Back in April at the height of the daffodil season, I wondered in this space whether hijacking your neighbor’s flowers — considering that the neighbor’s lot was just a gritty wasteland waiting for the construction of what would probably be yet another blight on the block — was really such a bad thing.

This particular place had been a floral showstopper before its modest house was demolished. The two gentleman gardeners who’d lived there had lovingly tended a riot of shrubs, trees, and flowers that spilled over beyond their fence onto the semipublic strip of land adjacent to the road, where, from mid-March to mid-May, “a host of golden daffodils” — also orange, red, and pink, Mendelian colors that Wordsworth could not have conceived of — “stretched in never-ending line.” Hundreds of them, maybe as many as a thousand. A host, for sure.

Every year in daffodil season I used to go out of my way to walk on that side of the road. But this spring, while the stunning procession marched down the aisle as always, there was no house, at least not yet; no trees, no shrubs, no owners that anyone knew of, no nothing. And it had been that way for a year. Likely a corporation waiting to resell and make a killing, we surmised.

So I didn’t think overmuch about doing a little expropriating. Rather than stopping and ogling and walking on, as in the past, I cut some daffs every few days and took them home, or to work, to admire. There were so many flowers that no one could possibly have told the difference if I hadn’t then gone and written about it, asking whether this small act of insurrection was, in fact, stealing.

Two things happened not long after that column ran. One, earth-movers arrived to begin construction. And two, I got an email from the property owners.

“Irene,

“. . . We are not a corporation, but a couple, who also love Amagansett and respect the house and land that we bought.”

“. . . Unfortunately, the house we purchased was ramshackle at best, held together by a paint job. The plantings, which we completely admired, were one of the reasons the house and land were so compelling for us. Had you taken a little more time to notice, before stealing our flowers, you might have seen how we actually transplanted as many of the beautiful trees the former owners planted that were viable in the back of our property, creating a nursery to protect them as we construct our house. Had you bothered to try to contact us, you might have understood that we actually had issues with a builder and had to call a halt to our construction until things could be sorted out.”

“We purchased that property not as a corporate plaything, but as a place where we could actually build a dream house — on land where we understood and respected the love with which the former owners tended their property. Our house will be beautiful and will reflect and respect the former owners as well as the neighborhood. Maybe you would have preferred a McMansion to be constructed in a few months’ time. It is unfortunate that you have chosen to characterize and ridicule us without any attempt to find out who we might be or what we might be doing.”

“Yes, the daffodils are beautiful and the land is beautiful. But there is more to this story. Your conflict with whether or not stealing our daffodils is actually stealing is actually a conflict. Yes, it is stealing. And even more, you have completely disrespected us. All our best wishes.”

Disaster. Here were people who had been hurt not once (okay, it was stealing) but twice (by writing about it). How to make amends?

“Buy them daffodil bulbs,” was the office consensus. “Drop them off with a nice note.”

Before I could do that, though (bulbs don’t come in to the nurseries until fall), the Amagansett Fire Department’s 100th anniversary parade took place. I was standing in the crowd on Main Street waving at the old pump trucks when along came a couple I hadn’t seen in years, and as we were catching up along came another, and the four of them started talking. And that was how I met the writers of the email, who, after an apology on one side and some initial wariness on the other, turned out to be the diametrical opposite of everything I’d been so sure about.

Better yet, the house has, too. It’s maybe half-finished now, going up slowly, as good houses do. I check it out every day as I go by. It’s going to be a knockout.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor-at-large.

We had always thought of Warren Buffett as a warm and fuzzy ambassador for capitalism before he and three Brazilian billionaires took Heinz private last year — a deal whose announcement was made in the wake of what was found to be insider trading in call options through a Goldman Sachs brokerage in Switzerland.

The deal divested my wife and me — no pensioners we — of modest inherited holdings in a good company that paid good dividends, and thus was galling enough; further evidence, if any further evidence were needed, that we are but prawns in a game ruled by big fish.

And though the deal itself, we are told, did not come under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the attendant insider trading did. Three cheers, you might say, but a recent study by N.Y.U. and McGill economists has found that when it comes to these mergers and acquisitions, the chances of insider trading not being involved in the run-up to them exceeds the odds of winning the lottery (the lottery that, it seems, we are always on the cusp of winning, and whose anticipated net proceeds we have long ago consigned to the younger generation, in the form of houses mostly).

