“Whose Garden Was This,”  an evocative song by Tom Paxton, who lived in East Hampton for many years, came into my head this week after I drove through the railroad underpass on Narrow Lane in Bridgehampton and was suddenly startled, not by an approaching vehicle (although that is a real concern), but by a stand of some two dozen wild lupines. I had forgotten how stunning their blue-purple flag-like flowers are.

    Like Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Tom’s song  was an anthem for the fight against environmental degradation. At the time, though, the lyrics spoke to places far away, at least as far as I was concerned; I never thought the day would come when they struck home here on eastern Long Island. 

    Lupine, which used to follow the bird’s-foot violet in flowering along local roadsides, are just about gone now. They had held on for quite a while despite inappropriate public mowing in the name of road safety. Some years ago an effort was made — in East Hampton, at least — to convince the  Town Highway Department to schedule its mowing in keeping with botanical seasons, but it didn’t take. Changes in accepted government procedures require public insistence, and the voices for the protection of roadside flowers were too muted.

    Lupine wasn’t the only flower that used to grace the roads. Later in the summer, grass was punctuated by orange butterfly weed. Like the lupine, butterfly weed was pretty much taken for granted until it was too late.

    Of course, there are still flowering plants and bushes in out-of-the-way places here. A hidden forest of mountain laurel is breathtaking in June. Rosa rugosa, from which you can make rose-hip jelly, continues to thrive near the beaches, and goldenrod and asters pop up in August. Beach plum bushes put on a pretty show in good years.

    There also are members of the orchid family on Napeague’s wild lands. If you know when and where to look, you can see lady’s slippers and orchis, although they are much rarer than they used to be. These Napeague plants have been subject to neither mowing nor overdevelopment, but some of them are pollinated by bees, and bees are in serious decline.

    The disappearance of native flora is to some extent an aesthetic matter, I suppose. (That is, if you don’t consider the protection of biodiversity to be important as a general principle.) But such is not the case where shellfish are concerned. I remember the 1960s and ’70s, when people from away, unfamiliar with the South Fork, would ask whether it was safe to eat local clams. Of course! we told them, with exclamation marks in our voices. It never occurred to me in those days that in 30 or 40 years our waterways would write a different story.

    Today, shellfishing is banned either temporarily or after rainstorms in some of our harbors, and a few prohibitions may turn out to be permanent. If roadside mowing was death for many wildflowers, an overabundance of nitrogen and of chemical pollutants is the obvious cause of contaminated shellfish.

    The good news is that if you love lupine and butterfly weed you can buy seeds and plant them in your garden. Meanwhile, scientists seem to agree that it is not too late to reverse the downward trend in our harbors and bays. We will just have to make our public outcry louder and more persistent this time.

   Ah, Memorial Day, how did you come upon us so quickly? I don’t know about my fellow locals, but I’m just not ready for you.

    I’m already missing winter’s empty stores, quiet checkout lines, and roads that were not yet filled with pedestrians and bike riders who don’t seem to get that there are vehicles in their midst, people rushing to their jobs, people in a hurry. The bumper sticker that says, “We’re not all on vacation,” says it all.

    I’ll miss my Sunday afternoon drives with my husband, which will now end as he starts fishing every free chance he gets, leaving me alone to fight the crowds on beaches, in parking lots, the supermarket, and just about everywhere else.

    On our winter drives we often see other long-married couples taking their afternoon drives, which makes me feel old and almost makes me want to stop taking them. But we won’t because there’s nothing else to do at that time of year, and that’s how we like it. Sacred Sunday, we call it. In a perfect world no one would have to work on Sundays.

    When we drive through the quiet streets of Montauk we see the new houses under construction, many of them much bigger and grander than my own year-round residence. How do these people get to come to my town and build a bigger house than me? I, too, want a gazebo attached to my house or an oceanfront view. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem fair that those of us who live here year round often live in small houses, well smaller, anyway.

