Fall weather is perfect for a yard sale. People aren’t hot or cranky and really seem to enjoy the smell of leaves dying and the crunch they make under one’s feet. I’m joining a few other women this weekend to have a yard sale in Montauk and am not sure if I should be looking forward to it or dreading it. Obviously, I have done this before.

One might wonder what I could possibly be thinking, as those who have held yard sales know that the insults to your personal stuff fly freely. I just hope to wake in a good mood on Saturday morning.

It’s time to clear out my house and some personal belongings. I have finally accepted that the beautiful high heels worn only once for a wedding will never get worn again. I’ve also concluded that I should get rid of a few favorite pocketbooks — oops, I mean handbags, as they’re now called. I see no reason to hang on to the leather bags that clutter my bedroom and that my two daughters have no interest in.

The best part of a yard sale is never knowing what treasures you might find. I scored a Dolce & Gabbana black leather shoulder bag from the bottom of a box at the Montauk Library’s yard sale section at its book fair this summer for $5. Brand new, it sells for over $1,000! That, I’m holding on to. And if someone reading this says, “Oh no, Mom donated my Italian leather bag with gold chain clasp,” don’t even think about asking for it back. I paid my $5 and it’s now mine, all mine, heh heh heh.

Jewelry will also be sold. Until a few necklaces appeared to be choking me recently, I never realized that my neck would thicken over the years as much as my waistline. A necklace is my favorite type of jewelry and I have too many. This is a clearance sale; I need to clear out my house.

I will be selling the lingerie from Victoria’s Secret that my husband buys each year for me on Christmas. It never fits me, but if in his mind I’m still that slender slip of a girl, so be it. Who am I to burst his bubble? As I get older, I just keep dimming the bedroom lights more and more. And if I can make a few bucks on the items, then maybe I’d buy some slinky thing that actually fits me.

Pricing items for a yard sale is tough. I’m selling stuff that I would probably keep, except that there’s no more room in my house for clutter. But when I’m offered $2 for something I think is a bargain at $5, that’s when I might have to slug the offender. People read in newspapers and magazines how to haggle with a seller and think it’s their job to do so. Yard sale customers will always offer you less, much less in some cases.

My sister is selling a beautiful wood kitchen island that has had some nips previously on Bonac Yard Sale on Facebook. But the wannabe buyers keep trying to haggle her down on the already cheap listing price. One woman who visited my sister’s home to look at it would not leave her driveway for almost a half-hour last week because she couldn’t wrap her head around the price my sister was asking for it. And though the woman really wanted it, she wouldn’t give in to the extra few bucks.

I’m usually an easy target; I give in. Hell, tell me a sob story and I’ll give you the item for free! But on Saturday I’m going to try to stand firm, keep my pride, and just say no, I will not take $1 for that brand-new L.L. Bean shirt that is still in its wrapper. I will not take $2 for the handbag I spent over $300 on at Bloomingdale’s several years ago. And I will not listen to your sob story. If you see something, say something, just don’t let it be, “How about a buck for that?”

Janis Hewitt is a senior writer and the Montauk correspondent for The Star.

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.

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.

Summer does not so much make a light escape here as a noisy one, so that we, the birds who stay, and who indeed will shiver, rejoice.

Thus the seasons are for us rearranged, and the waning of summer, what for many is a signal of decline, brings promise here.

A photographer friend, who has been shuffling all summer to the numbing rhythms of real estate interests, has been saying for the past three months that he can’t wait for summer to end and for fall to begin, so that he can be freed, somewhat, from exigency, and participate again in the dance of life. That’s why I made note of the high school teams’ first scrimmages and games at the end of this week in my calendar, which ordinarily I would stop at Wednesday.

Soon we will be caught up in so much activity — but of a much more joyful kind than we’ve known of late — that we’ll be able to delight, if not forever, at least for some months to come, in the present.

A Terrible Duty

His world was narrowing, Mary said, and ours was too. He was almost there when he went, at our hands — a terrible duty that this terrible beauty exacts.

The last time at Louse Point, in the golden light, he tugged gently at the leash at the water’s edge, and I wouldn’t let him go, not wanting to be possibly inconvenienced, though I said to myself and others, who could see that he was old, that it was for his own good.

