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.

My daughter, who is also an editor, is always chiming in from the peanut gallery to tell me that my column is best when I resist my natural inclination toward sententious themes of doom and gloom. She likes to warn me, only half-joshing, not to allow my column to become a “Whine of the Week,” and perhaps she is right. But today’s sky is awfully gray, and it looks like it’s going to rain for the next two or three days . . . and this somehow is giving me license to write about what I am going to write about (rather than foraging for a sunny topic, which I might feel more compelled to do if the forecast called for balmy weather all week). In any case, my husband absolutely insists that I use this space to draw whatever attention I can to a report from the Federation of American Scientists called  “A Scenario for Jihadist Nuclear Revenge.” 

The report was sent to us by a lifelong friend, Edward A. Friedman, who wrote it with Roger K. Lewis. They are working to inform the public and our national leaders — and to promote academic discussion — about what they say is the greatest threat to this country if not to, well, civilization itself. The report is long and detailed and includes technological analyses, which I do not pretend to understand. But the crux of the message is powerful, to say the least.

While the media, the government, and the public concentrate on those nations with which we are at odds that have nuclear capability (Iran and North Korea in particular), the report summarizes the history of nuclear weaponry and makes it evident that the knowledge and equipment necessary to fabricate simpler bombs than those dropped at Nagasaki and Hiroshima is widespread and likely to be accessible.

The authors of the report say it is entirely possible that those who have a religious mission to destroy the “decadent” United States or want to exact revenge for anti-Islamism or the death of Osama bin Laden, for example, could deliver to a busy American port “a crate holding a lead-shielded, 12-foot-long artillery gun,” as used to set off the Hiroshima bomb, that would be both “effective and deadly.” They name Al Qaeda, as well as terrorists from the Northern Caucasus, a Japanese cult, and ordinary homegrown American sociopaths as possible perpetrators.

The report notes that President Obama has said nuclear terrorism is an “immediate and extreme threat” and that the Federal Emergency Management Administration is quietly engaged in trying to develop emergency responses to an attack with a nuclear weapon of the intensity of the one dropped on Hiroshima — but the authors aren’t sanguine about the plans so far to derail any such attack. They point to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, which they say has kept the world safe from nuclear holocaust for the 69 years since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It is no longer a safeguard because it cannot deter non-state entities. 

They remind those reading the report of the 82-year-old nun who with two others got into the “inner sanctum” of what was supposed to be the most secure nuclear facility in the country, at Oak Ridge, Tenn., to spray-paint the walls with graffiti; they speculate on how easy it might be to infiltrate facilities in Pakistan, North Korea, or China, which have huge stockpiles of enriched uranium, or to get into relatively unguarded places in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, obtaining uranium from which hundreds of bombs could be fabricated. 

A longtime professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., Dr. Friedman has bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University. He was instrumental in developing a college of engineering in Afghanistan in the early 1970s, was a founder and senior vice president of the Afghanistan Relief Committee, and has taught a graduate course on nuclear weapons. Richard K. Lewis is an architect and planner who has written a column for many years for The Washington Post. If you would like to read more about the alarm they are ringing, all you need do is go to the Federation of American Scientists website.

Two things have greatly improved the way we eat at the Rattray house this spring. First, warmer weather brought the garden to life and helped encourage me to get out on the water to fish and clam. The other is that after talking for years about signing up for weekly produce with one of the community-supported agriculture ventures that have popped up here, we joined Amber Waves.

Four weeks in, and we are already feeling healthier. Tuesday’s food box, for example, contained kale, chard, radishes, lettuce, and baby turnips so sweet you could eat them raw. Parsley, which grows strongly in the cool mists of late spring, has also been supplied, which dovetails nicely with the half-bushel of clams I dug from a favorite spot after last Thursday’s editorial meeting.

I had planned to go digging with a friend that afternoon, but his work interfered, so I went alone, running the boat out to the flat just as the tide went slack. In a moderate east wind and under an overcast sky, a lone bayman was scratching far offshore. I gave him plenty of room, anchoring the boat about a quarter of a mile down the beach before jumping off on the leeward side with my rake and basket.

