On Sunday nights, our entire street goes dark. We used to be among the weekend families, the ones who packed up their lives and returned to the city midday Sunday afternoon.

    Having children changes everything.

    A year before my husband and I married, we bought a house, nestled in the Northwest Woods of East Hampton, about a five minutes’ drive from the center of town. At the time, it was our weekend retreat, where we would arrive late Friday night, each having battled long workweeks, and where we rested our weary bones and summoned enough stamina to do it again the following week.

    Flash forward to May 2012, when we moved out for an extended summer, this time with our 6-week-old son in tow. Never having spent more than an entire week in our house, we planned on staying until Labor Day. I distinctly remember leaving behind my sweaters and coats. Not only would they have found an impossible time fitting over my new, ample-sized body, it was simply inconceivable that we wouldn’t be returning to the lives and the seasons where such items were worn.

    But by Labor Day, we hadn’t really made much progress in our return to the city. And with a semester-long parental leave for my husband, and occasional side projects as a freelance writer, there wasn’t any particular rush to return to our former lives. By late October, though, friends had grown worried and the call of the world ultimately felt too great.

    So, we moved back for the months of November and December to our two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. We were quickly and quite surprisingly miserable. After long walks on the beach every evening near dusk, our apartment felt tiny and claustrophobic by comparison. City life with a baby, and later a toddler, proved worse. My friends in Williamsburg might as well have occupied another city given how little I saw of them. Between nap times and limited child care, we started to live our lives in a span of 30 city blocks — and often far less.

    A year ago, we moved out to the house, with the intention of giving it a full calendar year. There were more than a few occasions last winter when I felt like a modern-day pioneer woman, tasked with keeping the elements at bay. My husband experimented with what it meant to commute two full days a week into the city, and I started working at The Star part time, an alternative that allowed me more time with my son, while also keeping a vital toehold in the working world.

    All this time, we’ve kept our apartment. But those days, we’re finding, are numbered. Each trip feels like visiting a former life. The bedroom where I first kissed my husband and the shower where I labored are still there. Our plates and utensils, too. But I firmly believe this next stretch of our lives is about committing to one place, about our family, now the three of us, deciding where to make our home.

    Nevertheless, the decision of where to be has proven an agonizing one.

    Sometimes, it feels strange to have chosen to make your life in such a desolate part of the earth. I like to joke with my mother, who lives in California, that there really wasn’t much farther east we could have gone.

    I moved to New York after college, as a lot of young and ambitious people do, to live out their dreams. Those 10 years, filled with equal parts magic and heartbreak, they went by in a flash.

    A few weeks ago, my husband and I drove back into the city for a long weekend, our son fast asleep in the back seat. It was one of those stark Manhattan nights, when the lights of the city seemed to appear out of nowhere, stretching on as far as the eye could see. The city seemed massive in a way that I couldn’t fully penetrate. In those moments, I felt as though I had barely scratched the surface.

    I hope for these next 10 years, wherever it is they take us — possibly here, possibly not — that at the end of it we arrive at a place that feels more like home. A place where we can say there was a deeply felt sense of community, of purpose, where we came away with an abiding sense of being known.

    Maybe more than I want it for my child, I want it for myself, too.

    Amanda M. Fairbanks is a reporter at The Star.   

    On Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of running water. Actually, I had noticed a soft flowing noise Saturday night, but decided I was imagining things. After all, a plumber had been to our house to fix the furnace and one of the toilets that very day, so surely nothing could be amiss with our pipes. By Sunday breakfast time, however, I realized I needed to investigate. Peering down the cellar steps, I saw a flood. I put on my cracked old boat boots, crept down, and found half the concrete cellar floor covered with water. It was five or six inches deep in one area.

