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.”

There is an old saw that says you should build your second house first.  

What?

Well, by the time you are on your second house, you have learned enough from the first one to apply that knowledge to the next one. That makes whacky sense, but it just sort of works if you are doing a renovation.

Consider that your first/original house (inherited, bachelor digs, divorce gift) no longer works for you, but you are used to it and you love the location. You know where the sun comes up and what you would want to look at if only the windows were wider, taller, or moved a foot to the left or right.

So call this future renovation the not-quite-second house because half of it you learned from and the other half you have no clue about.

Naturally, you expect the plan drawer-upper to find certain mistakes in your semi-architectural sketches and notes. (Do not.) You expect the builder-project manager to take you aside and say, “Ya know, if you just thought about having that cellar be a” — read: “trophy” — “basement you would have a lot more space. . . .”

But not everyone tells you stuff in ways you can hear it. We got a cellar and not a “trophy” basement. Twelve years ago, who really knew about the (under)groundswell of the magical third floor that can exist below grade?! But I digress.

We got the house we asked for. Really. But we didn’t get or didn’t really hear the expertise we might have been given. Herewith some of what we learned 12 years after the fact.

We should have:

• Given ourselves a first-floor bedroom with an en-suite bathroom for guests and/or old people with stair issues. (We didn’t do it, and that was a lesson learned too late.)

• Gotten the (trophy) basement with inside stairs. Didn’t, because it ate up too much inside floor space, and I thought basements always had spiders and were basically creepy. In the early 2000s we had never thought about a “third-floor” basement. Amazing, since it’s now such a part of the building vernacular.

• Planned for gutters instead of having to retrofit a few years ago.

• Considered a really big mudroom.

• Known that living here year round we would have seasonal clothes that would not really fit in the summer-house closets.

• Remembered that everyone needs their own room/office/den/cave/space. Sharing is complicated.

• Had the ceilings painted glossy from the start.

One thing we did do: Put the washing machine near where the clothes live (second floor). Lugging laundry is overrated exercise.

The fun/frustrating list is what we would love to change, add, tweak. (Are you listening, New York State Lottery?) I will be leaving “pie in the sky” for another “Relay.” Stay tuned.

Here’s what we were surprised by last year: That the washing machine would wear out (after 12 years). We don’t do that much laundry, really, but apparently they have a built-in obsolescence. Well, replacement wasn’t the worst surprise. The real surprise was that the new washer and dryer (stacking, smallest available) would no longer fit into that little closet we had built to house them. Now they make them deeper to make them narrower. This required an emergency robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul solution, expanding the closet by diminishing the room behind. You win by loss, sort of. Well, there is no predicting old age, in people or machines, but the mechanical engineers really pulled a fast one.

Last year we were also surprised by a massive leak in the ceiling of the kitchen. The ceiling paint held the leak for a while, but the ballooning ceiling was alarming. “Call the super! Wait, we are the super; this is a house.” When we found a fixer we had to open the roof to find out that our 12-year-old kitchen roof had had a slow leak all along. When the kitchen skylight had to be replaced along with the roof, we learned from the fixer that the flashing at the true top of a skylight is abundant, less so at the bottom edge. The flashing around our kitchen skylight was basically nil. Looking back, we guess the building crew just didn’t realize that top edge of a skylight has more flashing — and when putting them in backwards they cut away the extra flashing at the lower edge. It turns out that all of our skylights are backwards. Big surprise!

Then there are the things you wish someone had pointed out before or during the renovation. These are the things nobody warns you about because they assume you know. To wit, a one-story house sees the side of the garage, a two-story house . . . well, the view is no longer the side of the garage; the view is the roof of the garage. Surprise! You will want a new roof there, too.

Another surprise is ice dams.

Nobody tells you when you become a year-round summer person to get the snow away from your shingles. It’s hard enough to shovel a path on the deck, why would I clear the snow away from the house? Why would I ask someone to do that?

ICEDAMN, or damned ice dam, that’s why.

On the verge of our 12th spring, we were in for yet another little surprise.

During recent winters, snow piled on our nice back deck. We cleared paths to the driveway, but that was all we did. Twelve winters of snow/ice/melting/ freezing and more snow got up and under the lowest shingles at the join with the deck. It snuck into the house and buckled the floor in our pantry along the outside wall. How long did it take? I have no idea. It was only today, when I put a few empty bottles on the floor of the pantry and the bottles fell over, that I came face to face with the result. On my hands and knees (no easy task) I saw that a corner floorboard was heaved and dark with water stain. While the area was free of mold and damp, clearly the floor was compromised. Outside the shingles kiss the deck. My guess, though I cannot yet swear to it, is there is no flashing around our deck. Very likely the building crew/skylight putter-inners, who also built our deck, never flashed where it met the house.