“Mary, there always have been crooks,” my late stepfather said once to my wife as she inveighed against felons in high places.

Is democracy, then, just another word for 57 varieties of malfeasance? It seems to be so. It would be ironic, wouldn’t it, if this country simply were to sink under its own weight, brought low by its own tawdriness rather than by terrorists.

It’s impunity for those who wheel and deal and hard time for those who just deal.

Trillions, it is said, is hidden in safe havens offshore. Beef up the S.E.C. then rather than the Pentagon. Bring the traitors to account, bring the myriad inside traders to account. Upend and squeeze them, just as you would a catsup bottle. Recoup the money that’s been taken private and put it to good public use.

I would relish that, though it’s getting late to step up to the plate.

Summer as a child on my grandparents’ farm in the Catskills was fun. We played in a cold brook, picked blueberries on the hills, and invented fantastic worlds on the third floor of the barn, where a carriage had long been abandoned. Once, on a neighbor’s farm, I was allowed to attempt to milk a cow. 

The summer of 1948 was different. It may have been the last summer we spent on the farm, but I honestly can’t remember. Old Man Low, whose cows I used to visit in one of his pastures about a half-mile away, wasn’t there that summer; he was gone. No one told me if he had given up dairy farming, or just passed on, but in any case his pastures were empty and that was that. And then one day, his farmhouse and outbuildings were rented to a group of men and boys. 

In August, I was asked to go to the Low farm to help serve meals for the group. I would get up early and take a shortcut through the woods to a large room being used as a mess hall, where I dished out appalling reconstituted scrambled eggs, among other non-delicacies.

I didn’t hear any shooting that summer, but I knew these young men were training for the war in Israel, which had become an independent nation that May. Not too many months later, a man I had seen at the Low farm, known to me only as Warsaw, was arrested, apparently attempting to load guns onto a vessel in New York Harbor.

We learned then — at least, if my memory isn’t playing tricks, this was when I learned the name — that he and his fellows were members of a group called Irgun, extremist fighters seeking to force the British out of Palestine. Menachem Begin, who in time became the Israeli prime minister and won the Nobel Peace Prize, was one of Irgun’s leaders. Today we would call them terrorists. (Haganah was another paramilitary organization at the time, but it was less radical in its violence than its offshoot, Irgun.)

My parents weren’t political. My father had been a Roosevelt man, not knowing, of course, how little the president was doing to help the Jews escape from the Nazis. They held on tightly to Judaism, however, and belonged to an Orthodox synagogue. Did they know I was helping a secret cell of Irgun that summer? Were they indifferent to or ignorant of the presence nearby of men receiving training in arms? Or were they proud? What seems most likely is that they simply avoided thinking too hard about what was going on, just as I think they avoided thinking too much about the concentration camps. 

As a young woman I guess I took a cue from my parents. I had belonged to a Zionist youth organization in high school, but only briefly. I never chose to study the story of the new Jewish state. In fact, by the time I got to college, I was more interested in the Tunisian struggle for independence from France, and did a paper on Habib Bourguiba, a hero who became Tunisia’s president in 1957.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that nearly 1,200 Palestinians had been killed in the previous three weeks, along with 56 Israelis, three of whom were civilians. It also reported that armed Palestinian fighters had reached Israel through one of the many tunnels Israel has discovered and hopes to destroy.

Every death in this war is an affront to humanity. The casualties are unspeakable. Pondering all this horror, I am almost bereft of opinion. I find myself coming closer and closer to my parents’ seemingly diffident attitude. How can an adult of good conscience — an Israeli, a Palestinian, who has witnessed plenty of evil in this world — see only black and white, or find it simple to take sides?

Brock, or Brick, or something like that, I think he said his name was, but it was difficult to pay attention the other day because I was on the beach chasing friends’ children in a runaway kayak as they drifted down the bay in the direction of Promised Land. He seemed a nice enough guy, probably in his late 20s or early 30s. He introduced me to his companion, a woman about his age, and said he was renting the house next door.

Things on the beach have seemed different in the past couple of summers. New and unfamiliar people walk past our place. Last year, the house next door was rented in August to some youngish tenants who were low-key until the end of the season, when they threw a jungle-themed pool party complete with thickset bouncers and a catered spread.

They were nice enough, though my wife was itching to call the police one night when they turned the music up way too loud. Heading off her grab for the phone, I pulled on a pair of paint-covered jeans and the muck boots I use to tend the chickens and headed over for a chat. They agreed to turn the thumping disco down and invited me for a shot of spiced rum. I declined and went home to get back in bed.