I should have let him, I should have let him go. Forgive me, Henry.

Everything’s so clean and neat now.

And silent.

And empty.

The kitchen floor is bare.

Your eyes were so beautiful, though I hadn’t realized eternity was in them until the day we let you go.

An erupting fight over the former East Deck Motel property in Montauk has pitted a wealthy new property owner against scores of residents and visitors who would like to see Ditch Plain Beach remain the way it was for so long. More than 2,000 people have signed an online petition opposing J. Darius Bikoff’s plan to convert the iconic motel into a private surf club, of sorts.

The scale and “screw you” message of the proposal brings to mind the epic battle here in the 1980s and early ’90s over Barcelona Neck, some 341 acres then owned by Ben Heller, which eventually was bought by the State of New York for $40 million in 1992. It also seems an echo of the plans for a luxury development on 99 oceanfront acres in Montauk known as Shadmoor, which the town, county, and state bought for $17.3 million in 1999 from Robert Bear and Peter Schub.

Every few years, another bete noire emerges to energize preservationists. Mr. Bikoff would seem to be bidding to try on this ignominious mantle if he persists in seeking approval for the East Deck makeover — effectively privatizing a shoreline considered in short supply.

The town alone or in concert with other levels of government could make a bid to buy the site from him and his unnamed partners in the limited liability corporation called ED40 that bought the place. In hindsight, the $15 million they paid to the Houseknecht family while making flimsy promises about respecting the integrity of the place looks like a bargain — and perhaps the biggest single missed opportunity on the land-buying front of the previous town administration.

Mr. Bikoff has touched off what will surely be a long and bitter confrontation. It would be a terrific turn of events if he would work with local officials on a public deal to preserve the site. The price would be steep, I suspect, but as with Shadmoor and Barcelona before it, time has proven that those involved did the right thing.

It is a foregone conclusion that East Hampton went to the dogs long ago. Now it is the cats! East Hampton began its meandering path to going to the cats mostly in the modern historical sense of time.

Our family cats began, when I was a little boy, with Black Nose. He was a family pet, yet the only significant memory I have of this cat was wrapping him in a blanket and putting him in the bathroom sink to rest. The cat was not well. Black Nose spent his last days resting in the bathroom sink comfy and dry, wrapped in his small blanket.

The next in line was a black Persian cat born at a neighbor’s house across the street. In the days when East Hampton’s empty fields grew tall with wheat and lawns were left semitended, cats crossed roads and cars stopped, especially if it was a black cat.

Needless to say, the cat picked our home, refusing to be taken back across the street to its birthplace. The neighbor gave up after multiple cat returns. The cat grew stately, with many reigning achievements of local lore at his new home. Once, the cat jumped out of the family car in Bridgehampton and spent a week roaming free until a family friend found it near where it had taken flight.

Not many local cats have caught and released a large live bat into their home. How my dad laughed as my older brother chased this evil-looking bat around the kitchen with a broom. Eventually, the bat exited the back door very much alive, mouth a-snapping, wings a-flap. For morning dramatics circa 1973, my dad would recite Shakespeare in small sonnets to the cat over coffee at 7 a.m. And who could forget the huge bloody jackrabbit the cat brought in alive to run around the ground floor?

Next in the lineage, but not least in any sense, was Marlin the cat. Marlin was born on a smallish, crumpled derelict sailboat that sat aground not far from what is known now as the East Hampton Point restaurant. Marlin, who was named after the Marlin fishing vessels docked at the Montauk docks, without question lived a charmed life.

Marlin’s charm could lead to the demise of any animal smaller than he by way of his terrifying claws. Known as the U.S. Marines of local cats, Marlin assaulted birds, rabbits, mice — oh, those poor mice. That cat was a terror! Having climbed the evergreen tree to eye level out the back kitchen window, Marlin put on a brazen show. As my little sister, Tara, looked on and cried in disbelief, Marlin’s evil little face peered in as he swatted a tiny baby birdie out of its nest. It was awful: My little sister screamed. What a terrible cat!

Dogs were scared of that cat. Those mice, those poor mice, how Marlin would catch them, run around with them in his mouth, toss them up in the air over and over again. The devil himself, that cat was.