Surprise, house, it is your 12th birthday. Feeling old, are ya?

Rebuilding the deck is not an option right now, when we really need that en-suite bathroom (see above), so shoveling is in my future. Unless you are still listening, Lottery God.

Crap happens in and to your house.

Some are things you can live with or fix (leaks, ice dams), and some things you just have to live with no matter what. When your neighbor’s house becomes a monster construction site, their pretty willow tree drops stuff in your gutters, which clog, overflow, and get mildewed on the shady side of your house; when other neighbor’s hedge grows so high and you lose your cutting garden to shade.

Not to worry.

Crap happens.

Take heart, though, because going forward, in this area, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for renovations. Why? Because everything is a teardown. My house, your house, the house down the road. Anything built after 1900 and not considered historic is destined to be rubble as soon as the closing is over.

So, dear future renovators, if you inherit your mom’s house, fix it up for you and your lifestyle. Pay as close attention as you can, but don’t go nuts because the house you are in, when sold, will be razed, and in place will grow a brand-new, trophy-basemented, en-suite-bathroomed, gambrel-roofed, 12-foot-ceil­ing­ed house — built by a guy who still might put the skylights in backwards.

Just remember, when you sell, it will be for the land and the location, so patch what’s broken and get on with your life. No worries, mon.

Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer for The Star, loves watching buildings being built because “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”

About six dozen yellow irises greeted me on a gray morning this week, testimony to a place where others have lived and gardened before. The old lilacs aren’t as bountiful as I remember, waiting perhaps for  judicial pruning, but there are enough for bouquets.

To be sure, I am hardly a gardener, neglectful as I am of almost everything necessary to qualify. I’ve been known to put the wrong plants in the wrong places and then gone on to mourn those that are lost. The deer are responsible for more depredations than I am, though, and I just can’t bring myself to put up fencing. The deer relished the rose bushes, although two or three may survive, and it probably is true that they were put in where there wasn’t enough sun. I’m not sure what eradicated the astilbe, although, like the lilies of the valley, they probably were choked out by a persistent groundcover, which I have failed to get rid of because it is the earliest thing hereabouts to flower.

The irises, a bounty from someone’s effort in times past, are not the only pleasures of the garden this spring. They followed the blooming of four or five varieties of yellow narcissus, with various clutches of petals. And, while it is true that an earlier generation’s tiger lilies in another part of the yard were long since executed by the deer, their places have been taken by batches of white narcissus with a fragrant scent reminiscent of paper whites that are blooming still.

The white narcissus are coinciding now with flowering viburnum bushes, which although misshapen by the deer so that they now branch out into straight shelves some four feet off the ground, are attractive nevertheless. And I shouldn’t ignore the forsythia, which decorated the place earlier in the season.

I don’t think there will be further come-by-chance surprises in the garden this summer. Instead, I will watch over the nepeta and lavender I put in the beds last year, which are said to be deer resistant and may therefore survive.  

Eastern Long Island (the Hamptons, if you insist) is a world of extraordinary gardens, designed by dedicated amateurs and talented professionals and nurtured with love — and lots of work. But there is something to be said about old backyards.

One of the small pleasures at the office occurs when the latest copy of The Vineyard Gazette arrives. We have had a subscription to this lovely, old-fashioned broadsheet for a long time now, and it is always interesting to see how that island, not all that dissimilar from the East End of Long Island, copes with some of the same pressures.

Two stories in the May 23 Gazette could have been set here. In one, residents were outraged at the quality of the material placed to replenish an eroded beach. The Town of Oak Bluffs will remove an unspecified quantity of dredging spoils, presumably as nasty as they sound, from two locations.

Though protesters have not taken to the streets here, as they did on the Vineyard, it has been noted that the fill passing for sand at Georgica and at Montauk’s downtown beaches is less than ideal. As here, the Vineyard spoils met state standards for purity, which, according to the descriptions in the Gazette, are far from the cleanest, best sand. “Sludge,” some picketers at Inkwell Beach called it.

Elsewhere on the same page of the paper, there was a story about the Tisbury selectmen reducing the length of time that visiting boaters can anchor off Vineyard Haven out of concern about water pollution.

Two pages on was a discussion of whether the Vineyard’s five school districts should be combined. With a sole superintendent, that island is already a step ahead of the South Fork, where each district not only has an administrative head but most have at least one principal.