It was relatively easy going; a soft sandy bottom with few rocks gave up half a bushel of chowders with a couple of Little Necks and an oyster for good measure in less than an hour. The bayman was still hard at it when I climbed back aboard and headed to the dock. I wondered what he had been thinking about out there for the duration of the tide — probably about the same as I had, which is to say, not much.

The kids like clams well enough as long as they are prepared no other way than stuffed and baked or in chowder, so Lisa and I pretty much had the linguini alle vongole with a fat handful of chopped parsley from the box to ourselves the first night.

By the second night, I succumbed, mixing chopped clams with panko crumbs, sauteed garlic and onion, and olive oil, then spooning the mixture into opened shells and running them under the broiler to brown. The dozen or so I prepared were not enough, however, so there were complaints when the last one was spoken for.

“I play like you work,” I said the other day to Mary, who works very hard, and has precious little time to play, though I am encouraging her to become more like me — minus the neuroses of course.

I am ashamed to admit that my work, by and large, is fun, so, while I would rather say to her, “I work like you play,” it is not so, at least at the moment, though she has been working out weekly with Rob Balnis at East End Physical Therapy, as I do, and we hit tennis balls whenever we both find ourselves free.

Would it be better somewhere else? We ask that question frequently, but, no matter how idyllic the setting, there always seems to be a worm in the apple. The Golden Years, she was told recently by a Golden Ager, are “a myth.” A way of saying, I guess, that “Shit happens. Always.”

She takes things more seriously than I do, which I sometimes envy, but I’ve also seen the toll it takes. I’d love to say I’m looking at the big picture, but it’s more that I’m afraid to look, and would rather continue on my insouciant, selfish way.

I told her the other night that the secret was to “divest, divest, divest,” but that I hoped, of course, she would not divest herself of me.

There is reason not to reason overmuch, and to try not to let facts get in the way of a good time.

Her 5-year-old granddaughter, Ella, and she had experienced a beautiful moment, Mary reported, on returning home yesterday from Southampton Hospital after having visited with Ella’s newborn brother, Charlie, and with Ella’s parents.

Ella and she, who are very close, have at times labeled one another chatterboxes. “But we didn’t say a thing — we just looked at each other . . . and it was wonderful.”

My present to the baby was a well-wrought church key bought at Hildreth’s.

“Some day, he’ll open these bottles with his teeth, when he’s an offensive lineman at Wesleyan,” I said in sharing a Stella Artois toast to Charlie with Georgie and Gavin, who had both been yearning for a cold beer, and I had been glad to be of help.

I don’t generally drink beer myself, but it sure tasted good.

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.

The tale is an infamous one, shared between my family and our oldest, best family friends, the Scrudatos. “The time Thea and Bella ran away at the beach” is what our parents call it; however, I remember the purpose of that unauthorized beach adventure to be something other than an attempted escape out from under our beach umbrellas.

In fact, Thea and I had confirmed with each other that we both would be able to remember which umbrella was ours on the return trip. Such planning and mutual agreement was only too typical for Thea and me, only 5 years old at the time, but long since burgeoned partners in crime.

The event occurred 14 years ago at Atlantic Avenue Beach, at some point in between trips to the “Snack Shack” for Baby Bottle Pops and French fries. I still remember our 5-year-old logic clearly, perhaps because of how much we had to explain ourselves after the fact: We had wanted just to go on a walk. We could not have been running away because we planned on coming back.

There were moments, though, when I was unsure of the walk. When we were moving away from the umbrella, I recall looking back and becoming aware that all the umbrellas actually did look very similar despite what Thea and I had said.

We had gotten far along the beach. All the families’ beach encampments, including ours (the location of which was long forgotten), were dots in the distance behind us. There was just the occasional passer-by, probably skeptical of our parents’ parenting abilities. I vaguely remember someone flying a kite and asking us something, and knowing that we were not supposed to be talking to strangers.