As we learned later from the neighbor who owned the house, the jungle party had left the house a shambles. Rooms that were supposed to remain off-limits had been the scene of apparent debauchery and so on. She vowed to better vet her tenants next time. We said we would help keep an eye on things.

So far, the guy whose name I didn’t quite get and his friends have hardly been a nuisance next door. We hear them occasionally carrying on around the pool. It seems that they gather for dinner and an early drink, then go out on the town after we have gotten our kids into bed. They have had one party, and the catering gear hung around on the beach for a few days, but so far, that has been about it.

More interesting, really, was the extended family that rented a place a couple of houses to the west for a weekend at the end of June. Out walking the dogs one evening, I stopped to try to chat with a guy wearing a camouflage trucker’s hat who was baiting a line for a small child.

He had little to say, which surprised me; most of the time, people on the beach here like to get acquainted. A little while later, as I walked back the other way, the rest of the family had emerged, two more men in camouflage hats, a couple of women, and a few more children. They acknowledged my hello with a nod and a wan smile, but did not engage. I have not seen them in the weeks since, but I wonder who they were each time I go by.

Many may not take me for the type of gal who enjoys camping. After all, I was raised in Manhattan. Growing up, the closest I ever got to camping was visiting my cousins at Hither Hills during their extended stays there, but I always left long before dusk. Fast forward all these years later and I look forward to going to sleep under the stars, sitting by a campfire, and, yes, even as a decade-long vegetarian, waking up to the smell of bacon cooking at the neighboring campsite.

All of that faced several interruptions, including leaks and police activity, a few weekends ago.

First, the hot water heater in our camper broke. (Did you think this city girl slept in a tent?) It was already after dark on a nonelectric site at Indian Island in Riverhead, so we roughed it the first night. In the morning, we tinkered with pipes and valves, which promptly blew the faucet off the kitchenette sink. Then we realized the fridge and freezer, which can operate off propane, weren’t getting as cold as they should, a rather big problem for my MorningStar Farms veggie bacon strips.

My fiancé was ready to admit defeat, but a friend in East Hampton, far more experienced in the world of camping, had a number for a repairman who exclusively fixes campers. We called Bill, who came right over, fixed the sink and the fridge, and diagnosed the leak. Weekend saved.

As soon as one problem is fixed though, another rears its ugly head.

As we enjoyed a peaceful evening, we heard yelling. We peeked our heads around the camper, and diagonally across the way found a man screaming at two Suffolk County Park Police officers. Our next-door neighbors, a large group of 20-somethings, suddenly came out from their campsite to fill us in — they had been watching most of the incident through the blinds. Allegedly, the man had two shotguns in the trunk of his car, which the cops had confiscated. It’s illegal to bring any firearms to a county park.

The man appeared intoxicated, also a no-no in a county park. He was filming the exchange with his cellphone camera — after all, the Eric Garner incident was just days old. The back-and-forth went on for quite some time with him screaming about his rights and the officers trying to keep him at bay. It was like a block party with campers from every site gathering around to watch. More cops and a sergeant arrived.

The man grew less steady on his feet as time went on, doing the two-step and carrying on. When he urinated right in front of the officers, it seemed they had had enough. I think it took six officers to arrest him as he struggled with them. My neighbor captured the whole thing on his cellphone. There were no chokeholds, though.

Everyone was relieved the man was in custody, and just as we were all ready to go back to our s’mores, the reason the officers had held off arresting him so long became apparent: a 3-year-old child asleep in a large tailgating chair and no other adults in sight. Another hour went by before a Riverhead volunteer ambulance came to fetch the child, I assume under some kind of protocol because the child seemed fine, scared and alone, but all right.

Officers remained at the campsite well after I turned in for the night. The Suffolk Times reported later that police found a loaded shotgun in the man’s tent, though the article made no mention of those other guns. Court documents said the child could have easily gotten to the gun.

You just never know what’s lurking around the corner. The whole incident got me thinking that maybe I should have stuck to Manhattan, where at least I had double-bolted doors, albeit no real view of the stars.

Taylor K. Vescey is The Star’s digital products editor.

Back when summer was new, The Star sent out its interns to gather up all the free magazines they could find and put a brief rundown of them on our website. The interns came back with 13 glossies. Thirteen! A few, like Hamptons magazine, have been around a long time, but most are relatively new here and some are pop-ups (to use the term now popular for the sudden appearance of a shop or restaurant).