As here, the districts all send their older students to a single high school. Past opposition has included fear of losing local control, but variances among the offerings at the Vineyard’s lower schools has meant that some kids are better prepared than others, depending on where they come from. Standardizing elementary education might come with advantages, the idea’s backers said.

Here, as there, it is difficult to say how the school consolidation debate will play out. James Weiss, the Vineyard’s superintendent, told a recent meeting of that island’s League of Women Voters, “We have an outstanding school system. If we could do it better and more efficiently, we should do it.” That sentiment, and the Vineyard’s progress on this and other questions, are worth watching.

“Oh good,” I said as I cast a glance at my phone on returning to the office on the cusp of Memorial Day weekend. “No one’s called.”

I’d been to Citarella and BookHampton, and was pleased to tell Bill at the bookstore that it was “just as crowded as Citarella,” which was saying something inasmuch as they had six people at Citarella’s registers and still couldn’t keep up with the volume.

“Buy it now cuz it will all be gone by nightfall!” I said to Mayra and Russ once the relative paradise of The Star was regained, adding that the volume of Milton’s poetry I had bought at BookHampton weighed almost as much as the broccoli rabe, onions, garlic, lemons, smoked prosciutto, and avocados I’d bought at Citarella. All but the avocados are to go into the orecchiette I’m making to feed the 5,000 (not really that many) at a family gathering/baby shower tomorrow.

Of course I won’t eat it, being on a low-cholesterol diet, which is to say primarily hummus, yogurt, and oatmeal. Mary force-fed me some chocolate ice cream last night, but otherwise I’ve been clean these past few weeks. I’ve not given up drinking though. In fact I told Mary recently that were I to attend an A.A. meeting, I’d get up and say, “My name is Jack Graves and I still use floppy disks,” which is not quite true, but almost.

Another week and I am not yet saved, though I know everything is saved on my computer, which is good news. I no longer get so tense wondering whether what I’ve written will ever reappear, as if on a page.

Frankly, I had second thoughts about toting to The Star Milton’s complete poetic works, for, as I learned, in thumbing through it, it wasn’t a poem I’d been looking for after all, but a prose work, “Areopagitica,” that might help me better to understand Blake, whom I’m reading about now.

“Oh, I’m reading Milton too!” a woman next to me at the counter said. “Is ‘Paradise Lost’ in it?”

“You want it?” I said, half-seriously, resisting the urge to make an analogy to the Hamptons.

“Actually,” I said to Bill. “I think I’m trying to redeem my failed college education — I’m reading all these poets I was supposed to have read 50 years ago. And now I don’t know if I’ll have the time.”

I asked him if he’d seen, by the way, the article on time in this week’s New Yorker.

“Mary wants very much to read it,” I said, “but she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to find the time to!” And with that I was off, with plenty of food and with plenty of food for thought.

When I’m not busy working or cooking three different meals for the four different members of my family, I can usually be found folding laundry.

That sounds like such a stereotype, and it’s a lie, really, because I can never actually manage to fold all the clean laundry in the house before the next pile of dirty laundry creeps up on me. I am like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing my rock up the hill, only this rock is made of tangles of clean socks, wrinkled pants, crumpled shirts, and dishtowels.

I sometimes give up for weeks at a time, leaving the clean clothes spread flat and draped over a big chair in the living room or on the trunk at the foot of my bed. Even worse, I sometimes can’t manage to get the clean clothes out of the clean-clothes hamper before they’ve all been worn and put back in the dirty-clothes hamper. I call it the Laundry Monster, and I live at its mercy.

The clothes that wait to be folded are usually in the living room, sitting in their favorite chair, sometimes filling a clothes basket that I remember was originally labeled “the Hipster.” Contoured to fit around the body, just at the hip, it is one of the only hipsters that’s been in my house in at least the last seven years. When guests do come, the Laundry Monster is shut in my bedroom, where a childproof door handle cover marks it as a no-go zone.

Folding the shirts and pants of small children is like making so many origami frogs, and then trying to stack them on top of each other. It’s a precarious proposition; that they stay folded at all is nothing short of miraculous. But all that work can be undone in minutes. As my daughter sees it, no play date is complete until she and her friends have tried on every shirt, skirt, dress, bathing suit, and pair of pajamas in her dresser and closet. When cleanup time comes, everything goes in the hamper. “You wore this for five minutes,” I’ll say. “There’s no way it’s dirty.” Thus, we began again.

