Forgive me if I have mentioned this before, but winter has been hard on Leo the Pig.

For those of you unfamiliar with Leo, he is our pet 75-pound, 2-year-old, neutered boar, which my wife and oldest child bought for a ridiculous sum from a Texas con artist they met over the Internet. “He’ll only be 10 pounds, grown up!” they were told, “or your money back!” Ask them how that worked out next time you see them.

The pig mind is a curious thing; of all the animals I have known, they are the only ones for whom boredom appears constant. Years ago, when I worked briefly as a hot-walker at a Maryland thoroughbred barn, the high-strung horses would nip at our shoulders if we were not paying enough attention. That was the only animal behavior that came close.

Dogs quickly give up and go for a nap when the action slows. Cats slink off to their reveries. Pigs, on the other hand, have a range of emotional states, nearly all of them centered on their own demands.

Leo would much rather be outside rooting in the lawn or sleeping in a sunny place, which makes being cooped up inside torture. As I write this, he is at my side at the kitchen table, whining one of his almost cetacean choruses, then wandering to the porch door, which he has distressed with little tusk-marks in attempts to get the message across that he needs to go out for a pee or wants me to get up from my work to give him more breakfast.

That taken care of, he will return perhaps to the kitchen to root at my ankles, which hurts after a while as he inevitably escalates the pressure. So I put my feet up on a chair. Leo responds by walking over to a wooden chest in the entryway and loudly lifting its lid again and again while the rest of the house is sleeping. Then it’s back to poking at the door with his snout. If I yell at him to stop, he’s at my side once more, biting the chair seat while hoping for a scratch behind his ears, and nipping my toes if I do not comply straightaway.

Next, he might take all the cookbooks off the bottom shelf, the one he can reach, and push them around on the floor tiles. One of them, a collection of Vietnamese recipes, frequently draws his attention. He is not one of those Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs that were popular in the last round of porcine madness to sweep the nation, but it is a notable coincidence.

Leo has been described as more of a traditional English pig, pink underneath a coat of coarse white bristles. He’d make a good paintbrush, I tell him when he is being especially annoying. My friends suggest bacon.

Owing to the vagaries of weather here on the East End, few are the winters when we can reliably hope to haul the boats out of the barns and garages, sharpen our runners, and head for the ice. The winter of 2015 abruptly took a turn toward bitter with a Jan. 24 blizzard, and it has been cold enough to make for broad slabs of frozen water, but the snow accumulation made conditions on most ponds and lakes in the Northeast impossible for sailing.

So it was somewhat of a surprise that boats began appearing at the Flying Point Road bulkhead in Water Mill, a traditional loading-in place, during the last weeks of February. Between my drives to take one child or another to dance practice, I had been heading there to take a look. For too long, it seemed, a 30-foot-wide patch of open water flowed between us and sailing.

After a while, though, the ice on Mecox was passible; wind and snow over the preceding weeks had made for scattered rills, ridges, and bumpy places, but we could get to it. When the wind was slow, our family’s older boat, a batwing made by the Mead Glider Company some time before World War II, bogged down in the rough patches, giving a slight whiplash sensation as its speed dipped then rose again when it hit clearer ice.

Nostalgia may cloud my memory, but my recollection is that we had much better ice, and more of it, when I was a boy. The bat, as we called the boat, had been a gift from Dr. George Fish, a family friend, and, under my father’s guidance, we sailed all over the South Fork for what seemed to be weeks on end.

In those days, the Georgica Association was somewhat more relaxed than it is now, and we, along with iceboaters from all over Long Island, enjoyed perfect conditions sailing out from one of its coves. Another winter, Three Mile Harbor froze all the way from Hand’s Creek to the navigation channel, a vast expanse on which the class boats raced and we could tool around under Dr. Fish’s windows, though I believe he might have gone to meet his reward by then.