On to the present: Putter and Summer, born from underneath a local house, cats as feral as the winter night is long — young, obstinate, and hardly sociable. Putter was uncoordinated, scattered, not predictable. Putter bashed and broke drinking glasses in his mad scramble to avoid nothing. Tripping over his paws, falling from the highest location that a beam could provide, crashing into whatever made itself available.

Any sign of housecleaning drove Putter deep into whatever closet depths, darkest drawer, or smallest space that Houdini himself couldn’t fit into. Putter, an indoor cat, nigh never braved the outdoors. Once having slipped out, Putter’s moans, like shrieks, were a fright. A window and door were left open. Putter came flying through a ground-floor window like something shot from a small cannon. The cat hid for days. The outside world of East Hampton was not worth the venture for Putter the cat.

Putter’s sister Summer: a small, shy female cat, introspective, not friendly. Summer was never much for being handled, had little sense of humor, and did not care much for anyone’s company except my son’s. Summer, when young, didn’t have much of a personality. She was a boring cat.

What happened to Putter and Summer? Today they bound around like circus cats doing all kinds of the silliest things, including cat tricks for children. What possible explanation is there for this butterfly-like transition into super cats?

Summer’s feline personality is developing. It never occurred to anyone that Summer would ride around on people’s shoulders, perched bright, claws drawn in. She drinks milk from a little glass, eats striped bass like a pro, fluke and sardine too. These days Summer goes outside, a few feet away from the house. Her coat is super clean, eyes brightly steady, temperament stealthy. An attractive cat who likes to sleep in the corners.

Putter has clearly outdone himself. Maybe falling and crashing for years teaches a cat a certain mentality of the nine lives. After all, maybe cats are meant to be upside down and airborne for part of their lives. Putter’s coat looks lion-like, shading to other nuances gaining depth — extraordinarily clean, that cat. Rather a comedian of cats, as if he is saying, No one is funnier than I.

From being an unfriendly, mean, uncoordinated cat to allowing my brother’s young son to carry him around in a bear hug for short periods of time, a fine cat if ever there was one. How did it happen? Any rational person might have envisioned doom for that Putter cat upon seeing him years ago.

It has also been discovered recently that both Putter and Summer like the Rolling Stones. Your guess is as good as anyone’s.

Morgan McGivern is The Star’s staff photographer.

A friend sent an email to me and a slew of others this week, using Gmail, that warned against opening any email that might arrive from her Hotmail account, which had been hacked. I don’t know what can happen if you open a hacked email, and I don’t plan to find out, but I do know something about my friend that she hadn’t intended: the email addresses — and many of the names — of her friends, acquaintances, and business connections, some 350 of them. 

I’d been thinking about the information that is sometimes divulged unintentionally by email since June, when other friends invited me to their anniversary party. They didn’t realize, I am sure, that the names and addresses of everyone they were including arrived along with the invitation. There they were, on the “CC” line of the Apple Mail program.

Most of the guests were people I was delighted to see, and I already had some of their addresses. I thought about saving those I didn’t have, as potentially useful future contacts, but then reconsidered. What would Miss Manners say about taking advantage of someone else’s privacy goof? Of course, all these contacts are probably still floating around in my computer somewhere (and I just don’t know enough about technology to tap into them).

I do know enough about technology to have grasped the use of the “BCC” line, but just how you would BCC some 350 names and addresses boggles my mind a bit. I guess if someone held a gun to my head I’d be able to create a “group” in my Gmail address book, and use that, but so far I haven’t had the occasion.

Sometimes at The Star, I’ve received electronic press releases showing the name and address of every person or news outlet to which it was sent — quite a bonanza, when celebrities, moguls, and editors across the country were on the list. My journalistic curiosity is piqued, and I find myself examining these lists like Miss Marple. I admit I once forwarded a long media list received that way to the person responsible for sending out releases for the Choral Society of the Hamptons, of which I am a member. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. 

Then there was the party to which the hosts intentionally sent out five separate email invitations. Actually, the first and second were identical, one having been pasted into an email and the other sent through Paperless Post. But the third through fifth were unique, containing updates and tips, telling us what games were going to be played (golf), what to wear, that there were going to be two D.J.s, and adding a link to a hangover cure (Sprite) and others to taxi transportation. Each used assorted sizes and styles of type in coordinated shades of blue and turquoise. Talk about email virtuosity! 