Camus wrote of Sisyphus that “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,” and that may be true. Is it a futile effort because it must be eternally repeated, or is the effort itself the point? It’s a matter of perspective. Children spend their playtime playing at doing adult chores. When I invite mine to join me in filling the washer or switching the clothes to the dryer, you would think I had told them the ice cream truck was in the basement. Give them a chance to “wash” dishes, and they’ll stay at the sink for an hour.

Alas, there is a noticeable lack of enthusiasm when I invite them to help me fold, but I see signs of progress. My 4-year-old son is pretty good with washcloths and dishtowels. Caught in the right mood, my daughter will helpfully turn all her dirty clothes right-side-right before we wash them. She can fold, too, but prefers to act as if she can’t. To be fair, my husband does help. He will avoid his clean clothes for weeks, but then fold them all in a single session with the precision of a professional: shirts in threes, pants with a crease down the center of the legs.

If someone had told me that I would one day spend half of my free time dealing with laundry, I would not have believed it even a little bit.

That and my growing familiarity with young children’s literature make for some pretty exciting cocktail party conversations. Whether it’s a world crisis or an important current event, I can usually relate it to something I’ve recently read in “I Love You Because You’re You” or “Listen to My Trumpet,” which are among the dozens of books I can recite from memory. I’ve found that the overarching themes become apparent only through repetition. Such is true of so many life lessons.

So pull up a chair. Grab a hamper. Let’s pretend we’re folding laundry.

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

Spring agrees with Leo the pig. Regular readers of this column may recall that about two years ago, over my desperate protests, two of the women of our household insisted that we get a pet of the cloven-hoof variety.

My objections centered on the sense that I would end up taking care of it, and anyway, there was no way it was ever going to remain 10 pounds as an adult, as the Texas trailer park breeder they had found on the Internet said it would. I was correct on both counts. First, because I get up the earliest in the family, and the dang pig will not leave me alone until I make its breakfast, and second, well, pigs are pigs.

The last time we weighed Leo, he was well over 40 pounds. When a tile setter who had grown up on a farm in Greece was at our house a week ago, the subject came up. He estimated that Leo would top out at more than 50. When we get around to replacing the battery in the bathroom scale, we will settle the matter.

Though small for a pig, Leo is not 10 pounds. Picture a pinkish, spiky Labrador with short legs and you’ll get the idea. Part of the reason Leo appears to enjoy warmer weather is that the lawn becomes a relatively expansive food source for him. He will disappear for a while in the morning then return with his snout covered in soil, the interim having been spent rooting near the chicken coop or on the margin of the swamp in our backyard. Then it is time for a scratch, rubbing his flanks the way a bear might on a shaggy-backed wild cherry.

After these exertions, Leo might retire to a spot in the sun. As I left for work the other day, he had set himself down on the brick walkway with a low bank of grass on which to prop up his massive head. 

By coincidence this week I spoke with a therapist who, as it turned out, had been the original owner of a hand-me-down couch we keep on the porch. Leo, I said, had taken to the dark brown velvet cushions now that the weather was warm, and often beds down on it for his afternoon nap.

The therapist paused, laughed, and said something to the effect that it was the best outcome possible for an old psychoanalytic couch.

Leo, if he could understand it, would surely agree. But then again, he’d probably be too busy dreaming about grass and what he might have for supper.

White Boots, our 8-year-old cat, is 3 feet long. At least that’s how long he looked the other day when I picked him up from the living room floor to move him away from a visitor who is allergic to cats: Stretched out toe to toe, white boots and white belly presenting, he was practically the size of a porpoise.

White Boots is supposed to belong to one of my granddaughters. She fell in love with him on her 5th birthday, when she was taken for a visit to the shelter run by the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons.

Her mom is allergic, too, and my granddaughter was devastated not to be allowed to bring him home. Naturally, I volunteered to foster him. She named him White Boots, and it was apparent very quickly that he had come to my house to stay.

Some of White Boots’s antics are typical cat stuff. (We think it’s cute when he jumps into the kitchen sink or the old clawfoot bathtub to beg for water, for instance.) But a few of the things he does are singular. 

I was showering last week when I noticed the bottom of the shower curtain beginning to bulge strangely. It took me a minute to figure out that White Boots was pushing against it. Thinking this behavior weird, I scolded and shooed him away, but he didn’t retreat. As soon as I stepped out of the shower, he let up and started licking its edge. Then he jumped  inside the enclosure and starting licking the shower floor. I was not only startled but alarmed. Eight isn’t that old for a cat, but I nevertheless feared that he was showing signs of kitty-cat dementia. Then logic prevailed: I had just used for the first time a bar of soap made in Nova Scotia that had been a Christmas present. Was something in it catnip for him? Fish oil? An indigenous herb? The next time I showered I was glad he was outdoors.