    The standing joke between my husband and me, when I prove to have a woefully inadequate grasp of something mechanical or electrical, is that his “father was an engineer” (and therefore I should step aside and leave it to him). Nevertheless, it fell on me that morning to take action about the water in the cellar. I waded around trying to figure out whether I could somehow stop the water from getting into any of the fuel-burning elements down there. But I gave that up rather quickly, came upstairs, and called the answering service of the plumbing company that had repaired the toilet and furnace — which burns oil to heat water that feeds our old-fashioned radiators — the day before. I was told a “technician” would call back and let us know when to expect a visit.

    Now, this company had been extremely accommodating on Saturday, and the plumber they had sent then had gone so far as to drive to Bridgehampton, halfway to the company’s headquarters, to meet another employee, who brought him parts we needed to fix a corroded valve or some such. But despite that good service, I was impatient and growing a bit alarmed on Sunday. When no one called back within an hour, I phoned again . . . two, three, four times.

    I was about to call in a different plumber — even if it meant paying someone to fix something that was someone else’s fault, as I speculated it was — when, a little more than four hours after my S.O.S. went out, the nice fellow from the day before arrived at the door.

    He, too, seemed to assume he was at fault. I heard him ask himself, “Where on Earth is the leak?”

    Truth will out. Five or 10 minutes later, he surfaced. The truth was that a garden hose on one side of the house, which had been inadvertently left on months earlier, had frozen and burst, then started flowing when the weather moderated. Water had saturated the foundation and a steady stream was entering the basement. He was relieved; I, abashed and exceedingly grateful when he offered to pump the basement out.

    As he wrote up the bill, he told me that he had been on call throughout the long, deep freeze of the first half of January. We kibitzed a bit. He told me that he used to enjoy deep-sea diving in Florida (quite a plumber-ish activity, I thought), but that he got tired of swimming with sharks and alligators.

    He told me he lived in the Mastic- Shirley area. What was most aggravating, he said, was that sometimes he would be on the highway after a long day, within striking distance of home, when a new urgent call would come in and he would have to turn around and drive back east again.

    “This is nothing,” he said. He had been at work till midnight over the weekend, coping with burst pipes and cellars with water as deep as swimming pools. One East Hampton house had water in the basement up to the ceiling, which was coming down, he said.

    I had been ready to assume the worst and curse the company for which he worked (a company, by the by, that had taken over a local business some time ago), but it turned out to be a lesson in the dangers of hasty judgment, not to mention New-York-minute impatience in general.

    The plumber had been employed with his company for many years and was dedicated, skilled, and willing to go the extra mile in difficult circumstances. It turned out that ours was his eighth emergency call on Sunday.

    They say a good man is hard to find, but I imagine there are many of them in the trade parade that plies the highway every morning and evening. I wonder: These days, when few skilled workers can afford to live east of the Shinnecock Canal, how many good people like him have been priced out of the neighborhood? (And how many sharks and alligators have come to take their place?)   

    There was a near-sell-out crowd at the East Hampton movie theater on Saturday night for the 6:30 p.m. screening of “American Hustle,” and a buzz was in the air that had as much to do with the scandal involving New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as any Academy Awards nominations.

    “American Hustle” is a period piece of sorts, all mid-1970s fashions amid the loose framework of what is called the Abscam corruption scandal. Sure, the top-billed stars, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, and Jennifer Lawrence, are fine, but contemporary events rang loudly because Jeremy Renner plays a well-meaning populist mayor who is caught up in a federal sting.

    Less a few score pounds, Mr. Renner’s Carmine Polito is a stand-in for Mr. Christie. The character is based on a real-life Camden, N.J., mayor, Angelo Errichetti, who was caught taking a bribe, as were a United States senator and six members of the House, among others.

    No one is saying that Mr. Christie is on the take. Rather, the two biggest allegations are that he must have known about the plot by top aides to bog down Fort Lee traffic as political payback and that he and his family improperly appeared in a federally funded video promoting New Jersey tourism following Hurricane Sandy.

    By the look of it, Saturday’s audience here was heavy with New Yorkers and probably some number of New Jersey residents out for the weekend. Lisa and I could feel the “aha” sense of identification with the story of officials on the wrong side of the law.