    But I’m also jealous of those who are finding Montauk and the Hamptons for the first time. I’m jealous of the ones who have yet to find the secret beach that is littered with conch shells and driftwood that I take home for my collection, or the horse ranch high on a hill where Montauk horses graze and gladly take handfuls of carrots. I’m jealous of the first time they see Oink, our resident pig who roams as freely as a dog and has become something of a tourist attraction.

    I’m jealous of the adventure they are about to embark upon and the friends they will meet. When I first came to Montauk as a young recent graduate of a business high school, which allowed me to receive a diploma as long as I promised not to type for a living, I, too, found many adventures, some not too cool. Ironically, I now type for living and am actually not too bad at it.

    There was the first time my friends and I decided to walk from the downtown area to the Montauk Lighthouse, not realizing it was about five miles of tough road. We ended up turning back when we thought it must have fallen into the brink. “It really couldn’t be this far, can it?” we asked ourselves. Ironically, I now live near the Lighthouse.

    So we hitched a ride, thinking that there was safety in numbers. Of course, a weirdo picked us up, the same weirdo that I see nowadays and know as a local. As we sat in the back of his car, we held hands and prayed for our safe return to the motel we lived in. Ironically, that guy is now a friend of mine.

    Then there was the time a newly-met friend and I decided to embark on a bike ride after she took some Ex-Lax. She had asked my unprofessional opinion of how many she should take to get her bowels moving again and I told her about two or three. Hey, they were chocolate flavored, that’s all I knew. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pedal so fast and furious to the nearest restroom. There is no irony here; I still love chocolate.

    On our first summer out here, my close girlfriend, who grew up next door to me on City Island, was hit by a car in front of the Montauk movie theater. She was fine, took a ride in the ambulance to the hospital, but became agitated when a reporter from this newspaper got in touch with her for more information. “I don’t want this in the paper,” she told the reporter. “My parents will make me come home if it gets out.”

    I do look forward to the warm days of summer and lazing on a beach all day. I look forward to eating steamers, lobsters, homemade chowder, and fresh corn on the cob. I look forward to outdoor dining and family boat rides. I look forward to having a whole afternoon by myself while my husband fishes. I look forward to people-watching and watching summer blockbuster movies at the Montauk Movie. But what I really look forward to is September.

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   Yes, spring may be here, but, besides the dazzling gold­finches and cardinals, there is the oaken semen dripping on one’s windshield, pollen-suffused air, allergies, tick bites, the wretched antibiotics required to treat them, and, sports-wise, it’s been a bit of a slog — the great majority of our high school’s teams not being playoff-bound.

    Still, lushness is to be preferred to slushiness.

    Presumably, there will be growth next spring, but then I wonder will I, a weekly sportswriter perhaps overly dependent on the winning drug, be here to enjoy it?

    “. . . Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day / To-morrow will be a-dying.”

    Of course, Robert Herrick was addressing virgins of the 17th century, not herniated geezers with total knee replacements of the 21st, but I hear what he was a-saying.

    Long before Herrick, of course, there was Horace: “Dum loquimir, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.” Carpe diem. Pluck the day. Though not so roughly as to forget the future, which, while it is not ours to know, we can try our best to shape. Which is why am I going to p.t. every week trying to strengthen, after 70-some years of slouching, my shoulders so I can stand erect.

    It was my late mother-in-law’s express wish that I not hunch. Thus I’ve made it my mission to straighten up and fly right.

    “Yet, it’s the process,” my inner voice reminds. “Don’t get so hung up on Ws, give the kids a break, treat victory and defeat as the imposters they are and have some fun while you’re at it. In short, be plucky, and pay attention.”

    I had to admit I was right: Keep moving, keep improving, that’s the ticket. Did the kids learn, did they have fun? Those are the main questions.

    In the end, though, why not simply settle for fun, for the movement that embodies life, and let self-improvement take its course.