Fortunately for us here at The Star, these glossies pretty much compete with each other, and not with us. They lure advertisers from the corporate worlds of fashion and interior decorating, and, of course, they follow celebrities. They all allege to know everyone and everything that is happening. Real estate is also prime fodder. 

Ocean Home, which I hadn’t even heard of before the interns found it, offered what it said were the top 10 “most exclusive estates on the market.” (The word “exclusive” always draws my attention, by the way. What does that really mean, anyway? Most expensive? Most likely to be encircled by a moat?) The Real Deal, an oversize Manhattan magazine that concentrates on luxury apartments that are for sale, added a “Hot in the Hamptons” feature for July. There is Hamptons Cottages & Gardens, and Pulse, and Joan Jedell’s Hamptons Sheet, which have been around awhile.

I was a little amused when I belatedly cottoned on to the fact that there are two Beach magazines on the market. The Modern Luxury chain’s Beach magazine was inaugurated in 2012 and took a bead on Niche Media’s Hamptons. The other Beach is Avenue magazine’s Avenue on the Beach, which started up last summer. Although one has a much smaller format than the other, each has the word “Beach” on the cover in extra-large type. Could a little litigation be going on between them?

The interns also brought in a copy of Du Jour, which divides its content between the city and the East End. Its publisher is Jason Binn, who had launched but is no longer with Hamptons. More recently, I picked up a copy of Gotham, which is another Niche Media publication, and was pleasantly surprised that there was nothing in it about the East End, except for an advertisement for the James Beard Foundation’s Chefs and Champagne party this weekend. 

But the prize of the summer was picked up and brought home by my husband. It’s called Hamptons Dog, and it is about nothing but. Among the cover lines were: “Boating Safety for Canines,” “Flying Dogs: Learn Frisbee!” and “Summer Skin and Fur Care.” Its editor and publisher is Lisa Hartman, a dog trainer and crackerjack photographer of dogs. The issue featured a Paw List (names of dogs), an article on how to go paddleboarding with your four-legged friend, and quite a few photos of dogs cavorting handsomely on local beaches (although they showed happy golden retrievers or yellow Labs, not happy little blond children, these reminded me of the beachy family portraits you often see marketed locally).

I find Hamptons Dog quite brilliant in its special-interest focus. It certainly stands out among the other periodicals trying to make a buck with party pictures and wannabe society chit-chat. And who among us hasn’t complained that the Hamptons are going to the dogs?

Leo the pig has been in hog heaven these weeks as the bushes, grasses, and shrubs around our yard come into full, high-summer lushness. My wife, Lisa, has been reveling in produce too, although, unlike Leo, she does not waddle down to the edge of the lawn to munch grape leaves right off the vine.

As I have mentioned, I surprised Lisa for her birthday this year with a membership in one of the South Fork’s growing number of community-supported agriculture farms. Each week since before Memorial Day, we have picked up our box, and as spring has moved into summer, there has been an increasing variety. There is more, in fact, than we are able to keep up with some weeks. The pig and our few remaining hens are the beneficiaries of what we deem a little too long in the crisper.

Regular readers also may recall Leo’s story. Over my protests and warning that I was going to move in with the hens, Lisa and our oldest child somehow convinced themselves that the Texas breeder they found on the Internet was on the up and up when she promised he would not exceed 10 pounds when fully grown. I countered that he would, at best, end up the size of our Labrador mix, albeit with shorter legs. Now at about 50 pounds and counting, I rarely miss a chance to say “I told you so.”

Leo’s days are like this: He gets up a short while after I do from a child-sized couch in the master bedroom, which he has taken as his own. After a quick trip outside to water my dooryard herb patch, he badgers me for breakfast by assaulting my ankles with his snout. If that fails or I boot him away, he heads over to the pot rack to make so much noise that I am forced to comply and give him a bowl of pet-pig food. (Yes, they make this stuff.)

Next, he heads outside to snuffle for fallen shad berries or nibble fresh grass. The chickens, who we keep locked up because of hawks, can only look on with envy and make cackles of outrage. Then he sleeps in the sun until his ample belly starts to rumble, and he starts on his rounds once again.

At dinner, after the kids have been fed, Lisa and I sit down to our plates of greens sauteed with garlic and lemon juice or zucchini with tomato and purple basil. By now, Leo is done for the day and bedded down. We, if the children settle down, are not far behind.