Perhaps he was pointing out our parents to us, because then mine and Thea’s were all out sprinting down the sand and toward us. Maybe the man’s proximity was their specific cause for the running; I believe my parents asked whether I had been speaking to him and I felt some I-should-know-better guilt.

There are two other feelings that I remember having during the “reunion.” While my parents hugged me and expressed mainly just relief, Thea’s parents had already initiated the reprimanding phase. I am sure my parents saw to that as well, but interestingly I do not seem to remember. Anyway, I felt the disciplinary imbalance between Thea and me in that moment, but did not feel bad for her so much as I was nervous to have found that parental panic can sometimes take the form of yelling.

The other thing I remember is wanting to laugh at the fact that there I had been, strolling and appreciating the seaside, at peace, when all of a sudden my parents, in an opposite mental state, emotionally tormented, had come stampeding down the coast like they were storming the Normandy beaches.

Going somewhere without adult supervision, with a friend, is one of the first great privileges that many children experience. It seems that Thea and I believed we were a strong, functional enough unit to bypass our parents’ authority (and inevitable negation), and to decide for ourselves that, yeah, we definitely deserve that privilege, right now. This was not typical behavior for either of us. We did not constantly usurp our parents’ authority. I can think of a few times that we chose not to do something alternative because we anticipated repercussions. Though, according to Thea’s dad, we were and still are “twits.”

Now, it is clear to me that our misjudged decision to take the beach walk was kindled by our desire to spend time together. To each other, we were the person with whom we could imagine going off into the world (the unexplored half of Atlantic Avenue Beach), with whom we could be self-sufficient, and sort of like adults, or at least people with free beach-walking privileges. That is to say, our unorthodox departure from our families’ beach nest was admittedly too soon, but for the record, it felt right because it was with the right person with whom to branch out.

When we got older, we would inform the parents (the “parental unit,” or “P.U.” as ordained by Thea) that we were going on a “lifeguard walk,” which meant that we would walk in between the lifeguard chairs. We took the new stipulations of our walks well, and I remember being monumentally happy to walk with Thea, flop around in the warm sand up by the dunes, and wrap our towels around our heads.

Thea and I met in preschool, when we were 2, and on all accounts, we were inseparable. One particular account, my preschool report, read, “Bella has a special friend with whom she likes to chat and sit on the plastic couch during cleanup, instead of helping out.” Thea’s family received a copy-and-paste of the same statement with her name in place of mine.

The next day at drop-off, our parents found each other in the hall: “Are you the parent of the special friend?” Little did they know, their designated lost-child story to be told and retold would be one that they shared. Little did we know that as Thea left the cafe in which we would say our going-to-college goodbye, she would cock her head and say with, as usual, excellent comedic timing, “Hey, you’ll always be my special friend.”

And even littler did Thea and I know that, as a matter of fact, we were not adult humans during the summers we traipsed about Atlantic Avenue. Rather, we made each other feel that way, as if we were set for life. Thea was the first person who was to me, my partner. We spent only a year together at the same preschool, and have gone to different schools since then. We’ve accrued some more partners along the way, accrued and then let go of others, and still more we’ve accrued, but not really accrued.

It is our special-first-love partnership, however, that is an untouchable accrual, sealed forever, spanning from days when we would write cards to the parental unit as a tactic to secure a sleepover that night, to now, when we text each other to make plans, without consulting the P.U. at all.

Bella Lewis is an intern at The Star this summer.

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.

We have Danny Walsh, the golfing partner of my brother-in-law, to thank for what I’ve called “the Taj Mahal of outdoor showers.”

I say “we,” but historically I’ve been the only one to use it, logging with Jeffersonian attention each year’s first and last days. The women generally have been wary inasmuch as the one I built some years ago, using remnants of the house’s original deck and a pair of purloined swinging saloon-style doors, wasn’t sufficiently high enough — a genuine concern, I’ll admit, when the tall house next door housed innumerable tenants.

