One of the things I’ve noticed this fall, a season without any even glancing blows from tropical storms or, perish the thought, hurricanes, is that the volume of leaves fallen from the trees by now has been prodigious. Down near the bay where we live in Amagansett, November’s nearly unbroken northerly winds most years push what oak leaves manage to reach the ground swiftly into the underbrush.

This year, though, they piled up, covering the grass and giving our pet pig, Leo, who is secretive about such things, plenty of places to hide his droppings. Our 4-year-old son, Ellis, and I took up our rakes the Sunday before Thanksgiving to see what we could do.

The wind was up that afternoon and made our work, provided we went along from west to east, relatively easy. We made two piles before heading inside for hot chocolate.

Overnight, however, the piles appeared to have shrunk by half, and by midmorning, when Ellis and I got around to it, there were far fewer to layer on the compost heap while we dragged the rest into the underbrush.

Environmentalists say we should learn to tolerate some leaves on the ground, as they help  replenish the soil at the end of the growing season. I wonder, though, just what sustains the grass up in the village outside our office, where leaves are hardly left to settle before they are vacuumed away. There were some to be seen this week on the portion of the library lawn visible from my window, but the flagpole green just beyond was strangely, disturbingly bare.

I like things like lawns a little rough around the edges and find the perfect public face of many properties here off-putting. Nevertheless, most fall mornings when the wind has blown a little pile of leaves in front of The Star’s main door, I am the first to pick up a broom and sweep them into the gutter.

“Did you hear?” I said the other day to Mary, who was working at Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.

“Yes. Obama finally bit the bullet on immigration.”

“Well, there’s that, but they’ve found that 90 percent of social drinkers are not alcoholics! I had been hoping, though, to stand up at an A.A. meeting and say, ‘My name is Jack Graves and I still use floppy disks.’ ”

I suppose confessionals are good for one, though whenever I think of imbibing I remember what my late stepmother said when asked, after a 30-year absence from the Catholic Church, for a litany of her sins: “I’ve not done anything anyone else hasn’t done.”

And that was that. She wanted her epitaph to read “Lucette lived, loved, laughed, and left.” Which reminds me of Chris Walsh’s “Relay” column last week in which he quoted from Edith Piaf’s “Je ne Regrette Rien,” which my father and I used to sing with gusto, as well as “Milord.” My stepmother and father, mother and stepfather — not to mention my late mother-in-law — were like that, pretty much stoics all. Of course, they didn’t have to write weekly columns.

Ou sont les parents d’antan?

Nowadays, everybody’s wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Facebook is lousy with it, though I dutifully run through the postings before getting down to the more serious business of Scrabble, a game in which I’ve invented innumerable words they won’t allow, though it appears to me they allow equally arcane and innumerable ones of no more merit than mine. My 5-year-old granddaughter has just come up with one: aglet. I thought she meant eaglet, but no, she was right. Aglet is a word. It’s the metal point of a lace! I’ll keep her close the next time we play “Words With Friends” with Jeremy Samuelson.

But enough with the pouting. I should be stoic, laconic. Which reminds me that after describing an interviewee as such, I was taken to task for having intimated that he was lazy.

I didn’t mind it that he was a man of few words, it was just that I labored under the assumption (being rather green then and less aware than I am now that bigger photos can make up wonderfully for a lack of anything to say) that they were required if a newspaper were to exist. But, as the Facebook and tweeting age advances, photos may well inter print, as I think someone predicted recently.

If I didn’t have such a wonderful photographer, Craig Macnaughton, at my side, I might be worried by the handwringing on the wall.

But it’s Thanksgiving, and I oughtn’t to be fretting about the end of the world as I know it. I ought, rather, to be giving thanks for Kitty’s torte, an amalgam of concretized butter, sugar, and chocolate cake that, despite all my entreaties that it be removed from the house, remains, to be picked at, in the morning, at midday, and in the evening — an eroding whipped cream-topped cliff of soft and clumpy scrumptiousness that ultimately and inevitably slides down into the gullet, and out to the sea.

