert a more worthy claim to conscience than the license invoked by “haves” equating license with liberty? The gorge rises, the heart pounds, the tongue lashes. This is really living, and whom do we have to thank for it, for having revivified our torpid souls? Them! So, I urge you, don’t rush to judgment — even though it’s fun. Rather than vilified, they are more to be pitied perhaps. Working so hard as they do, they have little time to relax and think of the greater good. And so I say, as the season begins, “Honk if you love peace and quiet.”

Having had a taste of excitement, then, we decided to go whole hog, and spend a day in the city. Soon we were swept up in it, in the huddled masses, yearning for falafels.

But, wonderful to tell, there was ease there, a calm we’d almost forgotten. The sun was out in the city and it was, we agreed, as we walked along, a nice place to be. We struck up conversations easily, wished others well in parting, and returned here at peace, our heart rates having returned to normal and our sense of brotherhood renewed.

What to do with the sunny Sunday of a long holiday weekend? 

Well, for starters, I had to coordinate with the workers who arrived bright and early to fix our dilapidated old picket fence and plant some privet to hide the back neighbors’ pool from view. Then I wanted to cut and bring in some lilacs before their bloom faded. Also, I needed a few flowering plants for the three ceramic pots on the patio, and that meant I had to make a run to the crazy-busy nursery — where everyone and their mother was out buying hydrangeas and roses, it seemed — to get more potting soil. And then I had to thumb through cookbooks to decide what salads I was going to make for a family birthday dinner . . . and then shop for whatever ingredients were necessary, then whip the salads up . . . then off to an early cocktail reception, and then, by 6:30, the birthday party itself.

Because of all these plans — which somehow felt like a lot to do at one time, even though it wasn’t really — I blew off my usual yoga session on Sunday morning, for the third time in as many weeks. The deep-breathing exercises, not to mention the “letting go,” just weren’t on the agenda last weekend.

I decided on pilaf, and — while taking inventory of the fridge — noticed we were lacking quite a few pantry basics, including milk and Ajax, so I started a grocery list. Roasted asparagus seemed like it might be a nice companion to the pilaf, and I also had to find fruit for the fruit salad my husband had signed on to make for the birthday. The shopping list grew.

It was no longer early when I set out for the supermarket. Trying to make the most of a dwindling day, I decided to forget the Ajax and go straight to Citarella. It was, of course, jam-packed, too. Anticipating mayhem, no doubt, the management had hired attendants to stand by the parking lot entrance, directing cars. One of them, a young man with a clipboard, encouraged me to edge into a very narrow spot. When did shopping turn into such a brouhaha? Somehow, the checkers at the cash registers were still smiling. They told me it had been even crazier there on Saturday.

Making my way home, I followed the loop past the post office to Egypt Lane and stopped in a line of traffic at the light. Unfortunately, that is when my car — to my horror — somehow slowly slid into the Jeep ahead of me! The driver jumped out and, running toward me, shouted, “What the hell are you doing?” I had jammed on the brakes in enough time to avoid any damage, however, and he seemed mollified when I answered meekly that I was sorry. 

The truth is that Memorial Day weekend has never been my favorite moment of the year, no matter how fine the weather or how sweet-smelling the lilacs. Everyone arriving in town en masse seems determined to play — I think the term is “frantically relaxing” — but, like many of us who live here, I’m not on that wavelength right now. Summer is coming, but, for us, it’s not the start of vacation season but the start of work, work, work season. Maybe we can relax in, say, October? Something tells me I should get back to yoga class. 

Post-Memorial Day, it is a little difficult to decide what to write about. There are so many choices: traffic, noise, events missed, yard work.

Among other options are a pony on the beach at a kid’s birthday party, which drew the baffled attention of East Hampton Town Marine Patrol, and a maddening Montauk Highway tie-up on Sunday evening caused by the Cyril’s Fish House parking guys.  

But the thing that I think will stick with me as far as the first weekend of the 2015 season is concerned has to do with three young bike-riding visitors and an endangered plant.