But now everything’s fine, more than fine. Solid, sweet-smelling, with a wonderful bench, and with sides high enough so that all is hidden from view. In there the other day, it occurred to us that we could, with our feet up, read our books the livelong day with no one knowing where we were.

The further the seasonal feeling of invasion encroaches, the more one needs a private place, away from the madding crowd. Already, my Facebook page — something to which I vowed I’d never yield, having consigned it to braggarts and cranks before I began to delight in photos of our grandchildren — is littered with cars twisted and crushed in bloody accidents.

It is impossible, of course, to shut out the vanity and ugliness astride in the world, though, at times, especially when I’m in the outdoor shower, under the sun and the leafed-out trees, I do my best.

The world: “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow . . . where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes. . . .” (Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”)

“It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity: Thus could I sing & thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.” (Blake’s “The Four Zoas”)

We must be sensitive and empathetic, I agreed, when Mary and I were talking — as we often do — about the seemingly untold amount of suffering in the world, but we can’t allow our souls to be buried in it.

And with that I vanished, towel in hand.   

You really have to see the Taj Mahal in person to appreciate it. I don’t know if that’s a cliché — it probably is, but then, I’m not much of a world traveler. Still, a few years back I did catch a morning train from Jaipur to visit Shah Jahan’s “ultimate monument to love,” the mausoleum and funerary garden honoring his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

My then-brother-in-law and I stood on line for an hour, at least, before finally entering the grounds where, in the distance, the glorious structure rose from the earth, all white marble and sandstone and symmetry. A Mughal poet is said to have written that, in the mausoleum, “the whiteness of the true dawn is reflected, causing the viewer to forget his desire to move towards the highest heaven.” Sublime beauty, all around.

Until, I regret to report, while circumambulating the magnificent edifice, I came across a girl of, I guessed, 12 or 13. The girl, an Indian, apparently found it all somewhat less impressive than did the thousands of other visitors that day. At least, that was my inescapable conclusion as I watched her engrave her initials, with a stone, into a wall of the Taj Mahal. I sighed, heavily.

I was thinking of that girl on Saturday night, leaning against the bar at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett as Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, a legendary blues musician who goes by the name Taj Mahal, delivered a solo performance as sublimely beautiful as his namesake.

I’d seen Taj Mahal in New York a couple times — once at the late, great Tramps, and once, 15 years ago, in Central Park, when Sheryl Crow played a free concert with some very high-profile guests. I’ll never forget the reaction of Keith Richards, elegantly wasted, as he turned around to realize he was sharing the stage with Taj Mahal, who had performed ahead of Mr. Richards’s band in “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” back in 1968.

But this was a solo show, just Taj and a guitar. Strong and spirited at 72, he kept a full house spellbound with playful, masterful performances of his easygoing country blues. “Corrina” and “Fishin’ Blues,” to name a couple, never sounded so cool.

“Here’s a little tip that I would like to relate: Many fish bites if ya’ got good bait,” he sang. “I’m a-goin’ fishin’, yes I’m goin’ fishin’, and my baby goin’ fishin’ too.” Here was wisdom, dispensed with a song and a most infectious smile.

About that rapt audience, though: As is so often the case, more than a few Talkhouse patrons, who had paid $150 or more to attend, seemed blissfully unaware that a concert was in progress, an intimate solo performance at that. Standing directly in front of my date and me, a woman spent about half of the show peering into her smartphone, furiously sending and receiving text messages. The other half of the show? That was occupied by the reading back of the correspondence, aloud, to her companion. I sighed, heavily, again.

I guess it doesn’t matter what side of the world you are on, or if it’s Taj Mahal or the Taj Mahal. Nothing, truly nothing, is sacred. Was it always this way?

We left and walked home, a splendid time had, but a nagging annoyance hanging overhead. Up Main Street, a line from Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” replayed in my mind: “I’m nothing but a stranger in this world.”

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star and a musician himself.