I bought a new racket the other day and dubbed it Wonder Boy, and told the young guy who strung it, at 44 pounds, that I’d never lose again.

That was two losses ago. Amend that then to “Once it’s broken in, I’ll never lose again.” Reality is so boring — when it’s not horrific or beautiful, that is.

Meanwhile, the struggle against entropy continues; I have not stopped thinking about tomorrow, when I am to play, on the grass, I hope, at 10:30, with Al, Kaitlin, and a player to be named later. You don’t want to let the ball hit the ground when you’re on grass. Serve and volley, serve and volley. Perfectly suited to my game. Like mad dogs and Englishmen we’ll be out in the noonday sun, though it’s really heaven to be playing in the lengthening shadows and golden light of a summer’s day.

Once (going against type) I was praised by the leader of a Silva Mind Control seminar for saying, in answer to a question, that having “a good game” was what one really wanted from an athletic contest, forget the winning or the losing.

At that particular moment (one of those rare ones in which I’ve consciously tried to raise my consciousness) I believed that. But once the day was done, I went out and did not do likewise. I have an abused racket with a compound fracture on display in my office to prove it, which is why I went to Tennis East the other day to buy a new one.

Blake would say I’m still in the single vision stage, unable to see beyond my nose, a slave to Selfhood, though I’m trying, I’m trying, and find I’m taking a certain delight in encouraging others — my wife among them — who took up tennis much later than I and whose improvement has been palpable.

Just the other day I gave my squash racket to a young woman, a great lacrosse player, who I think may grow to love squash as well.

That game, I told her, had passed me by.

I don’t want to pass, however, before I’ve learned to play this one.

In February 2004, I took the family to Mexico. Sort of the way Chevy Chase took his family across the U.S. in “National Lampoon’s Vacation.”

First, I arrived at J.F.K. early on a Saturday morning with my wife, Christa, my two children, Kate, 16, and Devin, 14, and Kate’s friend Stephanie — but without our passports. It wasn’t that I forgot them. That would have been understandable, if infuriating. It was that I hadn’t needed a passport the last time I went to Mexico — in 1983 — so I thought driver’s licenses would still work.

When the ticket agent told me we couldn’t travel without passports, I thought there would be wiggle room. There wasn’t. So there we were, the still, sad point of a world swirling with happy travelers, stared at by, among others, my daughter’s East Hampton High School history teacher and a few clusters of her schoolmates.

It’s not my nature to be assertive, but I threw myself on the ticket agent’s mercy, pointing to my family as if they were refugees whose return to East Hampton would be catastrophic. Miraculously, she worked out a complicated, three-stop itinerary that would give me enough time to drive back to East Hampton, retrieve the passports, and return to the airport.

The following morning, after stops in Monterrey and Mexico City, we arrived in Cancun, where we would spend three days before driving down the coast to Playa del Carmen. After a day of relaxation, I decided we were ready for an eco-adventure. The kids and Christa wanted to chill at the beach, and the prefix “eco-” smacked of righteousness, but I insisted on a jungle tour, which consisted of piloting not-so-powerful and not-so-new Jet Skis through the green mangrove channels along the Cancun Lagoon.

We were led by a guide, Kate and Steph in one boat, Devin and Christa in another, and me bringing up the rear. As soon as we left the dock and hit open water, the wind picked up and the chop intensified. I had thought it would be a short run to the mangrove channel, but I was wrong. It was a good half-mile across open water against a stiff wind, and it felt as if the crossing would never end.

We finally entered the channel, where the water was calm and mangroves lined the shores. It was exotic and peaceful, but I wondered why the guide was speeding up and increasing the distance between him and us. The channel had its twists and turns so that you couldn’t see too far ahead, and it was while rounding one of those turns that I saw Christa and Devin at a dead stop, Kate screaming, and Steph in the water.

Fearful of losing sight of the guide, the girls had taken a turn too fast and crashed into the mangroves. By the time we got Steph back on her Jet Ski, we saw she had cut her face, torso, and legs, and blood was oozing everywhere. We returned immediately to the dock, where the tour organizers had only a couple of Band-Aids.

Our hotel was able to get a doctor to come to our room. Steph was bandaged up and given antibiotics, but the girl who had been dancing on a Cancun bar the night before was devastated by the doctor’s warning that there might be scarring.