Sunday afternoon, a little after 1, I was driving home on Cranberry Hole Road and noticed a bicycle on its side at the edge of the pavement. A young woman astride another bike stood nearby. As I got closer, I saw that a second woman, who I thought was not much older than 20, had crawled under the pines and  seated herself in a sprawl of small white flowers, apparently picking something. A young man waited in the grass by the side of the road a couple of hundred feet up the way. I thought about warning them about the ticks and the poison ivy, but it was clear that it was too late.

As it turned out, my sister, Bess, had passed these three only moments earlier. As we readied the kids for a trip to Montauk to play miniature golf, we laughed, rather unkindly, about what we had seen. “Ticks up the wazoo!” “Ha, hipsters!” That kind of thing.

Loading the car, with three kids in the back and my sister in the passenger seat, I headed east, turning onto Napeague Meadow Road. Near the big curve, where a new osprey nest on a pole is occupied, we saw them again. This time, a spray of pink flowers was bobbing from a backpack one of the women was wearing.

Almost simultaneously, Bess and I exclaimed, “Lady slippers!”

“Stop the car,” Bess cried, “I’m going to give them what for.”

Lady slippers, members of the orchid family, are protected in New York, as are the state’s other native orchids, all of which are rare. Cutting them from public land, like a road right of way, is a state law violation that can come with a fine. Even cutting them on private property is supposed to require the landowner’s permission. Anyway, in my opinion, a beautiful flower on the side of the road should be left for all to see. 

With a kid in the back of the car shouting “You are an idiot!” at the flower-snatchers, I had to roll up the windows, so I could not hear exactly what my sister said. Still steaming about it when she got back in the car, she said her remonstrations were answered by a repeated, weak, “Uh, okay.”

Judging from their blank expressions, it is  unlikely that they learned a lesson, although that is impossible to know. But they will not soon forget the encounter, that’s for sure.

And the season’s only just begun.

I am dying, Egypt, dying — of the pollen and the ticks — but life, at least as I find it today, is wonderful, now that the sun is out and we’re in the trees’ embrace.

Our daughter from Temecula is with us, pregnat, as she used to say, and we’re grillin’ tonight. Wally, her husband, will teach us, and I will pay close attention inasmuch as outdoor cookery is generally considered a manly thing, a rite of passage that has come along quite late in my life.

Mary, who’s never forgotten the orange roughy I cooked outside for her mother and her in 1986, recently bought the grill — one fit for the middle class, not overly ornate — and, sparing me the trouble, bless her, put it together. I react viscerally when people tell me that all I have to do is “read the manual.” I don’t like manuals. I don’t like to follow instructions, especially when they accompany diagrams, and I also tend to dismiss as pettifogging any disputes as to rules, as when Mary accuses me of cheating in backgammon.

“You hold me in too high esteem,” I say. “I’m not clever enough to cheat.”

“Trust but verify,” she says.

“Trust but vilify,” I say.

I will make it up to her. I will become, with the bright, shiny utensils Johnna and Wally gave us, a man of parts when it comes to barbecuing — “barbe-a-cul-ing,” as a French wit once put it to me. I know it is something I should do, that I’m programmed to do. It goes way back, she says, to when we were hunters and gatherers and women nursed the children and tended the hearth and cooked the food and made and washed the clothes and kept things clean and. . . .

“Really, not much has changed,” she said, “except instead of spearing wildebeests, you’re whacking tennis balls.”

“Don’t you worry ’bout a thing,” I tell her. “Soon you’ll be saying, just like they do on WLNG, ‘And thank you, Jack, for charring.’ ”

About two years after my mother died, at the unfair age of 58, my dad, who was in his early 60s, found himself pursued by a phalanx of age-appropriate widows.

When I say pursued, I’m not kidding. Hardly a day went by when he was not invited to a home-cooked dinner, a reading or a talk, a Broadway show or a Carnegie Hall concert for which they just happened to have an extra ticket, and on and on.

I remember one woman who used to run into him “accidentally” at least twice a week. Also one who requested the pleasure of his company for an entire winter’s Metropolitan Opera series (he didn’t accept); another who turned up in a nearby cabin after he told her he was going on a cruise, and yet another who actually bought an apartment in his same building.

