It was the early 1980s and everyone at The Star was fed up with the pigeons that perched and nested and chattered on the ledge that runs above the plate-glass windows at the front of the building. The pigeons made a lot of noise and left droppings all over the sidewalk (and, sometimes, all over the heads of customers). They were such a nuisance that we wanted to rid ourselves of them about as much as some people, these days, want to be rid of deer. 

Where have all the East Hampton pigeons gone? No one seems to remember quite when they left. One day they were just gone, and we hardly noticed.

My son Dave reminds me that, back in the day, the pigeons sometimes were poked at with long bamboo sticks, in an attempt to annoy them from their roost, but it didn’t go any good. We hung a fake owl above the ledge, to scare them, but they paid it no mind. I remember someone (I can’t remember who) got so irritated that he climbed up and snatched a pigeon nest from one of the ledge’s corners, mumbling he was going to transfer it to safety elsewhere. 

Robbing birds’ nests is hardly a civilized pastime. But the mess the pigeons made — not only on the sidewalk in front of the building but on the tiled outdoor step into it — was really a problem. I knew I would be held responsible if someone slipped and fell.

At the time, pigeons were all over the village business district. One shop owner had installed a fearfully loud, automatic clapper device on the roof of a Newtown Lane building to chase them away. I think it might have been Parsons Electric (headquartered where Scoop is today). At any rate, I decided to get a clapper for The Star, too. 

The noise of this electric clapper — and its intermittent timing — drove everyone in the neighborhood nuts. We had no year-round neighbors, but we got complaints. And it didn’t even work.

Thinking of our onetime pigeon problem, and the mystery of the birds’ curious disappearance, I went up to the attic this morning to see if I could unearth the famous clapper, but it was nowhere to be found. The man from Riverhead who installed it probably took it back when we and our neighbors had had enough. 

Looking for answers, I phoned Larry Penny, our nature writer, who has an encyclopedic mind when it comes to the flora and fauna of Long Island. Uncharacteristically, he was stymied for a while. Then, he called back with a theory. A Southern crow, the fish crow, which is a bit smaller than the indigenous American crow, has established itself here, especially in the village, “in a big way,” he said. And, he added, “They are nest-stealers.”

Hm. Wouldn’t it be nice — after all the sturm und drang about contraception, and culling, and spaying — if our problem deer would just quietly disappear into the night like the pigeons? I wonder what nonindigenous and less-troublesome animal we might import to nest in their place? Do llamas eat garden flowers? Do koalas carry ticks?

They really have the cleanup thing down pat in Port Jefferson, where I was for two days last week for a newspaper conference. Early Saturday, when I was out looking for a cup of coffee and something to eat instead of the hotel buffet, I noticed that the main route through the business district was littered with castoffs from the previous night. Plastic cups, waxed-paper remnants of late-night pizzas, cigarette butts, empty soda bottles, napkins, and other garbage spread over a two-block stretch.

By the time I finished my coffee, at about 7 a.m., however, a crew of men with leaf-blowers had swept in, sending the debris into the gutter, where a street-sweeper vacuumed it all up and hauled it away. In minutes, really, there was no trace of the previous night’s activities.

In addition to keeping the streets tidy, Port Jeff has much about it that reminds me of some of our South Fork villages, such as Sag Harbor, that try to balance the needs of the people who live there with the interests of those for whom making money is the primary concern. In sum, the basic question for any resort or day-tripper paradise is: How does a community see itself, and whom exactly should its social and governmental entities serve first?

I may have said it before, but from my perspective, residents come first. Policies that benefit those who simply live and work in a place can be a plus for visitors and the enterprises that cater to them as well. Consider East Hampton Village, where, outside of the Main Street and Newtown Lane center, all is orderly, clean, and quiet. As a result, real estate values here are a significant multiple above those seen where the rules are less rigorously enforced.  

In some ways downtown Port Jeff is kind of like Montauk, a place to which people travel to walk around and take in the sights. And the weekend crowds that might seem not quite thick enough for shopkeepers could well feel like way too many for those who call either place home.

“Let it rain!” I said to the guys who were putting up new seamless gutters whose downspouts and discharge pipes were arranged under our deck in such a way as to inspire hope that the annoyance of periodic basement floods would once and for all be ended.