There were explorations elsewhere, too. Poxabogue Pond might be the first to freeze some winters. One time, the boat hit something and the boom came crashing down onto my best friend’s head out on Fresh Pond in Montauk. But now, for the most part, it’s all Mecox.

The batwing is a curious craft amid the high-tech DNs and Skeeters. One lies on one’s stomach to steer, feet pointed aft, in a basin-like plywood “basket.” There is room for a passenger, or two if they are children, so I can frequently have company.

On that final Sunday, just as the snow began, my friend Cheryl Bendini brought her daughters, Chiara and Ani, around for a ride. Ani had missed out the last time around, as she was just a few weeks old and bundled up in a sling under her mother’s coat. As we rumbled off onto the ice, Chiara, who was 3 the last time we sailed together and now is in middle school, said she could remember only the sensation of snow hitting her face.

While I pay our bills every month, I tend not to follow through with the controversial kind, leaving those annoying back-and-forth agons to Mary, who the other day held my feet to the fire when a hefty one from Southampton Hospital came in.

Over all, I think it came to $34,000 or so — for a few hours in the emergency room and an overnight stay. The insurance company paid some of it, but that left about $6,000 as the insured’s responsibility.

I called the insurance company and learned that that indeed was the sum we owed given our plan’s deductible. Trixie A. said, when I asked, that she would send me the details as to how they came to settle upon the $6,000.

If true, it was yet another example, Mary said, of insurers passing on to patients more and more of the costs of health care. (We have on one of our bookshelves an entire issue of Time magazine tracing this shift, which in the end recommends Medicare for all.)

To continue, I swallowed hard, and phoned the hospital. The woman with whom I spoke was very cordial — and sympathetic when I said I thought she’d agree that its bill was a big nut for a middle-class couple. (We had, by the way, no quarrel with the care provided.)

As Mary had recommended, I asked for an itemized bill, and soon after was mailed one.

“The elephant in the room,” I said afterward to the hospital’s representative, “are these three $9,500-an-hour observation room charges. One more hour and you’d about equal my net pay for the year. . . .”

She would, she said, look further into the matter and would get back to me. With a sigh — and not very hopeful that anything would come of this review — I went back to work.

Just a few minutes later, the phone rang.

There had, she said, been “an error.” There should have been only one $9,500 observation room charge instead of three, and, besides, she had found other charges that had been duplicated. I was to do nothing then until it all got sorted out again with the insurer, a recalculation that would probably take a month or so.

Naturally, I was greatly relieved — and proud that my queries would presumably result in about $20,000 being excised from our metastatic bill.

I write this, not so much as a criticism of the hospital, which, as I say, provided good care and was responsive, but as a caveat to others who, rather than make that call and ask for an itemized bill, might, with a big sigh, send off a check in the full amount.

When Terry Watson received a call at her winter vacation house on St. John telling her that the Montauk Friends of Erin had chosen her to lead the 52nd St. Patrick’s Day parade as its grand marshal, she thought it was a prank. Her husband, George, is one of the hamlet’s biggest pranksters, so it was a logical conclusion.

Stunned by the news, all she could say was “okay,” and then she hung up the phone and cried, she said on Monday. “I never imagined they would choose me, but it’s such an honor and I’m thrilled,” she said.

It’s the Friends that should be honored because Terry is an elusive figure who often stays in the background of things. George, on the other hand, has his hand in many things, often with hilarious results. And when he gets really crazy, Terry just calmly rolls her eyes and keeps her mouth shut.

At functions, she doesn’t often allow her picture to be taken and she usually prefers not to comment on various issues. She does many good deeds that no one knows of, as she’s very quiet about what she does and she doesn’t expect accolades.

But in a hamlet as small as Montauk, word gets around, and whether she likes it or not, we know; we see you, Terry, and most of us are proud to consider you a good friend of the community.