    The other evening at my brother-in-law’s Derby party, watching the kids — there must have been at least two dozen of them — playing dodgeball in the backyard as the sun went down was enough, more than enough.

   As our children get older, Lisa and I have found ourselves shifting into the chauffeuring mode of parenthood. The after-school hours, and increasingly week­­ends, are spent driving the kids from one obligation to another. There are dance lessons, rehearsals of different kinds, and sporting events that have taken us as far as Pennsylvania.

    Spending that much time with the kids gives us a window into their world. In particular, I have been paying attention lately to the music they like to listen to. Forget about Dad turning on National Public Radio news; oh no, it’s pop music or else. I get even, however, by trying to pester the girls about the songs I find especially insipid or annoying. (Ellis is still too young to get it.)

    One peculiar thing about current FM radio hits that disturbs me is the frequent, if not constant, reference to alcohol. Singers boast of “drinking that bubbly” or “sippin’ gin and juice.” Because many of the songs drop the names of specific brand-name liquors, I found myself wondering, around summer last year, if there weren’t some kind of sponsorship going on.

    It turns out, not surprisingly, that I wasn’t the only one wondering. A group of pediatric researchers from the Dartmouth College and the University of Pittsburgh studied the top-40 songs from 2005 to 2007 and concluded that the average adolescent in the United States heard 34 references to alcohol each day.

    The researchers found that one in five songs that get heavy airplay had “explicit references” to drinking. Twenty-five percent mentioned a specific brand, and in those cases, the brands were associated with a “luxury life-style characterized by wealth, sex, partying, and other drugs.”

    My recent informal sample would seem to support these findings. One pop song’s lyrics talk about “when the bar closes, and you feel like falling down . . .” It’s not just about booze, however; friends are “in the bathroom getting higher than the Empire State.” And, speaking of New York, Jay-Z, the much-celebrated poet laureate of the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, rapped “MDMA got you feeling like a champion” in his anthem-like ode to the city. (MDMA, for those who don’t keep up with these things, is a drug that contains Ecstasy.)

    I can’t say that the radio music of my generation was inherently better for kids, though. The ’70s themselves were drug-soaked, if in a different way. One of my most vivid pop-related memories from that time was having a debate with my sister while our parents were driving us somewhere about the lyrics of “Muskrat Love,” the harmless, if cloying Captain and Tennille hit of 1976. I don’t remember what the specific dispute was about, though I recall certainty that I was right.

    Still, it’s a far cry from “nibbling on bacon, chewin’ on cheese” to today’s mindless celebration of things adolescents should view with apprehension, not aspire to as a symbol of the adult world.

   The provocative story of what happened when an Associated Press reporter broke the news that Germany had signed an unconditional surrender, ending World War II, came across my desk this week — by random coincidence, at the same time controversy was breaking out over the recent revelation that the Department of Justice had secretly obtained records of 20 A.P. phone lines.

    The wartime reporter, Edward Kennedy, was one of only three members of the American press allowed to witness the signing, and, like all three, was allowed to do so only on the condition that he hold the story until its release was approved by the brigadier general in charge, Frank A. Allen Jr.

    According to his own account,  Mr. Kennedy deliberated “which course did my duty as a reporter dictate — subservience to a political dictatorship, which was contrary to the principle of a free press and in violation of the word of the government and the army, or action which I believed right. . . .”

    The news of war’s end went out over the A.P. wires just a few minutes before editors learned that the Germans had announced the armistice in a radio broadcast several hours earlier. It had also already been broadcast in 24 languages, including English, via the American Broadcasting Station in Europe.

    Mr. Kennedy did not know it at the time, but history makes clear, that the army had decided to allow Russia to announce the surrender at a later ceremony in Berlin, a concession granted for (apparently misguided) political reasons. The Soviet announcement was the beginning of Russia’s dominance in Eastern Europe — and the Cold War.