    Governor Christie’s stumbles are sad. I was looking forward to a great Republican primary with him in the race for the presidential nomination — and maybe later battling Hillary Clinton for the whole enchilada.

    If anything, “American Hustle” makes the New Jersey debacle more believable. Its images of politicians in their slick suits reaching for briefcases of money left us thinking, “Sure. Of course. Of course, Christie knew. It makes sense.”

    I think the crowd was feeling exactly that way as we walked out of the theater.   

    Of course when I said, on my return from San Pancho, Mexico, “Let the games begin,” I didn’t know a blizzard was imminent, which caused the cancellation of just about everything over this past week, except for the skating at Buckskill and the Gin Rummy games which Mary seems to invariably win, even as she says I am an astute card player.

    An article on the winter club at Buckskill and an interview that arose from a serendipitous meeting with Paul and Frenee Frediani at the Polar Bear Plunge at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach allayed my anxiety somewhat, though a third story remained elusive until Mary reminded me, on awakening Saturday morning, that it was 25 years ago that East Hampton High’s boys basketball team won a state championship. 

    While Kathy, who makes me look good every week, said that putting a “25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports” column on the front sports page smacked of “desperation,” I, who had a photo of Kenny Wood to go with it, demurred.

    It’s all one to me, inasmuch as my sports writing style remains as convoluted as it ever was. I can’t go quite as far as Janis Joplin, but at times it almost seems as if it’s all the same fuckin’ day, man.

    Which, of course, is delightful inasmuch as I am a great devotee of my meandering prose, a self-love that’s probably more inherited than merited.

    Terminal alliteration may, indeed, be my fate. I fear it as much as Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile, full speed ahead, and damn the peccadillos.

    Mary has lately been saying — after I’ve performed a service that in more able men would go unremarked upon, such as closing the chimney flue — that I’m “a god.”

    Though — again, as with Kathy — I demur. “I’m not a god,” I say, in all seriousness. “Just a demigod.”

    “Or a dummy-god,” she says.

    Anyway, it all came together this week, as it always seems to do. Kathy held back my 30 inches of nostalgia in favor of a piece Rusty Drumm did on Johnny Rade, a savvy commercial fisherman who’s no less avid in discussing things avian.

    So, I can look forward to looking back next week. By which time, I hope, the games really will have begun.

We were expecting guests for dinner the other night when I decided the spread needed a little something more: bread, in particular. Carissa’s Breads, a first-rate bakery off Newtown Lane in the village, was closed, and I wasn’t confident about the choices I was likely to find in a hurry at Stop & Shop (although Nature’s Promise Jewish rye is darn good). So I headed over to Citarella.Parking spots were at a minimum. It was Saturday night in the Hamptons, and, as they say, all was well with the world. A man waiting to be served at the prepared foods counter next to me looked in my direction, and then, without preamble, said, “This is America.”

I was surprised and looked at him carefully. His clothing wasn’t especially notable, but he wore a small, pointy white goatee. He looked, in my humble opinion, like neither a stereotypical second-home owner nor weekend visitor. I wasn’t sure if his comment was in reference to the bounty spread before us, or something else, but I took it to be sardonic. It’s obvious that the world is your oyster when you have enough money to frequent the fine-food shops here.

I responded: “All you need is money.”

Truth be told, I was feeling guilty about my own conspicuous consumption that day. I had been foraging in the best shops that morning and had spent more on prepared foods than might be considered conscionable. I already had in hand two excellent cheeses from Breadzilla, my favorite Wainscott bakery and specialty-foods shop, an outstanding hummus made by Simply Sublime in East Hampton, and some appetizing viands from the most expensive of expensive shops in Sag Harbor. The eventual menu included mini crab cakes, chicken salad with grapes, sugar peas tossed with sesame seeds, a long, narrow mixed fruit tart, and a seeded, multigrain bread.

I don’t know how others come to terms with having more than they need of just about anything one might desire — or if they think about it much. Perhaps they simply accept their own economic and social well-being, enjoying what they have while actually remembering to help those less fortunate. 

