If you’ve ever wondered who sits in the big bay window on the second floor of The Star’s office building, that would be me. It is a great perch to witness the life of the village throughout the seasons. Up in the treetops there are leaves budding, blooming, changing, and falling, sparrows peeping in, and the occasional cardinal.

While the natural world is closest at hand, the byproducts of the four-lane highway that is Main Street can be the most conspicuous. With windows open to catch the cross breeze on a warm day, the noise of the traffic alone, without the attendant beeping horns, occasional brake squeals, and muffled or shouted curses, can make phone interviews a major challenge. There are days when the wails of sirens are endless, whether they come from ambulances, fire trucks, or cop cars.

Sitting above a number of clumsy intersections also forces me to witness accidents. Fortunately, in my experience, all have been fender benders, but that blunt sound of metal-on-metal impact is never pleasant, and there is dread in looking. There are also egregious and creative violations of the posted traffic signs: left turns across three lanes, bikes on the wrong side of the street, ignorance of yield and stop signs, and — my favorite — the periodic, but regular, wrong-way ride down the one-way lane in front of Guild Hall’s entrance, a path that will someday lead to disaster.

Yet, there are the happier events to take in as well. The Memorial Day parade, the Bonac on Board to Wellness 5K. The installation and unveiling of the current season’s outdoor sculpture at Guild Hall is a process that can sometimes take days, using trucks, cranes, pulleys, and sheer brute force. This is followed by packing it up sometime between Labor Day and Columbus Day weekends.

Summer Fridays always provide an entertaining streetscape of tennis, equestrian, running, and paddleboard (fill in any other athletic pursuit here) togged individuals just off the court, horse, bay, Babette’s seat, et cetera. I see also the city folk fresh off the Jitney with their fedoras, wheelie bags, and four-inch heels mincing down the sidewalk, the Lilly-clad prepsters popping out of their Audi convertibles and ambling into the office in their espadrilles to pick up a paper. 

The drop-off days for Guild Hall’s Artist Members Show and the Clothesline Art Sale always provide highlights. The events attract a steady stream of creative types, who like attention and know how to attract it, while they “catch up” in line mere hours before they see each other again at some opening, and again the next night. Yes, we are watching you.

Still, this year’s clothesline sale came with a piece of performance art that had the entire office mesmerized. A woman holding a parking space by the entrance for her friend began a series of balletic contortions and tai chi movements to signal to those eager for the spot that they were to have none of it. Most heeded her pantomimes, but some gave her an audible piece of their mind. Around this point she took to her cellphone and we provided the dialogue, the “Where are you? How much farther? I can’t keep up with this much longer. Can you believe these people?”

It is at times like these that one wants desperately to return to the calendar, article, essay, or review at hand, eager to have a clean slate or lessened load for the weekend. But, it was hard to let go of this one. My co-workers witnessing it from above waited until finally the friend’s car was in view and the parking genie gesticulated her relief, guiding the car in to the slot ground-crew style until a grateful reunion ensued. Then, they went back to their desks. I, however, kept a periodic vigil, alert to any other curiosity, one eye on the computer screen and one on the street below.

Jennifer Landes is The Star’s arts editor.

The New York Times had an eyesore of a typo in a front-page headline recently, and — while it’s not very nice to take pleasure in someone else’s mistakes — I couldn’t help but feel a certain secret satisfaction. If the old reliable Times, with its large and talented staff, can put out an edition with such a glaring mistake (“Panic Were Ebola Risk Is Tiny,” it read, “Stoicism Where It’s Real”), then we at the humble East Hampton Star can ease up a bit. 

The blooper made by The Times, obviously, was to use the word “were,” which made no sense, instead of the intended word, “where.” But at least they got the apostrophe right. 

Like many people who have worked as proofreaders or copy editors, I’ve got an unshakeable habit of reading newspapers and magazines as if I were actually engaged in making corrections with a blue pencil.