I met Terry back in the early ’70s when a large group of us, most of whom are still here, settled in Montauk, calling it home for some 40 years. She and George bought the old Fitzgerald’s bar and renamed it the Dock about the same time my husband and I bought the old Pier One restaurant, a breakfast joint that opened at 2 a.m. to feed the hungry fishermen. As they were closing for the night, we were just opening and they often stopped by to chat and eat.

Their place was and still is successful; ours wasn’t. The taxes and nighttime hours killed us. My husband was the cook and I was the waitress. The only money made in the dead of winter was when I played blackjack with the fishermen, a game I was very good at. When customers would come in during our card games, my husband would insist that I keep playing while he waited on them. Fishermen back then were kind of sexist and they couldn’t believe that they had been beaten by a girl.

We had some laughs and the laughs continued when we rented a house near the Watsons. Our house was on the south side of the Montauk School and they were on the north side of it, up on a hill. We didn’t often socialize in our homes but of course saw each other in the neighborhood. Our two families had children close in age, so we were also thrown together at school functions.

George and Terry owned a dog named Jackson, and Peter and I had a dog named Jake. Both of them were dominant males and did not get along. They sometimes fought, which made for a prickly situation that was heightened when my Jake killed one of the Watson’s rabbits. Even back then I knew George to be a prankster and I woke each morning expecting to see the dead rabbit on the pillow next to me or in a stewpot on the stove.

Terry has the distinction of being only the seventh female grand marshal in Montauk. She and George are both avid exercisers. George runs, and Terry, who used to jog, now walks. So she was well prepared for the hike down Fifth Avenue on Tuesday for the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, and for the few miles this Sunday in the Montauk parade. Her whole family — four sons and grandchildren — will be home for the festivities, which should be a rousing good time. You go, girl. Make us proud!

Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

Remember the grape boycotts of the 20th century? The dramatic slogan “It Won’t Wash” helped convince many of us to give up table grapes in support of California farm workers and their families, who were suffering serious health consequences, including birth defects and various cancers, from the pesticides being sprayed on fruit.

Pesticides are still used on fruits and vegetables in this country, of course, although one hopes that the Food and Drug Administration, and perhaps state law, have done away with the worst. Many of those who joined in the United Farm Workers boycott then have moved on now to organic foods and the slow food movement. 

For many years I didn’t buy grapes unless they were labeled as organic, and they weren’t always easy to find. I developed an admittedly unscientific rule of thumb about avoiding fruits from other countries, taking it on faith that those grown here were more strictly regulated and therefore safer than those grown in other countries. 

It is easy to get exorcised about pesticide use in this country and, yes, about industrial meat and poultry practices, especially if you spend any time reading friends’ Facebook posts and links. But what got me thinking again about grapes was the plastic pouch of green grapes grown in Chile that my husband brought home recently. So the next few times I went food shopping, I took some time to see where our produce was coming from on a winter’s day. The blueberries for sale came from Chile, too, and raspberries, blackberries, and grape tomatoes were from Mexico. 

International sources are common, these days, in the seafood aisle, too. I was surprised to see tuna from Indonesia along with frozen shrimp from Vietnam as well as Indonesia; tilapia, according to labels, was farm-raised in Ecuador or perhaps China. Bay scallops and shrimp from China are inexpensive, and even local shops carry them now — though, I have to admit, I don’t find the idea of a Chinese-managed aquaculture operation very appetizing, knowing what we know about that country’s industrial-oversight practices. Wired, Mother Jones, Bloomberg Businessweek, and others have reported on the dicy and/or disgusting things that get dumped into tilapia and shrimp pens in China (hog manure, for example, and nitrofurans, a cancer-causing chemical that has been banned for aquaculture use in the United States, and the list of grossness goes on). 