Outdoor cats have bad reputations, but I’ve been unable over the years to keep him inside. Generally speaking, he goes out after an evening meal and comes back in to sleep. Lately, however, with summer weather, he’s been spending more and more time in the yard. He will sit sentinel near the front steps or crouch near a hole in one of the flower beds waiting for a chipmunk to emerge. He hangs out around the barn, and that’s where he apparently befriended a raccoon.

Because my husband and I were out of town last weekend, we missed this latest caper. On Saturday night, my son Dan heard him meowing near the sunporch door and went to open it for him. It turned out that White Boots wasn’t the only creature peering in through the sunporch’s windows: A raccoon waited alongside. Now, I’m generally soft-hearted where indigenous animals are concerned (including deer), so I hadn’t blinked when someone told me a few weeks ago that he had seen a raccoon in the barn’s rafters.

Maybe it’s all right for White Boots to try to lap up the residue of Nova Scotia soap from the shower floor, but inviting a raccoon in for a play date is taking eccentricity too far.

Memo to South Fork businesses that raise prices before the arrival the summer hordes: We live here, too.

Seasonal price-gouging is nothing new. The difference between the cost of gasoline here and points west has long been a source of frustration, and even a few shots at legislation. Even ordinary day-to-day things like a lunchtime sandwich come at a premium here. I’ve noticed, too, that prices even at some no-frills, beach-y eateries have reached tourist clip-joint levels. But, at least for me, the higher cost of everything just kind of blends into the South Fork’s background noise.

I was jolted out of my stupor this week by an anonymous letter to the editor that came in over the transom. In neat handwriting, the unknown sender reported that his or her usual quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice had jumped from $10 to $12.99 seemingly overnight. Since the letter was unsigned, it doesn’t seem fair to name the store, and frankly, that would be almost beside the point.

The letter writer reported asking the cashier if the “drought in California or perhaps the weather in Florida” accounted for the sudden increase. “ ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘all the store’s prices were raised last week,’ ” the letter continued. “When I asked why, she replied it was done in anticipation of the tourist season.”

The letter is signed: “A supporter of your outstanding  newspaper and a concerned citizen.”

Thinking for a moment: If gas prices were suddenly inflated here the way juice prices are, we would be paying about $5.35 a gallon by the Fourth of July. Surprise, we’re getting off easy at the pump, relatively.

One can understand the temptation from the business owner’s point of view. The busy months are short, landlords charge blisteringly high rents, and, anyway, the summer people appear to have money to burn. Besides, the proletariat can just drink Tropicana. Only it, too, costs a third more out this way.

Well, there’s always water.

The Shelter Island 10K is, and was especially this year, a living symbol of all that is right with America, a country that is not without its faults, but which at its best remains as inspiring as it ever was.

To begin with, there was Meb Kef­lezighi, the first American to have won the Boston Marathon in more than 30 years, a native-born Eritrean whose father brought his children here from that Red Sea country so that they might escape the maw of endless war, so that they would have a chance to be — as Keflezighi told young runners at the Shelter Island School the day before the race — the best they could be.

His dream became reality the day he won Boston, said the very personable champion, who by winning overcame the inevitable restraint of age — he was a 38-year-old up against younger men who had run faster times — and who, by winning there, where deathly bombs had gone off the year before, said in effect that the hope liberty confers cannot be hacked apart by those who hate.

Incredibly, some questioned afterward whether he really were an American, when, in fact, Meb, as he is known, who has been a United States citizen since 1998, is what I would like to think of as quintessentially American, as ambitious for others as for himself, a supreme competitor and uniter.

I see this in Cliff Clark too, the Shelter Island 10K’s founder. A great competitor himself, he understands that ultimately it is both striving and sharing that matter, that we are, indeed, all in this together, and that if this country deteriorates — as, indeed, it sometimes seems to me — into everyone for himself, it will be the end of the game, the end of the dream.

Remember the dead — as Shelter Island did the other day, mourning again a young man, First Lt. Joe Theinert, struck down in Afghanistan four years ago — remember the living, remember and care for one another, and run the good race.

That at its best is America, and that is what I would like to think Meb was thinking as he entered Fiske Field, on his 4 minute and 53 second marathon pace, waving the American flag.