    Even though the A.P. had congratulated itself on its historic scoop, it did not stand by its reporter. He had defied military censorship, and he was censured and then fired. Eventually, he became the editor of papers in California.

     The New York Times, which had (naturally) used the A.P. story on page one with huge headlines, nevertheless also found fault with him. In an editorial two days later, The Times said he had done a “grave disservice to the newspaper profession.”

    I wonder what its editorial board would say about that today.

    In an article that came out in The New Yorker only a few weeks after the armistice,  A.J. Liebling, the legendary newspaper critic and accomplished war correspondent (and onetime resident of Springs), wrote, “I do not think Kennedy imperiled the lives of any Allied soldiers . . .  as some of his critics have charged. He probably saved a few, because by withholding the announcement of an armistice you prolong the shooting. . . .”

    Mr. Kennedy, who is no longer alive, was nominated this year for a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, or a citation, with the idea that such recognition would serve to correct what those who nominated him called “a major journalistic and public-policy wrong.” Nothing came of it.

 The only public recognition Mr. Kennedy has received is engraved on a memorial sundial in Laguna Grande Park in Seaside, Calif. It reads: “He saved the world an extra day of happiness.”

   “It feels like years since it’s been here,” sang George Harrison in the Beatles’ soul-soothing song “Here Comes the Sun.” Yes, “It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter” but “smiles [are] returning to the faces.” The 60-degree weather and returning greenery and blossoms are visible in every direction I turn, and I caught myself smiling ear to ear when my iPhone camera turned its lens on me instead of the cherry blossom tree I was aiming to capture during a recent walk.

    I feel blissed and blessed to live here on the East End with year-round beauty that multiplies in spring with additional opportunity to feel the ocean mist, smell the fragrances, and hear the whispers and songs nature sings.

    On May 1, I celebrated May Day, or Beltane, which is a national holiday in Sweden that marks the quarter point between the spring equinox and summer solstice. As with many holidays honored by Paganism, an often misunderstood earth-based religion, the day celebrates all that this season represents. It honors sexuality and the fruits born of that as well as from the earth in the form of crops and flowers, which traditionally adorn the heads of women during a ritual which usually includes a bonfire.

    With no centralized religious body, Pagans believe we are born sin-free with all of the tools necessary to live ethically and spiritually, with time in nature of utmost importance and something to be eternally grateful for.

    I believe that nature is the cure for much of what ails us. Time spent there is health care, the opposite of modern medical or dis-ease care, a necessity for us to come into balance, breathe, relax, and listen.

    I experienced this firsthand while on vacation last week. With no deadlines and very few things on the to-do list, I scheduled a few conventional modern medical appointments, which took hours in nature to undo. I did achieve balance finally after hula hooping therapy at sunset on Indian Wells Beach and frequent follow-up visits to Crescent Beach on Shelter Island.

    My theory was evidenced clearly in a newly gifted mood ring that turned black while in the doctor’s office, while the day before it stayed in purples and pinks during a walk on Havens Beach in Sag Harbor. Perhaps we all need to wear mood rings to realize what is working for us and what is not. 

    I learned that a staycation was what I needed more than I realized. There was a little bit of spring cleaning, but mostly that of mind clutter, released to the universe except for the entertaining memories that were channeled into the only book I picked up during the week, the one I am writing.

    The creative expression took place all week long in various outdoor spaces. My needs were simple, a beach and a picnic table. I chose my spot each day after a drive or walk from beach to beach in search of the most comfortable wind direction. I loved the exploration. After all of these years, I’m still in awe of the bright blues contrasting with light sand beaches. Some days it was a bay beach with glowing emerald green moss-covered rocks that did the trick.

    I don’t think enough people out here take advantage of all that our surroundings have to offer our minds, bodies, and souls. In fact, I know they don’t. I am often one of the few out there.