They say it’ll kill ya, but they don’t tell ya when!   

Well, I have the cold.

Everyone has or has had this cold. It’s what is going around. If you deal with crowds, if you go to the movies or the gym, if you go to the store and stand in line to get turkey gravy, you are surrounded by people. Some of them will have a cold and not know it. Some will have a cold and will do their stealth sneezing and coughing into their elbow, but it is out there and I got it.

But I didn’t know it.

The long weekend just passed gave me the opportunity to do some work on my sizable collection of antique quilts. I know it is best to refold and shake out all vintage textiles pretty regularly and I had waited way too long. The weekend stretched out with continuous hours of running textiles through the dryer (on gentle and air fluff). I pulled them all out into a mountain of patchwork and homespun and tackled the job. The room filled with the tiniest bits of what I would like to call fallout from another century. Every time I put something in I would clean the filter, but there was so much shaking out, and some are fragile and just need patting. Well, the setting sun showed a blur of dust and stuff in the air. Eventually I started sneezing. It was the particulates, for sure.

I mopped the floor to pick up the extra bits and threads and motes as they landed. I folded everything and put all of the quilts back on their shelves. More dust in the folding and pushing. Over 100, not counting the homespun coverlets. Like I said, a collection.

The next day, head feeling full of the dust (that had landed after the mopping), I headed to Montauk, windows open for the fresh air. I enjoyed that spectacular sunset standing in the wind at Indian Wells. Feeling great from that sea air, I went to a fancy party. The following day I went on the East Hampton Historical Society house tour. I felt perky, but still a little bit of sneezing and a bit of a cough from all that dust from the quilts.

But when I woke up Sunday morning and said hello to my cats and my husband (not in that order), nobody heard me because there was no voice. I never felt sick, but finally the cold had announced itself with silence. All along it was not from the particulates, it was the cold.

So if, while I was swanning around feeling fine, I gave you laryngitis over Thanksgiving weekend, I am truly sorry. If, however, one of you standing in line for turkey gravy gave it to me while you were swanning around feeling fine or sneezing onto your elbow, I forgive you, because you didn’t know you were sick either.

Keep calm and carry Kleenex. This too shall pass.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.

Everybody else, it seemed, had the same idea. On Sunday, with an afternoon low tide and the temperature forecast to be in the mid-50s, it was time to scallop. The harbor a friend and I checked after lunch was dotted with figures wading around waist-deep. Pickup trucks backed close to the water were lined up side-by-side. At the road access where the sand trail meets the pavement, a couple of people were transferring their haul from plastic bushel baskets into regulation, red-mesh shellfish bags.

Thing is, with shucked scallops at a cheap $15 a pound if you know the right people, they didn’t seem worth bothering with. We instead decided to look for oysters at a place where I had noticed them a couple of months earlier.

The oystering was good, and we gathered about as many as we could responsibly use relatively quickly. Many of them, I assumed, were from the town’s shellfish hatchery. Perfect examples not attached to rocks or other substrates, they were probably spawned in the lab and introduced to their culch there. Unlike mussels, which can grow new byssus filaments as demand arises, oysters become permanently bound just once, while they are in a larval stage, to the surface where they will live their entire lives.

As we waded around in the shallows, we noticed a good sign: smaller oysters self-cemented to rocks and other surfaces. Oyster larvae like their own kind, testing various things they encounter on the bay bottom before making a commitment. Tiny ones attached to larger ones suggest that the wild spawn is at least partially successful.

It is a bit difficult to reconcile the bad news about East Hampton’s waters with the prolific shellfish catches here these days. Toxic algae eruptions have been found here and there, and a consultant’s report describes a dire situation, to be sure. Perhaps there is a connection, perhaps not.