Lately, I’ve been on the particular lookout for missing apostrophes. Spell check might work wonders on our spelling, but the English language is just too convoluted for these digitized prose-check nannies — so far, anyway — to be much help with more subtle corrections and suggestions. Spell check can’t always help you decide between “let’s” and “lets,” for example; sometimes, it just doesn’t know if you are trying to say “let us” or if you mean something like “He lets the orange tabby cat eat too much Whiskas.” 

Unfortunately, where apostrophes are concerned, I am also guilty: I leave them out when I am hurrying to send texts on my cellphone. My excuse is that I haven’t found an apostrophe on the little keyboard, but I admit it must surely be there somewhere. In any case, I have plenty of company in getting more lax about apostrophes. We’ve almost come to expect it. I don’t think any diner gets confused when a restaurant menu offers the “chefs choice.”

Is texting making us all more lazy? Or would our language evolve like this, regardless? (The end result, is seems to me, is that the writer seems to increasingly rely on readers to figure out for themselves what is intended, even when what has been printed is wrong.)

Now, let’s consider words that combine the letters “I,” “T,” and “S.” Reading with a critical eye, you will inevitably find “its” and “it’s” mixed up all over the place these days. Everyone with an elementary school education in this country should know that “it’s” is a contraction meaning “it is,” while “its” is a possessive . . . but, judging by the reigning confusion, apparently, most Americans were napping during that class. 

Does all this matter? It does to me.

Obviously, our language is now and has always been in flux, but for me, things today are changing too quickly. I  blame the digital age. Everything is speeding up: News travels from New York to Beijing, documents zing from computer to computer, trades are made on Wall Street in a thousandth of the blink of an eye. Children, even, seem to be putative teenagers before they hit 13. 

Maybe, when it comes to language, I’m succumbing to the conservatism that — in the popular quote attributed, no doubt apocryphally, to Winston Churchill — comes with age. But even so, I still think we should attend carefully to changes in things we hold dear, and the proper use of language is certainly one of those to me.

On Tuesday morning while we were on our way to school, Adelia announced that she would have picked Lee Zeldin for Congress had she been old enough to vote. Adelia is in the eighth grade and not yet 14. “Mmm-hmm,” I said, “Why’s that?”

“Tim Bishop is being investigated,” she replied.

“Oh. Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

“YouTube,” she said. “And Hulu.”

Like so many of her peers, Adelia seems to live online these days, watching who knows what on her phone. Sometimes she has a television series going. Other times she is deeply focused on what are now known as Youtubers, apparently charming young people speaking directly to the camera about all manner of inanities and self-centered observations. And, for the last month and a half, just about everything she has looked at has been prefaced by a political advertisement attacking one side or the other.

The New York Times led a recent article about the digital pursuit of potential voters with a disturbing anecdote. One morning a couple of weeks ago, apparently, riders on the Montauk branch of the Long Island Rail Road were suddenly and all at once interrupted by the same ad blasting Representative Tim Bishop on their mobile devices. Just who paid for the message is not clear; it is likely to have been one of the dark-money committees now used by both sides. As much as $10 million may have been spent on the Bishop-Zeldin race by the time the counting is done.

At my desk computer, it took me two clicks on YouTube later that day, on “Funny Cats Compilation #1 -2014,” to hit my first attack ad, something about Mr. Bishop and casino chips; I’m not sure what since I had the volume down. Still, one of the reporters happened to stop by at that moment and caught a glimpse just as the first cats began to roll around on the screen.

As we drove along Montauk Highway Tuesday morning, I told Adelia that the F.B.I. had looked into the Bishop allegations and found nothing. It didn’t matter, she said, she was supporting Mr. Zeldin anyway.

“Why?” I asked.

“He’s better looking,” she said.

Welcome to politics circa 2014.

Mary has a most marvelous moth-eaten gray sweater that she loves. I’ve felt it and I know why, the tatters be damned.

The paint stains speak to me of the universe, the tear, resembling a hara-kiri cut, of the vagaries of life — in short of wonder, joy, and woe.