It could be argued that the disparity between the haves and have-nots is more extreme on eastern Long Island than it is in most of America (excepting, I guess, major cities like New York City and Los Angeles). Our economic diversity is probably more tangible because the place is so small. We are all apt to rub shoulders with one another, including the poor and indigent immigrants.

Of course, I might have completely misinterpreted the remark made by my fellow customer at the Citarella counter. Was he actually commenting on the fact that most of the service people at Citarella appear to be Latino, while most of the customers are white? Was he thinking about Allen Ginsberg’s “Supermarket in California”? Had I misheard him saying “This is a miracle” or “This is a mackerel”? I wish I’d had the courage to ask.

    We were the only people in the Bird House at the Bronx Zoo on Saturday. This was not surprising, since it was a cold, cold day and only about a half-dozen vehicles were in the parking lot when we arrived.

    There were four others at the tiger display and just two besides us peering at the snow leopards. Between the five of us and another group, only nine visitors visited the giraffes when we were there. Nobody else was around as we watched some grizzly bears wrestling in the snow. No one ever stopped to see the bison.

    It was as if we had the entire place to ourselves. I kid you not when I say that many of the animals appeared glad to see us, bored, I presume.

    Ellis, our almost-4-year-old, had wanted nothing else during the holiday break than to go to the zoo. Though we would have only about an hour before closing, having left Amagansett later than we would have liked, we were determined to go.

    Honestly, it was good that we had only limited time because the distances between exhibits are considerable, and, when the temperature is below freezing, they feel even farther. And one of our daughters happened to be wearing a pair of Ugg boots nearly worn through at the toes; she and Lisa went back to the mini van early to warm up.

    Forgetting about the weather, it was a pleasure to wander around the zoo with so few others. It was as if we were on a private tour of the place, an after-hours V.I.P. visit won in a charity auction perhaps.

    So what if the African wild dogs and gorillas had been moved somewhere warm for the winter? It was a reasonable trade in exchange for taking in what remained on display in near silence and without external distraction.

    Such is a joy of winter on the South Fork as well. We should all remember to take advantage of it while we can.   

    Borrowing from one of the books I’ve been reading lately (though not in the order presented), I would say that purgatory would best describe how it was getting to the small town of San Pancho, in Mexico; that being there was paradise, and that coming back was hell.

    Flying is such an ordeal these days that your destination damn well better be paradisiacal in order to justify the great annoyances you’ve got to undergo.

    The house we rented, high up on a hill, with verandas looking out onto the Pacific, was even more beautiful than we’d expected — the photos, contrary to what is usually the case, did not do it justice.

    It was largely a week of idleness for me (about all I can take, especially at this time of my life when it’s absolutely imperative that I keep moving), and therefore I had to admit it was true that, as Mary said on our return, I was not entirely myself down there.

    The sky, for one, was bigger, I told her, far, far more vast than here, where it’s comforting to be embraced by the trees. Two, the waves were too big and the undertow too strong for my titanium knees, three, there wasn’t an available tennis court (a further selling point, some of you would undoubtedly say), and four, Junot Diaz, who wrote the book I read while there, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” alternating between the English and Spanish versions, communicated the fear that pervaded the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s dictatorship so vividly that no number of margaritas, which usually further loosen my customarily garrulous tongue, would wash it away.

    He says at one point, following the brutal beating and probable repeated raping of Beli, the woman who was to become Oscar’s mother, “All that can be said is that it was the end of language, the end of hope.”

    Which, of course, got me to thinking of how easy we have it in this abundantly wealthy country, for all its faults. How lucky we are to be able to say what we want — and in full cry if we please — and for us there is always (isn’t there?) hope.  

    It is a true and beautiful — and sad and funny and torturous and tragic — book, one I think I may never forget. So, I take it back: I was not entirely idle in San Pancho, and the people — there are about 2,000 of them — were amiable, especially our house’s caretaker, Franco, who told me the day we left,  his eyes watering, that that night he would cook for a man, a Canadian vacationer of my age to whom he’d introduced me the day before, what might be his last meal in the town he loved to come to.