To be frank, Chris and I were only on that guest list because the bash was going to be a noisy affair and, well, our property backs up on theirs. We laughed at the obvious fact that we had raised the median age of the invitees, but we went nevertheless and had a swell time. Naturally, these young party-throwers were computer whizzes, and the names and addresses of everyone else invited were nowhere to be seen.

As I walked to The Star’s kitchen the other day with Henry’s empty dish, not needing it anymore, I saw a piece of plywood barring the editor’s door, about baby gate-high, and looked in, and there was a puppy nibbling at his shoelaces. I wasn’t overly sad, for that’s the way it is: Life goes on.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been paying more attention lately: to a small gold leaf that twirled downward as I was taking a shower outdoors yesterday morning, to a bug barely the size of a comma, walking briskly over his kingdom, words that I have been trying with some difficulty to understand, to two fawns who’ve been welcomed at the corner, feeding on our neighbors’ lawn at dusk, to our brightly painted wooden fish — which reminds we two should be at peace — that fell from its perch over our sink just as a catbird stumbled in through the open slider door, its heart beating hard as it pressed up against the large windowpane.

“Un parajo a dentro,” I said, with some excitement, as the cleaning women entered, and went to get garden gloves to take hold of it. As it hunkered down in the sink, not knowing what was coming next, I grabbed and squeezed a bit, though not too tightly, and as it protested I let it go, almost in one motion, delighted as it flew off — to where I don’t know, happy that it wasn’t sick.

“Everything is holy,” Blake said, and while I still can’t quite say I believe it, I am finding it is truer than I thought. He would say, I suppose, that I hadn’t thought it through enough, that we were all one at one point, in the Eternity that preceded the Creation/Fall, before unity gave way to division — division so painfully evident on this day of all days, division which, because of its great enormities, may lead us to treasure unity and life all the more.

You hear from time to time how tight East Hampton Town is when it comes to handing out construction permits. “You can’t get anything approved around here,” the complaint goes. Well, that is not really the case. Although the paperwork may mound up and the review process be painfully slow, you can generally get what you want.

During a late-August getaway, I visited a California community that was really restrictive and puts East Hampton’s supposedly hard-nosed preservationism into sharp perspective.

Bolinas, a town of about 1,500 residents on the Pacific Coast in Marin County, decided about 40 years ago to simply stop time. No, they said, to the California suburban sprawl creeping over Mount Tam from Interstate Highway 101. And it worked. There are no chain-type convenience stores, no obvious mansions belonging to the new San Francisco tech elite, and nothing to tell you that it’s not, say, 1971, other than the Honda Priuses parked along the road to the beach.

Chief among the tools that Bolinas pushed to limit growth was an absolute cap on the number of water meters. It is today, as it was when Johnson was in the White House, a hippie-surfer paradise, and it is likely to stay that way.

That the place could have remained unchanged is all the more astounding when you consider that it is but a one-hour drive from the new-money capital of the United States. Like Montauk, for example, Bolinas is flanked by preserved land and the sea. It, too, was once envisioned as the home of a massive resort project, including, in its case, a four-lane highway and marina for luxury yachts.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, activists began to build a metaphorical wall between themselves and the ravages of the time.

Visitors will find no sign on the main road indicating the Bolinas turnoff. Residents supposedly stole it so many times the authorities just decided to forget about another replacement. Montauk, on the other hand, and the rest of the Hamptons — well, we know all too well what has happened here.

Several times during my weekend there with an old friend, we passed a person dancing in the street in full shaman regalia — a cape, staff, beads, and, dangling from his decorated hat, a talisman that reached between his eyes to the end of his nose.

Okay, so Bolinas is definitely not East Hampton Village, where a shaman might be urged to go along. But it is interesting to consider what we might have looked like had we really held back East Coast excess and powerful real estate interests to make sure our policies lived up to their perception.

In East Hampton, officials and most residents just shrug, believing there is nothing they can do in the face of all that New York money. But it is illustrative to see just how far one community managed to go to keep its identity, and it is sad to realize the extent to which we’ve blown it here