I don’t worry much about contamination at this time of year. Few of the waterfront houses are occupied where shellfish were being gathered on Sunday, so failing septic systems are less likely to be a threat. November’s strong tides and storms stir things up as well.

The oysters, fat after a summer’s ample feeding, were delicious.

Middletown High School, where the state boys soccer Final Four games were played recently, is the Taj Mahal of high schools, the size, I thought, of at least two airports.

An eight-lane track wraps around a large turf field overlooked by a Jumbotron — yes, a Jumbotron — and at the other end is a large grandstand over which a commodious press box stretches. I tend to stay away from press boxes, though, preferring a ground-level view, as close to the action as possible.

We, my photographer friend, Craig Macnaughton, and I (when it comes to picture-taking, I am John the Baptist to his Jesus Christ) arrived Sunday morning at least two hours in advance of the East Hampton-Greece Athena final. He went off to check the lighting and to soak up the atmosphere while I took a bag of balls and my racket to the tennis courts, hidden from view around the school’s backside. He told me, by the way, that the stadium’s lighting was of Super Bowl quality.

The patched tennis courts with lonely piles of leaves in the corners clearly hadn’t been beneficiaries, as I was told the turf stadium had been, of a New York State “excel grant.” And there was goose shit all over the lacrosse fields above the courts. There’s always a worm in the apple.

Of course what sticks in my craw the most is the fact that our star player, Nick West, because his left foot had been stepped on and broken by an opposing player in the semifinal, never got a chance to play in what would have been the biggest game of his high school career.

With him I’m quite sure we would have won. Defensively, he would have given Greece Athena’s 6-foot-6-inch center midfielder a run for his money, and he would have sparked our offense as well, as he had in the first half against Jamesville-DeWitt the previous day, before he had to be sidelined for the rest of the game because of his injury.

In the final, it was one bad break after another as key players, either because of injuries or cardings, were withdrawn, one after another, from the field of play, the last, after a Greece Athena player had flopped in front of him, being East Hampton’s stout-hearted defender, Bryan Oreamuno, whose late grandfather, Enrique Leon, was one of the first to come here, in the late 1960s, from Costa Rica.

Oreamuno, who had been called earlier for a foul as he contested a 50-50 ball at the top of East Hampton’s penalty box (a referee’s gift that resulted in a 2-1 Greece Athena lead), was in tears, and five and a half minutes later most everyone was in tears or choked up — the players, who had been dreaming of a state title since they began kicking a ball around together at the ages of 5 or 6, the coaches, who had made of these talented ball-handlers a great team, and the some 300 fans who’d made the trip upstate.

Rich King, East Hampton’s coach, was right when he said afterward in reply to a sportswriter’s question that he didn’t think Greece Athena was the better team, though it had been, he said, on that day.

Later, once we were back, Craig emailed me that he’d gone with his wife to drown his sorrows at Townline BBQ, and that while they were there, the team and its coaches had come in, all seemingly in good spirits.

I, who had spent a while recounting to my wife on my return all of the day’s bad breaks and injustices, my eyes welling up again as I did so, was glad to hear it, that they knew they were a great team.

The best one I’ve ever seen, Greece Athena included.

As we pulled out of the massive parking lot, I thought of what Mike Burns had said after our softball team had lost a state final in Binghamton about 10 years ago, to wit, that the other team had to return to Glens Falls, while we got to go back to Bonac.

I am thankful that Facebook wasn’t around when I was a teenager. I can’t even imagine the trouble I’d have gotten into if it was. As it is, I’m a grown woman and get in trouble from my children for some of my posts, which I think are quite harmless and often humorous. They don’t agree, so obviously they didn’t get their sense of humor from their mother.

I’ve been told by them mid-post to get off Facebook. Can you imagine? As Rodney Dangerfield used to say, I get no respect. We were all at a wedding last summer and someone posted a picture of my family — my husband, two daughters, and my son-in-law. I just happened to mention that my upper body looked damn good, especially my girls, both of which were standing tall and perky.