Haz llover! Let it rain! Open the floodgates of heaven. Well, perhaps not quite so wide, but I do want to see if the new system works, if we’re on our way to, if not bone-dryness, less dankness. Yes, less dankness, fewer spiders, less mold, a little less of the entropy against which we are struggling.

My late stepfather, who was handy, used to say, with a shake of the head, “There’s always something.” I gathered he rather liked having it that way, though. Not being handy, I tend to avert my eyes until the storm of deferred maintenance that has gathered while I slept can no longer be ignored. It is only then that I take interest in stemming the tide.

You’ve noticed perhaps the allusions to Churchill’s writings. I’ve been thinking of him of late and of the Roosevelts, who were the subjects of a fascinating seven-part Ken Burns series recently on Channel 13. All of them did great things. I’m sure, with the Panama Canal, national parks, the Great Depression, wars, imperial and otherwise, and the improvement of society on their minds, they didn’t worry about things like dank basements.

Teddy was an intriguing cross between Genghis Khan and Eugene Debs. The Roosevelts were energetic, intelligent, and brave. They all struggled very well against entropy. Not a whiner among them.

Without drawing a direct parallel, I think I can say, without fearing contradiction itself, that the foundation of our society — as is the case with our basement — could stand some improvement, and that the sense of fairness that was so evident in Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor (especially in her, though not exclusively) is sorely missed.

Clichés are usually based on matters of common knowledge, so there has got to be at least some truth in the often heard idea that people revert to childhood as they age. Right? I’m sure this doesn’t pertain to me — at least not yet — but I’m keeping watch.

I celebrated one of those birthdays this week that people consider a milestone, and I am afraid there’s no hiding my age anymore. Besides, I’ve decided, if people don’t know my age, how can they tell me I don’t look it?

But on Sunday, when friends and family arrived for a backyard party, I realized that I had in fact reverted to childhood in at least one funny way: There was an unintended little curl right in the middle of my forehead. Oh dear, I could almost hear my mother saying:

There was a little girl,

And she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good

She was very, very good,        

And when she was bad she was horrid.

The best thing I can say about this memory is that the words are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s. My mother recited them often, and I still don’t know to this day whether she was in earnest or in jest about the “horrid” part.

Growing up, I fought those curls. I went from wearing my hair in what we called a pageboy to smoothing out my curls by pulling my hair straight back. It wasn’t until it could be said that I was moving out of middle age that I started liking and encouraging them. I even had my hair cut for a while in New York City at a place famous for the encouragement and pampering of curls, curls, curls. 

Now any hope I might still have had of keeping my age a secret has been all but dashed. Longtime readers of The Star know that from time to time we publish sly birthday greetings: Someone brings in a childhood photo as a birthday surprise for a friend or relative and it is run with phrases like “Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s 40” or “Nifty, Nifty, Look Who’s 50.” So it was that a photo of a child of about 3 appeared in last week’s issue, accompanied by a different rhyme:

Don’t be sad,  

Don’t be blue, 

Brigitte Bardot is your age, too.

This little ditty was a collaboration among my husband, who found the photo, and a number of people on the staff, who helped refine the message. Not all readers would have thought much lately about Brigitte Bardot and, even if they did, it was unlikely they would know how old she was. Of course, if readers out there cared to know, all they would have to do was go to Google. It turns out that Ms. Bardot was born one day before me. 

But there was a little problem. I laughed out loud when I saw the ad, and the collaborators roared with laughter when I told them that the cute little kid in the photo was my brother.

There are simply too many animals in our house, and, to be honest, there were too many a month ago before we brought a new pug puppy home. But a surprising, if unlikely, relationship between two of them gives me hope.

By the numbers, Luna the pug did not really skew things all that much. We had promised Evvy, our 10-year-old middle child, that she would be next in line for a dog of her own when our ancient pug, Yum, died. So, when Yum Yom’s time was up, the ticker started toward Evvy’s big day.

Luna, all three or four pounds of her, came to us by way of a breeder in New Hampshire in August. Now that she has topped seven pounds, she is beginning to establish herself as the most dominant of our four-legged pets.