    Soon the summer residents and seasonal visitors will return and many will complain about crowds, traffic, and lack of parking spaces, yet right now, beaches are empty and divinely breathtaking and there is hardly a soul taking advantage of nature’s gift to us.

    I believe East Enders should be especially filled with gratitude this year that our pristine beaches still exist at all after our close call with Hurricane Sandy.

    Yes, we have busy lives, but a quick break before, during, or after work will do us all a world of good. Whether it’s for exercise or a nap, breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or simply to feel the sand on your feet, I hope more people make the time to enjoy the gifts and the sunsets.

    Instead of “here comes the summer traffic,” think “here comes the sun and it’s all right.”

    Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

   Mary said on our return from the Dominican Republic that she didn’t much like my phone greeting, in which I say, “I’m either kicking the can down the road, pushing up daisies, or angling for a promotion,” especially the pushing-up-daisies part. And so, I’ve just changed it to “I’m either racing with the moon, running on empty, or jogging my memory . . . please leave a message.”

    This last, the jogging-my-memory bit, is, I’m afraid, all too true. I was kicking myself last night for having misremembered a photo subject’s name, as I had done the week before as well. If local journalism is indeed, as the late Jeannette Edwards Rattray said, “Names, names, names,” then it behooves me, I tell myself, to get them right. Sometimes, therefore, I wish — going against type — that there were no more print, only the Web, for then if you realized you’d erred you could splice out the offending gene, as it were, and all would be well conscience-wise. It’s hard to be a perfectionist in this business.

    “O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven. . . . What form of prayer can serve my turn. . . ?”

    “. . . Security [too much self-confidence] is mortals’ chiefest enemy.”

    One can only resolve to do better next time . . . and that is the wonderful thing about journalism: There always is a next time! Though the next time can be a mixed blessing — a time to be shriven should all go well, a time for self-flagellation — for kicking my can down the road, as it were — should it not.

    Having misquoted so many people so eloquently over the years, and having misspelled so many names in that long span without my self-esteem having wilted overmuch, I’ve decided it’s still far preferable that daisies be pulled than pushed.

    And that is why, despite my plaint of last week, I’ve embarked, albeit diffidently, on some exercises Si­nead FitzGibbon has prescribed so that I can resume with a light heart my battle against gravity.

   One of the more frequent questions I get these days when talking to someone whom I have not been in touch with for some time is how the beach in front of our house survived the winter. Hurricane Sandy set the table, as it were, for the ordinary winter storms that followed, so it is reasonable for friends to wonder whether we, too, suffered badly.

    The answer is mixed, as it is along the whole South Fork shoreline. Sandy was not the end of the world, but it sure came close. 

    That October day, my friend Jameson Ellis and I headed down to the house as the wind and seas of Gardiner’s Bay were rising. My wife and our children and pets had already fled to her parents’ house off the Sag Harbor Road. Jameson and I wanted one last look.

     When we reached the top of the dune, we saw that the bay, turned a yellow color from all the suspended silt, was rushing east to west, like a river about to overflow its banks. We stayed for a while, took a few pictures, then left, taking a few things out of the basement in case of flooding. Though neither of us said anything to the other, we confessed later that it seemed as if the house itself could be threatened this time.

    Well, everything more or less turned out fine. We were cut off from electricity for about a week, but the dune held. Even our stairs down to the beach remained in place. By spring, however, the sand had been scraped down about three feet, leaving a considerable jump from the bottom-most step. When taking the dogs for a walk, I have had to give a hand to Yum Yum, the aged, three-legged pug, and Lulu, the diminutive mutt, in both directions. All in all, though, it is not so bad.

    Some of our neighbors did not fare as well. One property, all but one bad storm away from having its foundation exposed, is supposedly going to be on the market soon. I heard this from a Chicago friend who had been phoned by a local broker, who, one hopes, was not prospecting for a sucker from the Midwest. In the other direction, a cottage is maybe two storms away from the brink.