In my post I wrote, “Wow, look at those babies, damn they look good!” Well, you would have thought I had declared a war on women the world over. All three of my kids, one as far away as Hawaii, commented under the post, “Mom, get off Facebook. Now.”

But that’s when my real girls, my girlfriends, began the battle and told my children to get off Facebook and to leave their mother, whose girls aren’t always so perky, alone. I don’t know how these celebrity mothers get away with all their nudity and foul language. I was fully clothed in the picture but just happened to be wearing a really good brassiere, and still I got hell for it.

I was late to join Facebook, and only did so at a colleague’s suggestion that I might be missing some juicy news tidbits. At first I just scrolled through other people’s posts and actually found it boring. Half of the people posting pictures of their little darlings I didn’t know and the other half were crying a river that I cared nothing about. I had enough problems of my own to bother with someone else’s ratty landlord or boss. Don’t they realize their bosses might read their posts? I doubt my boss, David, reads my Facebook posts, but if he did he would know that I’ve said he’s the most wonderful boss in the world. I hope he reads this because I’ll be hitting him up for a raise soon.

But then Facebook pissed me off. They started culling pictures from other areas of my life that I would never have posted, ones in which the girls did not look good and neither did my hair, a frizzy mess. In one picture, standing between my two daughters, I had my arms raised and wrapped around their shoulders and had a camel toe. If you don’t know what a camel toe means ask a 20-something. Let’s just say it’s an unflattering crotch shot.

And who the hell is Facebook to ask where I went to college or what types of music I like and then assume to know what movies I might like and post them on my Facebook page?

When a good friend of mine died I asked for prayers on his behalf. How innocent is that? But the family was furious with me, and Facebook made me cry. I should have waited for them to announce the death, but thought our friendship allowed me some rights. We’ve since made up, of course, but I learned a valuable lesson. Mind your own business when a friend dies, at least until the family announces it.

If Facebook was around when we were kids, I can’t imagine the fights it could have started. And remember I’m a Bronx girl, so fights can turn very dangerous. We would probably have commented on Suzy’s frizzy hair, Jimmy’s black socks with shorts, Nancy’s dirty ankles, or Sister Mary whatever’s yellow, broken teeth that we had to look at all day while stifling giggles or risk being beaten with a yardstick.

Let’s make a Thanksgiving pact. No nasty posts for this one wonderful day, the one holiday that doesn’t involve gifts, the stress of buying those gifts, but lots of good food. We can do it. I know we can because Christmas is right around the corner and, boy, that is sure to give us plenty to write about on Facebook. And remember, if you give a crappy gift, many of which I have received over the years, you will be written about for all to see. So shop carefully, my friends! With Facebook on the scene there’s no hiding behind re-gifting, so don’t even try it.

I’m planning on getting perky again on Thanksgiving. I just hope the girls don’t get in the way of the platters I’ll be serving food on. And if things go well, I might just get perky again for Christmas and have myself a very perky Christmas. At least my husband will enjoy it.

Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

Bargain-hunting is a hallowed American pastime. Despite the recession and widespread joblessness, most Americans are generally well-enough off to be able to plunge into the fray to buy whatever it is they’re coveting, especially when there’s a hefty discount.

With Black Friday — the ballyhooed beginning of the winter shopping season — upon us, I’ve been pondering why it is that I not only ignore our annual American spree but consider it somehow out of bounds, a breach of tradition. A whole month of holiday shopping? At least the British have the good taste to leave the bargain-hunting to Boxing Day, the day after Christmas.

Of course, I like bargains, too. I’m really not much of a shopper, but have been known to take pleasure in showing off a few items of clothing I bought for $6 or so at the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society Bargain Box. Everybody likes a deal, even the rich — or perhaps I should say especially the rich. I bet some scholar could prove that the richest among us at least partly accumulated their wealth by making purchases, from pots and pans to properties and private planes, at a discount. (Or that their forebears did the bargain-hunting for them.)