I am an only child. After my mother’s death my father used to call me every night precisely at 6. “Hi, baby, what’s new?” “What’s new with you, Dad?” and out it would come: “Well, I was looking forward to a quiet evening, but (Florence/Serena/Mildred/Bel) called and suggested we take in a movie, so. . . .”

“Bel,” by the by, was Bel Kauffman, who wrote a wildly popular novel called “Up the Down Staircase” that nobody today remembers unless they’re about 103, which she was when she died last year. She had a career as a teacher in the New York City public schools and, after the book was published, financial security for the rest of her long life. I seem to recall that she wanted an escort, not a husband, and Dad, whose 32-year marriage to my mother was one of consummate contentment, seemed fine with that.

And then there was Faye.

I blame my Aunt Maybelle for Faye. They were friends from high school, but then Faye got married and went to live in Texas. When they reconnected many years later, after Faye’s husband died and she moved back east, Maybelle gave her, oh, at least a day to settle in before calling her widower brother to set them up.

Texas, which at the time seemed to me about as close to the real world as Mars, really did a number on Faye. She was as different from my mother — who was stylish in a classic ’50s way, great with design and decoration and entertaining though not so much with crossword puzzles, dark-haired with a striking white streak in front, absolutely unaffected, and happiest when Dad and I were happy — as two women could be. Faye, “five-foot-two, eyes of blue,” had platinum hair, an I-dare-you-to-disagree attitude, a broad Southern accent that faded when she was “all riled up,” as often happened when the talk was about something that didn’t interest her, and, for my lawyer-father — high-minded, conservative, a wearer of vests — a come-hither crinkling of the eyes and an inexplicable, to me, attraction.

She was altogether unlike the other women of his generation and crowd. I suppose that had a lot to do with it.

They’d known each other for several months when he caught me by surprise one day with a question.

“What do you think of Faye?”

The question seemed casual — he wasn’t given to subtlety — and I answered it casually, without thinking.

“Not much.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I mean, she’s smart and pretty and everything, but there’s something, I don’t know, fake about her.”

I don’t remember any more of what was said — probably there was no more — but a few months later he told me Faye was going to marry a judge in New Jersey. That was the last time I heard her name mentioned, except for when Aunt Maybelle, a world-class guiltmaker, told me Faye had fallen very hard for Dad and had got engaged on the rebound.

My father lived another 10 or 12 years. He seemed older, now that I think of it, after the thing with Faye, as if some spark had gone out. He never remarried.

Looking back from a distance of decades, knowing with every year that passes a few more friends who have lost their spouses or longtime partners and seeing them ill with loneliness, I find myself thinking more and more about that conversation. I know that lots of children object to a parent’s remarriage for all sorts of reasons, not all of them bad, and every case is different, but I wonder.

Why did I say what I said? And why did he ask me?

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large. She is at large in Amagansett for the time being.

It was surprising at the beginning of the week to find myself in an art gallery in a small town in Northern California looking at photographs calling attention to that community’s housing crisis. The photographer, whose name by the time I wrote this, had slipped my mind, embarked on a project to document the people who have been displaced as the coastal unincorporated town of Bolinas changed rapidly in the past few years.

The blame, at least in the view of the photographer, lay in the fact that an increasing number of rentals were now listed online for short-term vacations — as on our own South Fork. This pulled potential residences from the pool available for the area’s workers, with the greatest impact among Latinos. The black-and-white images showed families, young couples, and older singles.

All the proceeds from the photos’ sales, after printing costs, were to be given to those in need of assistance. But more than that, the photographer wrote in an explanation posted on a wall, steps had to be taken to support landlords who choose to offer long-term rentals instead of short ones with revolving doors. Marin County, the statement said, was among the wealthiest in the United States; much more had to be done to assure its work force had places to live.

One can understand where the property owners are coming from. Short-term rentals result in less wear and tear, and, in many cases, the money is better. Renting year-round can be demanding as tenants’ needs evolve; opting for the short term mean hosts can shut down whenever they choose just by refusing to accept a booking or taking a listing off­line. And weekenders rarely show up with a bunch of furniture and pets or want to repaint all the bedrooms.

As in the Hamptons, this adds up to a serious disruption of the bottom of the housing market. This is a huge social justice issue as the cost of commuting into affluent areas, like East Hampton or Bolinas, helps eat up income that might otherwise be spent on essentials or put away toward savings, education, or building a business of one’s own.