I told her recently as she sat reading on the deck that I envied her that sweater. Mine by contrast are not nearly as fine. I have one that is in the running, a dark blue cashmere one with a collar that is worn through at the elbows. It’s my favorite.

Why is it, we wonder, that we prefer the down-at-the-heels look when we know perfectly well that we can afford to buy brand-new athletic socks, warm-up pants, and sweatshirts. Our parents, children of the Depression all, were frugal. That may be part of it. We go around in rags to honor them. Nothing too much, that kind of thing.

Mary, of course, is beautiful whether she’s wearing her ratty gray sweatshirt or pearls. And indeed she does dress up when she goes to work — it’s the law. No jeans. I always look like Mr. Burns, the nuclear power plant owner in “The Simpsons,” no matter what I wear, so why try?

Ah, that’s it. Why try? Why try to keep up appearances when all — well, most everything — is vanity. And if it’s not vanity, it’s inanity, or, as seems to be ever more painfully evident these days, insanity.

That’s humanity: vanity, inanity, insanity. Pretty much sums it up. You might as well dress comfortably then. Unless you’re going to a wedding or a funeral, and even then I reserve the right to wear New Balance 991s. In appropriate black and gray of course.

The Star, as far as I know, doesn’t have a dress code, and so I’ve never felt sartorially constrained in any way. As a way of giving thanks perhaps my prose has always been neater than I am, though with distinctive quirks, I hope, like a comfortable ratty sweatshirt or holey cashmere sweater that you’ll never throw out, but will keep on wearing until the end of time.

Election night for us was the night of the living dread, and on the morrow (even our night sweats have achieved a certain simultaneity) we awoke to baleful reality in a bed next to which a George McGovern poster hangs.

Frankly, and naively, I had thought ideas were pivotal when it came to electoral politics, but, as we’ve seen, it mainly comes down to money and the sound bites money — no matter the party — buys.

Still, I couldn’t imagine how Republicans, who opposed everything and proposed nothing in recent years, and who were the ones largely responsible for the much-maligned Congressional gridlock, and who put forward no alternative ideas as far as I could tell, would be elected. And yet they have been, in great numbers.

Obamacare has been largely a success, immigrants have, as always, contributed to the economy, which last I looked was doing better than it has been, the president has been as effective as one could be in dealing with the insane Middle East, and though tardy in dealing with immigration reform has by and large been temperate and reasoned in his governance. Yet he is reviled amid calls for change.

The change I’d want would include reviving the middle class, putting joy back into learning, welcoming, rather than deporting, immigrants who want to make a better life for themselves here, leading in such a way as to increasingly enlist allies in solving military challenges and social problems, checking in concert greed wherever it rears its ugly head, checking in concert environmental voraciousness, and extending Medicare to all.

The wish list, you’ll note, posits an activist central government, and I gather that the majority of those who voted last week dream of a limited one even as they collect Social Security checks.

The good news, though, is that hereafter some bills that have languished in committees will finally see the light of day, be voted upon, and will wind up on the desk of the president, either to be signed or vetoed, in which latter case a supermajority would be required to override. In other words, lawmakers will have to stand up and be counted — a radical thought.

So, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised — that under the new regime our nation, under God, will indeed in the coming years become indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Or will divisibility proceed apace, with license and justice for some?

“What is God?” my daughter asked me a few months ago. Not, “Does God exist?” Not, “Do you believe in God?” More like, “What is this God that people speak of?” Since then, the questions have tumbled in like waves breaking on the shore.

“What is heaven?” “What happens when you die?” “What does God look like?” “How can Santa know if every kid in the world is good or bad?” All the basics and then some. It’s hard to answer some questions when you’re not sure yourself. The phrase “Some people believe . . .” has helped me begin to explain the religious and spiritual realms to her, but it’s going to take a lot more study and thought to get the words right. This is a journey we’re on together; saying “It’s complicated” would be too much of a cop­out.