It’s possible that I am averse to Black Friday because I have an almost perverse suspicion of whatever the crowd is doing. Perhaps I am simply afraid of being caught doing something everyone else is doing.

Readers of The New York Times undoubtedly are familiar with its approach to feature stories, which is to hook readers with specific, personal details about individuals who epitomize the crux of the trend or cultural moment that is about to be revealed. So it was with fascination that I spied a piece in Saturday’s Business Day section about a super-shopper named Derek De Armond, who began camping in a tent outside a Best Buy in Florida more than two weeks before the doors were to swing open for the Black Friday pandemonium.

Did I think he was nuts? I did. I read the report with the kind of avid, creeping horror others might feel when reading a tale of true-crime gore. 

The Times reported that Mr. De Armond was having a grand old time and thinking — with sportsmanlike bonhomie — of others, too, not just himself. Because he stood to lose his place in line if the tent weren’t occupied 24 hours a day, he had rounded up his sons and a passel of “teammates” to rotate through the campsite. “It’s like a tailgate party at a football game,” he told the paper. “We barbecue every night. We invite people in; we’ve made new friends.”

Mr. De Armond said he planned to spend $399 on an iPad Air 2 that ordinarily costs $499, and that he also had his eye on a 50-inch LED TV that he was going to nab for $199, well below the list price of $799.99. The kicker? To quote from The Times: “He plans to donate the television to a local children’s hospital for a fund-raising raffle.” 

The example of good Mr. De Armond certainly flies in the face of my anti-shopping radicalism, but, still, I seriously doubt that most Black Friday warriors are out there to do charitable works. 

I don’t plan to succumb. Instead, I have pledged to hit the L.V.I.S. Bargain Box before Christmas. It has three pluses going for it: shopping at home, finding a bargain, and doing some real good all at the same time.

Driving, as I often do, toward the Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton, crossing the place where Lumber Lane and the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike conjoin and a driveway for a large parking lot to the west butts in, I can’t help feeling a sense of satisfaction when I see the imposing 19th-century buildings that mark two corners of the intersection. Not too long ago they were in need of various degrees of rehabilitation and faced uncertain futures.

Today, one, on the northeast corner, is the high-style Topping Rose House, with a celebrated restaurant and hotel accommodations, while the other, on the southeast corner and still undergoing renovation, was preserved with the help of South­ampton Town and Suffolk County and will become a Bridgehampton Historical Society museum.

Both buildings were built in Greek Revival style in the mid-19th century by a prominent Bridgehampton man, Abraham Topping Rose, who settled his family first in what is now known at the Nathaniel Rogers House. He built the Topping Rose House later, apparently wanting to live in something bigger.

I can’t but feel good about historic buildings that have been saved and put to good use, and I admire those who make it happen, even if they are not in my immediate neighborhood. (I once thought about restoring a three-story building in Flanders, which was dark green, derelict, and totally out of place, but it was only a fantasy.)

We East Hamptoners tend to be full of pride of place; we puff up like peacocks when we have an opportunity to tell visitors the history of the 17th-century Mulford Farmhouse or the early-20th-century Thomas Moran studio, among other historic buildings in the village. We almost claim ownership of the Montauk Light, which is as iconic a structure as can be and certainlydoesn’t belong to us.

On the other hand, Sag Harbor, which is full of old houses that residents, summer and year-round, have restored, didn’t seem to make much noise when the former Bulova watchcase factory was sold to developers who are turning it into a citified and exceedingly high-priced complex of condominium apartments. It’s too bad that a use wasn’t possible that was more or less in keeping with the New England factories that have been reimagined as public gathering places.

As for my own house, a part of it dates to the 18th century although additions and renovations were done in the 20th. And it certainly is not going to be a teardown in the 21st.