Weasel the Labrador mix with a mysterious black tongue (a shelter dog from down South somewhere) finds Luna annoying at best, and Luna gives Lulu, our other dog, the business when she wants something. But it is with Leo the pig, all 70 pounds of him, that she really shines.

To Luna, Leo is the ultimate pigskin or rawhide chew. A sucker for attention of any kind, all it takes for her to get him to submit is a few tugs on his tail. This is a signal that she is ready to gnaw, and Leo flops onto his side and lies back in anticipation.

As long as Luna does not teethe on the pig’s snout, all is good. The rest — and I mean the rest — of him is fair game: hooves, ears, knees, pork chops, whatever. There ought to be some kind of law against some of the indignities she subjects him to, if you know what I mean.

Leo, who can be annoying as hell when he is not being scratched or fed, is well subdued by the puppy’s attention. In the early morning, before Luna gets up or I have awakened enough to fill Leo’s bowl, he makes his impatience known in the kitchen by knocking the pot lids around on a low shelf or nosing an old sea chest in the entryway so its lid repeatedly falls with a loud crash.

If I don’t have a spray bottle handy to sprits him in the rump roast, he will keep this up until the food arrives or Luna gets up looking for a bite. Thank goodness for her. Now, if I can only teach her to make Leo’s breakfast.

It has become a tradition, six years running, for my family to meet up with a crew of other families from nearby and spend a September weekend camping at Hither Hills in Montauk. When the weather cooperates, and even when it doesn’t, these are my favorite days of the year.

My daughter was not quite 2 months old the first time we went, and our poorly chosen site left our tent in the middle of a moat the first morning of our stay. Our friends’ twins were just 4. Both families literally decamped to points west until the skies cleared, then returned by the next afternoon to enjoy a dry night under the stars by a warm campfire.

By the next year, my son was on the way, Jade was 1, but not walking, and the twins had graduated from scooters to bikes and skateboards. The year after that, another family joined us, my daughter was on a trike, and my son, then 4 months old, would sit happily in his Bumbo seat watching all the action. We’ve welcomed a new family and added a cool piece of camping gear every year since, getting a little better each time at maximizing fun and making it all work smoothly.

This year, there were eight families we knew. We had 11 kids under 18, along with friends brought from home or met at the campground, milling about on bikes and trikes and scooters and skateboards with sidewalk chalk or glow sticks in hand, depending on the time of day. Even the youngest were free to roam a certain distance alone, and they blossomed in their new independence.

Most of us shared dinner together near the fire each night, then talked and laughed and made up games around the firepit. We stayed up too late and woke up too early. The kids, ever in motion, wore themselves out from so much riding and running and sunshine. There were way too many marshmallows, and for some, too much good drink, but there was the ocean right over the dunes to make the morning better. The waves were perfect and we had three days of great weather after the initial rain that kept all but one family at home for Thursday night. It’s not always like that.

In six years, many of our camping neighbors have become familiar faces. If they weren’t “home” we recognized the names and hometowns on the cute family signs many people post at their sites. People return to the same camp neighborhood at the same time year after year, just like we do. While it’s close quarters at Hither Hills and there’s not much privacy between sites, people seem to sense when you want your space and when you want to make friends.

Many conversations start with a question about another camper’s gear or someone’s clever solution for common camping problems like finding shade or shelter or a way to keep your tent clean or your food cold or your path lighted. If there’s a problem out there, you can be sure that a camper or outdoor outfitter has figured out a way to solve it. And the die-hards who have been doing it for years revel in the chance to share their innovations, to talk out the pros and cons of one sort of camp vehicle versus another, or rate a firepit or portable grill.

I love checking out other people’s campsites to see what they’ve come up with. For me, camping is filled with aha moments that begin with “there must be a way to . . .” I love finding workarounds and ways to use one thing for more than one purpose, having invention forced upon me. I love it when a bin holding sleeping bags and blankets becomes a side table in a tent, when a cardboard six-pack box becomes a spice-and-condiment carrier, when a washing machine drum is retooled into a raised fire container. Ingenious! Look up “camping hacks” on Pinterest and you’ll find all sorts of great ideas for living the good life in the great outdoors. Sometimes I want to go camping just so I can try them out.

In a world of more, more, more and faster, faster, faster, it’s great to do more with less, to slow down enough to watch the stars move across the sky, to turn off my iPhone and spend the weekend in touch with the people who are close enough to actually touch.