It wasn’t so long ago that local markets eschewed fish “from away,” even red snapper, which often comes from Southern waters. Our bays and offshore waters provide a variety of indigenous and migrating species, perhaps more so than any other waters on the East Coast. But this no longer seems to be enough for the demanding Hamptons consumer. Despite the fact that it has become so fashionable to do lip-serving to “eating local,” a rainbow array of seafood, from Mediterranean branzino to New Zealand cockles, are bought here and consumed here on any given day.   

All this makes me wonder if we Americans have become too complacent about working conditions in other parts of the world. How many young people have even heard of the U.F.W. boycotts, or of Cesar Chavez, who was once a real American folk hero? Does our money aid and abet the exploitation of workers — the disregard for workers’ health — in countries poorer than ours? 

And what about our foods’ “carbon footprint,” to use another tritely fashionable phrase?

According to a recent Voice of America story, the operators of seven fishing vessels based in South Africa were found to have enslaved Indonesian fishermen, trapping them with false promises of a good living. Thailand and Cambodia are also listed on Internet sources as egregiously violating the rights of fishermen. 

Something is very wrong with a global community in which some of us are positioned to indulge in every possible culinary fancy — fruits and fish that once were exotic — while ignoring anything unpleasant about how these things were raised and harvested. It ought not take news of enslaved fishermen or publicity about birth defects in farm workers’ children to encourage us to be more genuinely thoughtful when making choices at the grocery store.

While “Birdman” was a wonderful picture, “Citizenfour,” which won the documentary Oscar for Laura Poitras (not to mention Glenn Greenwald’s Pulitzer Prize reporting), is even more of a must-see.

It certainly has a chilling effect — in keeping, I think you’ll agree, with the season.

Though I may not have Edward Snowden’s words quite right, during it — most of “Citizenfour” was filmed in a Hong Kong hotel room — he says that as the result of our government’s massive surveillance of its citizenry, which has effectively stripped privacy bare, we have been transformed from a country of electors and elected to one of the ruling and ruled.

A sea change into something new and strange if one prizes freedom.

It is ironic, moreover, that the whistleblower is charged under the Espionage Act when, in fact, it’s the government that is doing the spying. Dictatorships begin that way, someone in the film says.

Ah, but not to worry, this is the land of the free: Except for the fact that one’s freedom is forfeit to the extent that one’s privacy is invaded, leading to the aforementioned chilling effect.

If he’s got nothing to hide, let him come back and make his case in a court of law, some — even commentators I admire — say. You’ve got to be kidding — Snowden would be clapped into irons as quickly as you could say justice is served. No less a person than Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, has said he should stay away.

Interestingly — at least to me — is that William Blake said that there are two sorts — tyrants and their acquiescent victims. Old-time tyranny may not be practiced in this purported democracy, though it can come creeping in other guises, the above-mentioned universal listening-in to which Snowden has alerted us and the vast structural inequality described by Thomas Piketty being two ways. . . . Tyranny creeps in on little cat feet. . . .

Are we destroying the village to save it?   

My wife and the kids got out of town the week before last and I took to the basement with a vengeance. It had been something I had intended to do for a long, long time.

After three kids and about 16 years since Lisa I got married and moved into my childhood house, things had, to put it mildly, accumulated. The basement, more of a glorified crawl space for anyone taller than a “Wizard of Oz” Munchkin, has been the receptacle of much of the excess. The weekend plus the few days I would have to myself seemed the perfect time to de-clutter in a big way.

As I dug through the piles, bags, and boxes, I had to fight a familiar pack-rat instinct. Helping me along, though, was retelling myself over and over again a story my father told about an Amagansett hoarder in whose house was discovered, among many other things, a box labeled “Strings Six Inches and Under.” Try mumbling that to yourself the next time you are confronted with a plastic bin full of mismatched mittens; it helps.

There are two advantages to tackling household purges when your kids are away. First, there is a sharp reduction in distractions. Then there is the special bonus of being able to run off to the landfill with all those half-destroyed toys and tattered stuffed animals, which they might otherwise insist on keeping.