    I wore no watch there, I had trouble remembering what day it was, and I liked it that I felt impelled to speak Spanish. (The margaritas, of course, always help in that regard.)

    But Mary was right. Driving down Three Mile Harbor Road toward the office  six-and-a-half hours after we’d returned (I’ll not go into the hellishness of it), I heard myself cry out, “Let the games begin!”

    Come back, Stephen Talkhouse, all is forgiven!

    This strange sequence of words was like a whisper in my ear as I trudged along the partially plowed sidewalk on Main Street ’round about midnight on Saturday, still blissfully unaware of the incoming polar vortex and its ruthlessly frigid Arctic air. A whisper, or perhaps the wind. Come back, Stephen Talkhouse.

    The Talkhouse — the establishment, not the man — where I spent an awful lot of hours (and a couple awful hours) over the last 12 months — for professional reasons, of course, mostly — is closed until March. As some of its principals and crew headed to Florida for a Soldier Ride benefit, the nearest watering hole/concert hall/community house to my little apartment was suddenly inoperative. The long holiday season is over, the wind whispered, and the deep freeze is on. Get out while you can.

    I still remember the feeling when Labor Day came to Montauk, and the lines at Gosman’s Clam Bar, where I worked many a summer, grew shorter with the daylight. I remember the subtly shifting hues of the September sky and sea. I can still recall the yearning in a local man’s voice as he noted, almost 30 years ago, the mass exodus from the South Fork at summer’s end. “Back to the city,” he said wistfully. “And you wish you could go with them.”

    After childhood as a year-round resident of Montauk, I used to do just that, clearing out well ahead of Columbus Day. Then I lived in the city year round, and as time passed spent less and less time here. From the outset, the summers in New York were horrible, intolerable, and eventually I couldn’t bear the thought of another, and here I am again.

    Into a second winter in Amagansett, I’ve experienced two summers of the Fabulous Hamptons like I’d never known them before. We all know of the crowds, the traffic. Surely we can all recount all-too-true tales of rude and ostentatious behavior, inconceivable self-regard. Noise, litter, and nowhere to park. Much like New York. . . .

    Yeah, it’s a lot nicer here without all that. The Reutershan parking lot is more accommodating without the Ferrari positioned, by design, to occupy two parking spaces. But these are the desolate days, and April seems a long way from here.

    At the Talkhouse, there was live music. There was recorded music. There were familiar faces, friends, and fun. And now there isn’t.

    So I had to stop in on Saturday. I had to get one more impression, one that would have to last a while.

    It had been a good year at the Talkhouse. I’d seen and heard plenty of great artists, and met and interviewed quite a few of them too. I was recruited to work the merchandise table for a couple acts and made a few extra dollars in the process. I’d performed there a few times with my band, the Hot Pockets, and introduced the indescribably perfect tribute band Lez Zeppelin at their second show of the summer.

    And on Aug. 15, ’–round about midnight, ragged from multiple jobs and just back from an East-Hampton-to-Queens-to-East-Hampton sprint in The Star’s embattled van, I’d had a brief but exhilarating chat with Sir Paul McCartney, as Jimmy Buffett and Angelica Huston stood nearby. How often does that happen?

    Come back, Stephen Talkhouse, wherever you are.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.

    Air travel is a conundrum, at once wonderful and terrible. It is wonderful to travel so far so quickly, but terrible to have to leap over all the hurdles it throws in your way.

    (By the way, if our family friend Maria Matthiessen is reading this, I warn her that she should stop right here: I’m about to engage in a binge of what she calls “route talk.” And if you don’t get that reference, I refer you to a recent episode of the public radio program “This American Life,” about the five topics that without fail make conversations boring.)

    After Christmas in Nova Scotia, my husband and I hopped, skipped, and jumped down to Massachusetts for New Year’s. Although we encountered no ice storms, no canceled flights, and no geese on the runway, we almost missed our connection in Toronto. I don’t think we would have made it to Boston at all if my husband hadn’t used a wheelchair when we transferred planes.