The $400 prints in the gallery were not of themselves going to solve West Marin’s housing crisis, but by drawing attention to it, they might just help. As for the East End, there is a proposed legislative solution in the form of loans for down payments on house purchases. But even that program, should it come into being, would deal only with workers already secure enough to buy a house; it would not help assure access to affordable rentals among those just starting out or of modest means.

Meanwhile, the Wainscott School Board has taken it upon itself to seek to block a town effort to build a small number of affordable apartments in that district. Signs are not good for a serious solution anytime soon. In fact, judging from the number of online listings, it’s only getting worse — all over.

It is time to talk of the outdoor shower, that blessed sanctuary among the trees and birds and light in which one can revel six months long before driven inside to the fire, a pleasure of a different kind.

Whether in the shower, which has a bench, or by the fire, one can read, and that is something she and I do habitually — to no end that I know of in her case except the pleasure that she takes in it.

I, on the other hand, used to think that the more I read the more I would know, but that has not turned out to be so. As I — I believe it was I, or at least the I that says it’s me — once said, if I were to reread what I’d deemed a worthy book several times probably every line would wind up underlined.

Still, I’m reluctant to let go of the evidence, in the office and at home, that mine is a well-stocked mind. Classics stuffed in shelves, classics heaped on the floor. How could a visitor in looking around after I’m gone not exclaim what an improved brain was his, crammed with truth and beauty.

What I’m reading now, however, counsels against such striving in favor of merely looking about, as one often tends to do in an outdoor shower, and marveling at life as it is now, uncensoriously.

Maybe that is what is so wonderful about an outdoor shower, for in it and akin with nature you’re less inclined to think metaphorically, it simply being what it is.

You’re less inclined, in the sun and the trees and the birds, to worry about the future or to fret about the past. Less inclined too to pick up a book — which one can do in our shower inasmuch as it has a bench — to fill in the gaps in your knowledge.

Less inclined in the joy of the moment to think someday, someday I will be wise.

Miraculous power and marvelous activity — drawing water and hewing wood!

And showering out of doors!

My cousin Harriet tries to keep her father’s side of the family together even though she lives in Dallas and most of the relatives live on the East Coast. On Sunday, it had been nine years since a dozen of us sat down together. The nice thing is we all are alive and well, although one first cousin doesn’t leave her house anymore. Her granddaughter, a native of Israel who lives in Queens, visits her in New Jersey once a week by subway, bus, and a mile-long walk. That’s an expression of family affection that I bet few can match.

As we enjoyed brunch in a New York City restaurant, I found myself musing on what the members of extended families mean to each other. We went around the table bringing each other up to date. But something else was almost tangible. In our case, we share the knowledge that those who came before us, men and women who immigrated to this country before World War II, made our lives possible. What a distance we have traveled.

Given how American families are known for dispersing, generation after generation, it seemed big that some of ours could be together even if our number was small. How close we are can be gleaned from the fact that on Sunday there were two Harriets and two Philips at the table.

Harriet from Dallas is my father’s brother Sam’s daughter — she and my father were niece and uncle. I never knew my father’s parents, my paternal grandparents. We talked about how my father and Harriet’s parents were born on Clinton Street in Manhattan. I can’t imagine what they would think of that hip neighborhood today.

My mother’s parents, whom I did know and loved, had attended meetings of a group of immigrants who had come to this country as they did at the beginning of the 20th century from the same part of Europe. In my grandparents’ case it was Bessarabia, now Moldova, after an infamous pogrom in Kishinev. How terribly meaningful the society of their old, surviving friends must have been. 

Recent polls have found churchgoing in this country on the decline. I think that is unfortunate since our religious institutions are often bedrocks of concern and compassion for others. And if the family is dispersed and the church is no longer important, one relies on friends for everything — for solace or support or congratulations when they are due.

A recent opinion piece in The New York Times described a coterie of young married mothers who live on New York’s Upper East Side, painting an unattractive picture of privileged but hardly powerful women who bond over what money buys them. Church wasn’t mentioned, and nothing was said about their extended families. To me, that seems like a kind of poverty.