Back in Bridgehampton, it is reassuring that residents literally took to the streets (well, just Main Street) to argue against the construction of a 9,030-square-foot commercial building for a CVS Pharmacy on a vacant tract across the road from the Topping Rose House. They have argued that the community’s war monument is in the middle of the intersection there, that traffic is already bad, and that the property would make an appropriate commons. They have even formed an organization called Save Main Street.

As things like this sometimes go, the protesters seem to have history on their side and not much else. Excavation has already begun, apparently on the strength of one permit, although another is needed, and the Southampton Town Planning Board has been sued by the property’s owner and CVS for requiring that a full environmental study in keeping with state law be done. Well, at least the protesters can take consolation in the restoration of the houses that Abraham Rose built.   

Just after sunrise on Sunday, with a first cup of coffee down the hatch and another getting ready on the stove, I went down to the beach for a walk with the dogs. It was a cold morning; a strong northwest wind had blown itself out overnight, but the chill lingered. The sand underfoot was hard, as if getting ready for the freeze to come.

Gardiner’s Bay at this time of the year is devoid of most of spring and summer’s life. The clear, cold water provides little in the way of baitfish for gulls, and the terns have long since left on their southward migration. Long-tail ducks and scoters are there, though, diving to take shellfish from the rocks. Shorebirds in their gray winter plumage pick at the water’s edge.

A short way to the west of where I began walking, I came on a small sea turtle on its back at the high tide line. At this time of year, as the water rapidly cools, turtles like that one sometimes fall into a sort of torpor before they can move to warmer waters. Groups like the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research  and Preservation call the phenomena cold-stunning, and they run workshops and volunteer networks to scour the beaches in the hope of rescuing them.

Those walking the beaches have been asked to phone the group’s hotline if they encounter turtles or other stranded marine life. A technician is rapidly sent to retrieve the animal, which sometimes can be brought back to normal in a controlled setting. Under no circumstances should they be put back into the water or heated even slightly by well-meaning finders.

My turtle, the first known stranding in New York State this season, did not make it. Kim Durham of the Riverhead Foundation said that it could not be revived, likely because it had spent at least three hours on the sand before the dogs and I arrived. I found out later it was an Atlantic green turtle, listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

I was late getting out of the house with the kids on the following mornings, so I did not have a chance to return to the beach to look for more turtles, which has nagged at me. I hope to get out there as soon as I can now that the weather has turned even colder.

The Riverhead Foundation stranding line can be phoned at 369-9829.

After interviewing Cory Lillie and Kyle Solomon about the soon-to-be East End Sharks, a nascent high school ice hockey team that ought to be fun to write about this winter and in winters to come, I went onto the last court open to play that remained, the hard court, to practice my serve, which had been tweaked the day before at an adult clinic at the East Hampton Indoor Club.

I recommend these Wednesday morning clinics given by Lisa Jones: You can always learn something. Every week it’s a different stroke, and by the time they go around again you’ll probably be in need of reminding.

Having reached an age when things can go south pretty quick, I try to pace myself, though the high-strung teenager (interestingly, I string my rackets loosely now, preferring power to control, as I suppose an out-of-control teenager might) remains within. I was called to account the other night by a player on a neighboring court who had had it with my acting-out and told me in no uncertain terms to quit it. I stared. He glared. And so the confrontation ended.

I had been justly admonished. I who had recently written, in good faith, a column about how keeping your head when all about you were losing theirs (not literally, of course, at least in our immediate environs) was the key to winning tennis.

Shame, shame. Go and sin no more.

I emerged from a full immersion in the subsequent serving clinic reborn, competitively rearmed and, dare I say it, morally so as well. Well, maybe I oughtn’t dare to say that, though my renewed intention is to speak softly and carry a big racket, to let my racket make the racket in other words.

I’m hoping my serve will be salvific in this regard. What is the Ross School’s motto? Ah, “Know thyself in order to serve.” A good one, wouldn’t you say, for a school to which a tennis academy’s attached? With me it may be the other way round.

The rest is silence . . . or license. It’s all how you look at it. We’ll see.