On the fourth day we drove south to Playa del Carmen, happy to get away from the disappointment of Cancun. Through a website, I had secured a three-bedroom house directly on the beach, which I hoped would compensate for my previous miscalculations.

We picked up the key at a small hotel in town and drove the few blocks to the property. At first glance it was not exactly enchanting, but it was on the beach. Except between our house and the beach was an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. It was not an encouraging sign.

I tried to put a good face on things and suggested we could make do. Then Christa discovered that someone had put a fist through a wall in one of the bathrooms and left a nasty-looking hole. For the third time on the trip there were tears.

 So we started, first on foot, then in the minivan, in search of a hotel, but every place we tried was booked. At one point I drove up a street that dead-ended at a hotel. After learning it, too, had no rooms, I started backing up. Christa advised me to turn the van around, since it didn’t allow much of a view to the rear, but I refused. If I retained any confidence at that point, it was in my driving.

That’s when I backed into the motor scooter. There followed two hours of looking for the owner and negotiating a settlement, not to mention few choruses from Christa and the kids of “We told you so.” Two hundred dollars later, we took stock of our situation. Hungry, tired, and convinced that we would not be able to find accommodation, we decided to cut our losses and head back to Cancun. Devin insisted we first stop at a shack Lonely Planet claimed had the world’s best shrimp tacos. I acquiesced.

I pulled into a motel parking area to turn around and saw a sign that said “Vacante.” And that was when the trip finally turned around. Within a few minutes, we were settled in and, since it had started to storm, we decided shrimp tacos were called for.

The taco joint was on the main commercial strip that ran up and down the Riviera Maya. While the rain thrummed on the tin roof, we gorged ourselves on the definitive shrimp tacos, washed them down with lots of local beer, and decided it was all worth it.

After settling our bill, we saw that the rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. “Who’s up for parasailing?” I asked.

Mark Segal is a writer for The Star.

Toys and toothbrushes may be turning up in peculiar places, but I wouldn’t trade this month for anything. It is said that grandparents have all the fun when it comes to child-care, but none of the responsibility, and I say, “Hurray.” I suppose that for those grandparents who are charged with caring full time for grandchildren, the fun can wear thin, but there’s no sign of that at our house, even though two of my grandkids are now into the third week of a monthlong stay.

We are also thoroughly enjoying that special prerogative of grandparents: bragging. 

Nettie and Teddy are 7 and 4. They have grown a lot and learned a lot since the last time we were together, at Thanksgiving. We applaud wildly when Nettie gets into a yoga bridge from a handstand. We knew she was good at drawing, and that she loved art, but we were particularly thrilled with a portrait she did of Chris. A pencil drawing, it has a word-cloud reading “Okay” (something he says constantly), and there is a cellphone at his ear (also ubiquitous); these are truly characteristic, as is the big open mouth she gave him (about which I will make no comment). 

We knew that Teddy was good at putting things together, like the bits and pieces of Lego, and that he had learned perhaps too much about manipulating video games. (He and his sister are allowed only two hours of video games a week, but recently he somehow managed to purchase for himself a game app called “Contract Killer 2,” much to his parents’ horror and amusement.) But we were delighted to discover how well he knows his letters and numbers, and charmed that he likes to sit quietly doing very important “homework” in a kindergarten “Star Wars Mathematics” workbook. Nettie has read a book to me, and Teddy has a way of playing funny tricks on us.

Obviously, we are indulgent grandparents. We smile at the kids when they open our bedroom door and wake us early in the morning. Today, when they actually found me up and about — but Chris still under the covers — they insisted that I wake him because they had a surprise for us. It turned out that the surprise was in the kitchen, where we found they had made breakfast: Shredded Wheat for Chris, Honey Nut Cheerios for me. They had also put an egg in a pot of cold water on the stove for their mother. Teddy brought us spoons; Nettie poured in the milk. Who could ask for anything more?

Because we all work, and because Chris and I are indeed getting older, I must admit it is something of a relief that they are attending day camp during the week. A yellow school bus picks them up and delivers them home, and they seem very excited about going on their big adventure every day. From a grandparent’s point of view, they also look completely adorable as they march off, struggling under the burden of colorful backpacks and cute matching lunch bags.

My daughter will be driving to Maine to catch a ferry back to their home in Nova Scotia when the time comes for their visit to end in early August, and she was surprised when I offered to go along for the ride. 

“Why would you do that? Won’t you have seen enough of them?” she asked.    My answer? “No way.”