My mother was brought up Catholic; my father is a Jew who loves Christmas. We had High Holy Days and Passover with his family, celebrated Easter with the Easter Bunny and Christmas with Santa Claus, and I never set foot in a church with worshippers until I was much older. I dropped out of Bible camp and Hebrew school. My husband was, as he says, politely asked to leave Catholic school.

I never adopted an organized religion, though it might have been easier if I had. Still, I value faith, am moved by religious observance, and have a deep respect — awe even — for those who live through their faith to make their communities and their world a better place.

I believe in science, and to me, the wonders of science are so miraculous I can’t help but believe in God — that spring comes, that my two children grew inside of me, that my husband was cured of Hodgkin’s disease so that he, we, could live to make those children. Thank you, Chemistry and Biology. Thank you, Modern Medicine. Thank you, God.

My regular places of worship are all outside — the Stony Hill Woods, the Montauk bluffs, the Walking Dunes, Quail Hill Farm. I see God through my children; I worship the way their minds awaken to grasp the small elements of our world at work. My daughter’s question is one she answers for me every day.

These are my blessings: the sticks and pebbles my son saves for me each day from the playground at school, a bouquet of fall leaves collected especially for me, the notes from my daughter as she learns to shape letters into words, a picture of the two of us playing together, the sound of her reading aloud. Let’s start with that.

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

Bunky was a real writer’s cat. When I would sit down at my laptop, he would jump onto the desk and circle around my workspace. He was of the belief that the keyboard was the perfect resting place. I would gently dissuade him from lying on the keys. He would eventually give in, moving to the side or the back of my laptop, and lie down. Sometimes he would watch me, and sometimes he would sleep.

He was scrappy. Having spent his kitten months in a small apartment full of aggressive children, he was wary of being handled. In particular, you could never touch his tail.

When Carole and I first got him, he wasn’t quite fully grown. I announced that there would be no need to castrate him. His moniker was, after all, my cousin’s nickname. A few weeks later, Bunky began having howling spells. He also decided that clawing his way up the window shades was a good thing to do. Still, I was adamant. No castration.

One day, I came home from work. In the corner of the apartment was my beloved black leather jacket, in a heap on the floor. On top of it was a yellow pool. A quick trip to the vet, and Bunky was a castrato.

We decided to move him out to Montauk when I found that I was doing most of my work out there. We had a rental in Ditch Plain (yes, there once were year-round rentals in Ditch, and year-round residents, as well).

In our garden, we had an area fenced with chicken wire where, supposedly, we were going to grow vegetables. We used it to acclimate Bunky to the outdoors. After a while, he began going in and out of the house on his own.

He was a big tom. He would get into occasional fights, but he always could handle himself. The yard, and the immediate woods east of the house, were his domain.

Opening the door for him when he wanted out, every morning and every evening, was fun. Each time, he would shoot down the porch steps, and break into a full sprint. Sometimes, he would head right, toward the big tree in the corner of the yard, climbing halfway up the trunk in a couple of seconds. Other times he would turn left, sprinting up the hill toward the woods.

Any direction he took, he would freeze after about 20 yards. Up the hill or on the tree, motionless, he would survey his world.

The tree was his scratching post, of course, and his jungle gym. He rarely went all the way up.

Of course, as with all cats, one time he went too far, finding himself the proverbial cat stuck out on a limb. He began crying, unsure how to get down. I got the ladder out, went up and got him, getting a couple of claw marks as a thank-you.

He was, for most of his life, a great mouser and quite proud of himself. He would catch mice in the woods, almost daily, and bring them back to us, a nice little gift, although Carole, in particular, did not share his enthusiasm.

Sometimes, instead of bringing his catch of the day up the steps, he would eat it in the backyard. Then, one day, he became violently ill. He hid under a bed for several days. When he emerged, his mouse diet was over, though he continued to bring his trophies back to us.

Tiger-striped, orange and white, he was impossible to see when he was in the shade.