Doing the math, if each of our three kids averaged only a single item brought home each week apiece, that would have added up to more than 1,400 objects that either had to be rapidly de-accessioned or put away, and that’s not counting all the clothing they grew out of or hand-me-downs they have yet to wear. Then there are my interests, notably fishing, which is as much a gear obsession as anything else. It took three trips to the recycling center to haul away what was not worth giving to charity or friends.

Suffice it to say, the project rolled over into the week after they got back, but progress had been made. We can now see the basement floor, and new metal shelving that I bought in Riverhead is helping with a semblance of order. The temptation, of course, will be to let the basement just fill up again. But as long as I keep repeating “string, six inches and under” to myself we should be fine.

We were sitting on a narrow, pleasantly crowded fine-sand beach in Naples, Fla., the other day, reading our books under an umbrella as walkers paraded by, one of whom caught my eye, wearing as he was black shorts and his long black hair tied back.

What made him come up to us I forget, though it seemed apt. I told him I was reading a book on Zen Buddhism, and he said that that was good, and that — according to Mary’s recall — he liked to propound too much to be a Buddhist.

“My wife tells me,” I said, with a laugh, “that I should stop reading books about Buddhism and just do it. . . . Maybe I should put this book down and just let it go. . . .”

He smiled. “Let everything go,” he said as he kept on going.

Not long after, I thought I saw him in the water about 100 yards distant, and, after looking down at the book for a moment or two, looked up to find he’d vanished.

“What made him stop here? You think he’s a Zen master, Mary?”

Florida may well be “Centereach with palm trees,” as Kathy has succinctly phrased it, but everyone’s quite friendly there, or at least they were on the street in Naples that we frequented, whose name I dare not say. Here, we pass each other with heads bowed or eyes drifting off to the left or right. There, by the time I’d walked up from the beach to the public tennis courts, I had learned a good deal about the cheery person striding along beside me.

Maybe it’s the weather that does that to you, people just happy for a time — even for a week, as was the case with us — to be sprung from winter’s grip. A beach, public Har-Tru tennis courts with no end of people — usually from Ohio or Michigan — to play with, and a bar with passable margaritas (though not, of course, as good as mine) all on one street!

A week was enough.

“It’s just good,” as Lori Wesnofske said the other day, “to get away.”

And to keep on going.

Her: Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.

    Him: No you can’t.

    Her: Yes I can.

    Him: No you can’t.

    Her: Yes I can.

She is Annie Oakley, he is Frank Powers, and it is 1946. Ethel Merman and Frank Middleton are playing the roles. The show is “Annie Get Your Gun,” with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and a book by a brother-and-sister team, Dorothy and Herbert Fields. If I could go back in time to see three shows from the last century, this might be one of them, along with the original production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and “Hamlet” with John Barrymore.

But, I digress. It is 1946, the war is over, and the world has changed. Women rolled up their sleeves during the war, taking on jobs previously held by men.

Annie Oakley was a perfect character for her time, and that was a perfect song for that time, and for our time. Don’t believe me? Take shoveling snow.

It was another March snowstorm. Will it ever stop snowing?

But, I digress. It was a Friday morning. I had a cup of green tea, steeling myself for the task ahead. About seven or eight inches of wet snow lay on the ground in front of my car, along with a pile of whatever that was plowed into my drive by the Highway Department. The temperature was well below freezing. I prepared to go out and shovel.

We have wintered in Montauk for over 25 years. For much of that time, we were in a rental in Ditch. The driveway was fairly long, and was in a cut. A bad storm meant a lot of shoveling, lifting, tossing snow. There were storms that resulted in three or four hours of work.

But, the payoff, ah the payoff, it is a thing of beauty. A blacktop driveway in a wintry white world that you have shoveled clean.

Since we moved from Ditch, it is not such an ordeal. I need to clear maybe 12 square feet of ground where we are now, at most. I probably spent an hour, hour and a half digging out from Juno in January. That would easily have been four hours in Ditch.