    The modern airport can be like an obstacle course you’d see in a movie about military training, can’t it? It really isn’t a user-friendly space. Not everyone is able-bodied enough to hike the long distances between gates and security checkpoints; and not all airports have people-mover conveyer belts or carts to take the tired, the lame, or the aged from one holding pen or line to another. Airport navigation is about the only circumstance I can think of that can make a person feel grateful for being reliant on a wheelchair (though I guess athletes who participate in wheelchair races probably consider that sport to be another upside).

    As is so often the case, our flight was a half hour late arriving from Halifax into Toronto, and after we landed — “deplaned,” to use the lingo — we had to move like Ethiopian middle-distance runners to catch the connecting leg to Boston. Three different airline assistants moved us to the front of lines when we went through security (for the second time that day) and then United States customs.

    We arrived at the departure gate with frazzled smiles on our faces, just as boarding was announced for “those traveling with children or needing assistance.” Since there were only a few daily scheduled flights that would have gotten us down to New England on Canada Air, I felt certain the wheelchair had spared us a night in Toronto.

    Some time ago, a woman of a certain age whom I barely know confessed that she was in the habit of requesting a wheelchair in airports even though she didn’t really need one. Perhaps guilt loosened her tongue, but who knows? Maybe she was bragging about her wiles. I myself shoot dark looks at those drivers I sometimes see parking in places reserved for the handicapped, ever watchful because my husband has, and needs, a handicapped tag. I don’t believe in taking advantage of it when I am alone in the car.

    Our trip from Nova Scotia to Boston took 14 and a half hours, a little longer than a nonstop to Beijing or Dubai. Looking at a map, I think we might have rowed the 300 or so miles across the Gulf of Maine in better time.

    Sharp-eyed readers of a nautical sort may notice a small but significant change in this week’s newspaper. For what I think may be a first, the tide table, which usully appears in the sports section, no longer gives the times of the daily highs and lows at Promised Land. Instead, it lists the ups and downs for the Three Mile Harbor entrance.

    Our decision to do this reflects two things. The first is that government tide tables are easily available for Three Mile Harbor, and the second is that no one much knows where Promised Land is anymore.

    Time was, Promised Land, facing northwest on the shore of Gardiner’s Bay, was a port of some importance. The Smith Meal company ran a menhaden processing plant there, and the Edwards Brothers brought fish to their dock. A railroad spur off the L.I.R.R. main line once crossed what is now part of Napeague State Park to reach the area.

    Seasonal workers, most from the South, traveled there each year to work on the menhaden boats — bunker steamers in the local vernacular — or in the steaming, hulking factory. When the plant was in full operation, it was hard to miss. The overwhelming smell of thousands of pounds of menhaden being steamed down for their oil and fish byproducts was something one might never forget. Employment there meant money, good money, the story goes, making it a “promised land.”

    Our house, about a half-mile to the west along the Gardiner’s Bay shore, was the nearest to the fish factory, as we called it, until well after it closed in 1968. It was the last of a number of smaller fish-rendering plants that had operated in the area; remnants can be found along the eastern, interior shore of Napeague Harbor and on Hick’s Island.

    According to “The South Fork,” my father’s, Everett Rattray’s, book, the owners of the Hick’s Island factory ran a two-mile-long water pipe from a pump house at Fresh Pond, Montauk. Fresh water was essential to the steam-run operations. When I was out at Napeague recently I noticed what I suspected was a piece of the old pipe now exposed by the shifting sands.

    With the fish factories all but gone, so too is the sense of what was once promising about Promised Land. Boaters do not end up there very much now, except for occasional drifts for fluke or if blown over from the Devon Yacht Club. People who work or play on the waters here are far more likely to be familiar with Three Mile Harbor, and so the change to our tide chart.

    Promised Land remains a place name, however, at least for us locals, and if you really want to know what the tide will be doing there, you can just subtract about a half hour for an approximate time.