It had been a warm winter when the end came. In the fall, he had gotten into a howling fight with a neighboring black-and-white, and he lost his enthusiasm for extended forays outside. He was becoming visibly weaker. Suddenly, he could barely walk. We took him to Dr. Turetsky’s office. He was seen by Dr. Katz. She told us what we already knew, that Bunky was, at roughly 20 years of age, old. He had several issues, the treatment of which would be very invasive, without any real recovery.

If he was dying, which I believed he was, I planned on burying him in the yard he loved so much. There was a winter storm on the way. It was supposed to dive down from the 50s to the lower teens. I took a shovel and dug a hole I wished I would never have to fill.

We brought him home and gave him his drugs, but he was weak and listless.

The next day, as the temperature dropped, an amazing thing happened. It was as if Bunky was reborn. He had energy, and while he was clearly an old cat, he was a happy one.

That burst of life was short-lived. The following morning, he was barely able to move. He grew weaker through the day, picking himself up only to collapse to the floor.

I wrapped him in a towel the following morning. He was practically lifeless. It began to snow as we made the long drive from Ditch to Goodfriend Drive. I held Bunky while Dr. Katz inserted the needle.

I buried him in the yard as the snow fell, under the now frozen dirt.

Years have passed, and life moves on. But, every once in a while, I turn a corner in my mind, and there is Bunky.

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star and a self-described “cat man.”

The permit I picked up at East Hampton Village Hall this week makes it official: We’re going to have a yard sale! I’ve talked about one for so many years — decades, even — that saying so has become a joke around our household. 

Heaven knows the South Fork is a great place to get up early on a Saturday and go scouting for things you want, need, or are just crazy about. But our family, you could say, specializes in old things — I suspect some of the Rattray clan started yard sale-ing and thrifting even before the terms came into common usage — and our house is stuffed to the gills already. I myself gave up going to such sales a long time ago. Instead of dreaming of the next great find, I’ve dreamed of the great unload.

At Village Hall, the application you fill out reads “Garage Sale.” We don’t seem to have any of those these days; I don’t remember seeing a classified advertisement for one in The Star for years, and we are the prime source for such ads. In point of fact, the sale isn’t going to be in our yard, exactly. Instead, it will be in front of the 18th century barn on the lot adjoining our house. And that brings me to the real reason we are finally having our yard sale.

If all goes as planned, the East Hampton Historical Society will be taking the barn apart this spring, moving it to the Mulford Farm, across Main Street, and restoring whatever needs restoring. Robert Hefner, the village preservation consultant, told me it was the last untouched old barn in the village.

Word got out about the barn a couple of years ago, and the historical society has found a heritage-minded donor who will make it all possible.

We will be very sad to see the old barn gone, but — after years of wondering if we should convert it to a house, and many discussions of how we might shore it up, if we didn’t — the time has come for it (and us) to move on. It’s wonderful to know the barn will be seen and appreciated by the public for years to come.

I rather hoped the historical society would call it the Edwards barn, but history is history: Experts in local lore call it the Hedges barn because when it was built it was an outbuilding to the Hedges house, which once stood where the East Hampton Library’s north wing is now. (In our family, the Hedges house was known as “the purple house,” and Jeannette Edwards Rattray was born there. It now forms part of the East Hampton Town Hall complex.) 

At any rate, instead of a yard sale I suppose we could legitimately say we are having a barn sale, which somehow sounds a bit more alluring. Some of what will be offered are objects that family members, and friends of cousins, and friends of cousins’ friends have stored there and forgotten about. (Does anyone windsurf anymore? Croquet, anyone?)

Judging by the many ads in The Star, yard sales, tag sales, moving sales, and estate sales are practically an economy in and of themselves out here, with so many being held on autumn weekends. Perhaps calling ours a barn sale will make it stand out as a tad more unique.

The bad news is that it is approaching much too quickly for comfort, on the weekend of Oct. 18. We have a lot of sorting, hauling, and lifting — and, no doubt, bickering — to accomplish before we open the cash box. We will, of course, advertise in The Star and welcome all comers. No early birds, please!