I was ready to start shoveling that Friday, but I had a story to finish. “I’ll help,” Carole said. “Sure, hon,” I said. I was staring at the keyboard. She put on her coat and went outside.

About 10 minutes later, story finished, I went out, and walked around to the drive. There was Carole, shovel in hand. The drive was free of snow. “I’m finished,” she said.

I was stunned. Then, Carole confessed. “Peter Joyce came by in a truck,” she said. “He plowed, and his worker shoveled.”

I was reminded of a famous scene from that seminal 1934 road movie, “It Happened One Night,” directed by Frank Capra, written by Robert Riskin, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.

The two of them are stranded on the road. Gable brags to Colbert that he is a master hitchhiker. “It’s all in the thumb, see?” he says, as he demonstrates for her his three different styles of hitching. Then he steps out into the road. Car after car whizzes by.

“Let me try,” she says.

“You?”

“I’ll stop a car, and I won’t use my thumb.”

In one of the most famous moments of the early talkies, she goes to the side of the road, sticks out her leg, hitches up her skirt, and a driver slams on the brakes.

They have their ride. 

Now, Carole didn’t use any such method, she simply went out there with a shovel. I can’t thank Peter Joyce enough for helping her out.

But, when next year’s first snow falls I think I will stay in bed.

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star who covers police and courts along with planning and zoning.

An osprey apparently forgot that he was supposed to be headed north in time for the first day of spring, or Fish Hawk Day, as old-timers here call it. Instead he hovered over Lake Arenal — a surprise greeting on our first afternoon in Costa Rica.

Ospreys are romantic birds. They mate for life and return, if they can, to the same nest year after year. They dive claws-first into the sea to grab fish with their talons, which doesn’t sound very romantic, but if you remember their species’ near demise in the 1960s (because DDT thinned their eggshells, making reproduction terribly difficult), you can see something beautiful even in their hunting skills.

Ospreys are romantic birds to me, personally, because I was introduced to them when I married for the first time and came to the East End in 1960. For the next decade or two our family was among those who put up poles and platforms to encourage ospreys to nest again; we watched intently every spring for their return.

Chris and I went to Costa Rica a few weeks ago to see the birds of the rain forest, and before the trip was over, I had added about 30 to my lifetime list. It was a long-delayed dream come true.

But the vacation was also a rare chance to really relax, and I made the most of it by leaving my computer and cellphone at home. My husband, who is even more of a workaholic than I, even though his work is all volunteer these days, had his iPhone at the ready and that was enough of a connection with the world we left behind as far as I was concerned. (I turned on the TV once in the hotel, just in time to learn that Hillary Clinton was to hold a press conference to explain her use of private email for official business when she was secretary of state, but that was my only screen time all week.)

It had been nearly 20 years since Chris and I had truly gotten away by ourselves, and I came home feeling invigorated and, well, young. Traveling has meant visiting friends or family in the past, and though we love them all dearly, such visits are often more of a workout than a relaxing vacation, especially when young grandchildren are in the mix.

One of the most accomplished people I know used to annoy me by declaring that everyone needed at least a month’s vacation every year. Who was he kidding? How could he, a renowned physician, pretend that he took a month off every year himself? And, furthermore, how could he claim such a thing were possible for the rest of us, who work hard for a living? Later in life, though, he and his wife seemed to fulfill his goal by renting out their summer house in Water Mill for the month of August and disappearing to France.

I’m afraid I am not about to follow suit with yearly monthlong jaunts to Costa Rica, but I don’t think I am ever again going to feel guilty about time off. Vacation guilt is an old habit that I am finally ready to bid goodbye.

By the time we got back to the States, rain had washed away much of the snow, and the snowdrops were beginning to show their heads in the yard. I hope our Costa Rican osprey has made his return migration north, as we have, and that we’ll see him around these parts soon.