To me, that feels like home.

Carissa Katz, The Star’s managing editor, is still unpacking from her weekend “away.”

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!

Our kids are sick of hearing about my car already. And what kid wouldn’t be? Parents are, almost by definition, annoying when you are between, say, 10 and 17 years old, especially if they ramble on and on. But, hey, I just got my first electric vehicle after thinking about it for years, and I’m not ready to shut up yet.

Truth is, I don’t even really understand how the thing works yet. It’s a 2014 Chevrolet Volt, leased from an eponymous dealer up the road a bit whom I really shouldn’t plug in print. I would take it to the Tyler Valcich Memorial Car Show at the American Legion in Amagansett on Sunday to show off, but I figure I ought to be able to speak with some knowledge first.

What I do know is that it goes about 38 miles on a battery charge, enough to get a daughter or two to ballet in Bridgehampton and home again to Amagansett at a whole lot less cost than my old gas-guzzling pickup truck, and there are enough buttons and options on the touch screen to keep our 4-year-old Pokemon fan of a son happy.

I’ve kept my 2000 Tundra for fishing, surfing, hauling boat stuff around, and going to the dump. It’s paid for, and at about 172,000 miles, it might last another couple of years easily.

By the numbers, the Toyota should not be driven daily, getting as it does about 13 miles to the gallon and costing about $10 for a round-trip ballet run. That and my other travels had added up to about $100 a week for gas.

The Volt, on the other hand, seems to take about $1.80 worth of electricity from the PSEG grid to go the same distance, if I understand my most recent bill’s mind-boggling rates correctly. And, though the Volt has a small gasoline engine under the hood, it is mostly used to recharge the battery when it gets depleted. In about 150 miles of driving, it has come on only once and only for about a mile before I got home.

So far, I am happy with the new vehicle, and pleased that I’m not blowing a hole in the ozone with tailpipe emissions the way I was in the Tundra. We will see how things go over the long run, but right now, it’s looking good.

The dark comes so early now. I shudder to think of the end of daylight saving time, barely a week away. But Tuesday was so mild and biking up Further Lane after work has become something of a mild exercise habit as I try to hold onto these great outdoors until the frost comes. So it was already getting dark as I pedaled east, then south, then west.

From long driveways, a few landscapers straggled toward home. A lot more deer, stock still, stared quizzically as I pedaled past, laboring on the cheap folding bike. This was Further Lane in the dying of the light in late October.

I stopped several times, to stare back and have a word with the deer, or take a snap of the horizon, pink and dusky gray-blue over blue-gray. Heading toward Old Beach Lane.

The outdated iPhone’s camera never gets it right. It doesn’t come close. The digital snapshot is dull and dark and small. It cannot capture it. But neither can I.

On the sand, a man practiced tai chi and another stood motionless and reverent at water’s edge and an elegant woman gazed at the sea and sky as her cavalier and happy spaniel ran freely. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” she exclaimed.

I thought a long moment and said yes, I think I have. “But it’s still magnificent.”

“It’s magnificent,” she said.

I wish I could speak in glorious Technicolor. But no, just black-and-white. “It’s hard to put into words,” I said, and corrected myself. “I can’t put it into words.”

“You can’t put it into words,” she said.

The night before, I’d learned that a young man I knew, just 20 years old, had died unexpectedly. His mother and I are friends, and the shock and sorrow for those who have lost him has made concentration difficult in the hours since. The awful news has also jarred a dark memory of a month and six years ago when my then-wife’s brother had also, at 27, passed away without warning. How is it that I had made it that far, and then so much farther, there on Further Lane?

I thought back to India, its colorful, fanciful gods and the Bhagavad Gita and Sri Krishna’s tender reprimand. “You are mourning for what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor the dead.”

“Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.”

“As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A self-realized soul is not bewildered by such a change.”

The southern sky steeped in deep blues above, a long and delicate brush of powdery pink between, the relentless roll of the ocean below, and we four or five souls, helpless and bewildered on the sand before the terrible beauty at the end of Old Beach Lane. The elegant woman, barefoot, walked east, the galloping little dog charging into the twilight until I couldn’t see them anymore.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The East Hampton Star.

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.