The holidays aren’t here yet, not by a long shot, but my mailbox is already stuffed with letters seeking big and small gifts. Many of the requests come from institutions I am familiar with and wish I could do more to support, but I also seem to have gotten on the mailing lists of tons of organizations that I know little or nothing about. I guess donor lists are shared and shared again, until your address has been reproduced exponentially. 

I don’t remember ever communicating in any way with the New York Public Library, for example (although in years gone by I sat on the steps between the lions at the main branch on sunny afternoons). Nevertheless, in today’s mail the library addressed me as “Dear Friend” and asked me to make a donation from $25 to $1,500. There is, the solicitation reads, greater demand for the library’s resources and services and consistently less public funding.

The library does sound like a good cause, I’ll admit. I also was asked to help Long Island Cares, which operates the Harry Chapin Food Bank; it is seeking contributions to provide more than “6 million meals to 320,000 hungry Long Islanders.” That’s a vital cause, I agree again.

So how do you choose whom to give to? 

My rule of thumb, in general, is to donate as close to home as possible. There are food banks here in East Hampton that do a great public service, especially as the weather turns cold and seasonal workers find less work. Another really true-blue hometown organization that needs assistance is the East Hampton Fire Department. In addition to putting out fires, attending accidents, and saving lives, the Fire Department showers the community with a great big fireworks show every summer (and to me that’s no small public service). Arriving on my desk this morning, the Fire Department’s appeal says that calls have increased but “donations have dropped by half.” 

Another fine organization from which I receive pleas, both electronically and by snail mail, is much further afield: Doctors Without Borders (a k a Medecins Sans Frontieres). I was first drawn to its fight against childhood malnutrition in impoverished parts of the world. And, of course, today it is among those leading the charge against the horrendous Ebola epidemic. This week, The New York Times said it “has heroically provided much, if not most, of the care in the stricken countries.”

On a lighter note, I’ve been bombarded electronically with pleas from Democrats on behalf of men and women running for election or re-election to the Senate. I can’t help feeling like a bit beleaguered as Election Day approaches and the volume of these pleas increases. There must be people out there who understand why these candidate requests are for $3 sometimes or $80 at other times; these seem like curious numbers. I guess algorithms are involved. Whatever those are. (I just had to look up how to spell the word.)

It turns out that America ranked first among 153 countries in a new global survey of philanthropy. That’s great news, but I would feel a lot better about it if I knew that donations to political action committees were not included in that tally.

With the film festival in town last week and into this, an unusual number of people walked back and forth in front of our office. I counted myself among them, as a late addition to the festival’s documentary jury, which meant, among other things, that I spent quite a considerable bit of time on foot between the office and town, as we call it, and then hustling back south to Guild Hall, and back again.

One thing was clear from this: I don’t walk enough. Credit is due to Jack Graves, The Star’s eminence grise and sportswriter, who makes his way into town rather regularly. My father, who ran this paper until his death in 1980, was a walker, too, as was his brother, David.

David Rattray the elder, with whom I share a name, was not quite the equal of the legendary Stephen Talkhouse as a walker, but remarkable nonetheless. He, like my father, is gone now, but before his illness, he would take epic hikes, perhaps from Amagansett to East Hampton along the beach in the depths of winter.

He was foremost a poet, among his many other talents, including the ability to read and translate a host of languages and play concert-level piano. I read from one of his poems at a New York City tribute to him a couple of years ago. “West From Napeague” speaks of three figures afoot in the distance on the beach: himself, my father, and my aunt, Mary Rattray, who lives in Springs and in her time was as much of a walker as her brothers, I think.

Someone, Kierkegaard, perhaps, wrote that he walked himself into his best ideas. I have always liked that notion and tended to agree. Some walks are better than others, of course. On Main Street, East Hampton, I am as likely now to be buttonholed by a reader about something or other or just distracted by a loud truck going by.

And yet, we get a feel for a place while on foot that is like none other. A California writer whom I met recently has said that in walking we take measure of the earth. I plan to do a lot more measuring, then, now that fall has come.