    For me, Sandy’s legacy, and that of the storm season that followed, is that moving our house back toward the road or putting it up on stilts is going to be our problem, not our children’s. We are lucky that when my parents built the house more than 50 years ago, they chose a site well away from the water. That has bought us some time — not as much as we would like, perhaps, but time enough.

   Two of my gal pals and I have been doing yoga together now for 10 years. Ani, our teacher, insists we’ve only just begun — that it takes years and years —  and years — to get good at it.

    Be that as it may, we three got our start somewhat earlier, when we indulged ourselves in trips to Rancho La Puerta, the laid-back spa in Mexico, where I distinctly remember Phyllis Pilgrim, a longtime yoga and tai chi instructor there, telling us that as we got older there were just two physical activities we needed to pursue: yoga and walking. What a comfort that thought is now, by hindsight.

    Not long after the three of us began Ani’s classes — in a room at the house of a friend who didn’t much go for yoga and quickly dropped out — two more joined us. Husband and wife, they invited us to use a perfect studio at their house. We’ve been together ever since.

    For quite some time, the four women in the troupe were able to say we were a decade apart; the youngest was in her 50s, the oldest in her 80s, with the others in-between. (I never did think to ask how old the lone male in the class is.)

    Thinking back to my early practice, I remember being sure that I would never be able to do certain poses, even the triangle, for example, which is basic.  It’s amazing to contemplate how far we all have come, although I continue to wobble in such balancing positions as the half moon, and my tree still has a crooked limb. No matter. As Ani says, it takes years. And there are many who prove it.

    Take Natalie Dessay,  the coloratura soprano who was an amazing Cleopatra in the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of “Giulio Cesare.” Ms. Dessay, who The New York Times, in a review, said was not always at her vocal best, nevertheless was an extraordinarily nimble Cleopatra, dancing with arm thrusts and head swivels that few other sopranos would attempt, let alone execute with aplomb. Between acts, she told Rene Fleming,host for the HD performance, that she does yoga every day. And she rolled up the sleeve covering her right arm to show its muscle.

    Well, developing muscles isn’t exactly what our class is about, and we don’t do headstands, which require strong arms, either. It seems to me, although Ani might deny it, that she has softened the class over the years, as we have gotten older. But we have been growing more agile while, at the same time, we seem to have figured out how to let our bodies relax, or, as Ani describes it, melt.  

    When reminded in class recently that we had begun 10 years ago, I said we deserved gold stars. Ani suggested we wait till we had been at it for 20 years.  One of our number  is now 88,  however, and not so sure about that. Nevertheless, undaunted, she is a role model for us all.

   The one thing my children know is not to buy me perfume for Mother’s Day on Sunday. And even though the perfume makers purport to use all types of natural ingredients, such as sandalwood, rose, patchouli, white lilies, and ambergris, they also use chemicals that are not listed on the label that include benzoin resin, deer musk, acetoin, bisabolol, and perillaldehyde, whatever that is. No wonder I’m allergic to it.

    Like smoking, the scent of a perfume can have second-hand repercussions, like asthma (have it), itching (have it), and rash (have had it). Maybe it’s the scent of deer musk in the one scent I do wear that’s making me forage through my own garden lately and wince at bright lights.

    Last week a little boy sat behind me at a school program. Cute as a button, I thought, until I got a whiff of him and thought I would have to flee the auditorium. There was no one in the seat next to me, so he flung his upper body over it and was basically in my face. I smiled at him, complimented his singing ability as he sang along with the students on stage in my right ear, but started getting annoyed when, instead of applauding, he kicked his feet against the back of my chair.    But even that was less annoying than his aroma. I do believe he’d doused himself in his father’s cologne, using the whole bottle. First my nose started twitching and then I started itching all over. The itch was unbearable, but I resisted leaving because I didn’t want to miss seeing my sister’s child receive an award. As the students on stage sang their hearts out, I was discreetly trying to scratch the itch on my back, thighs, and near my ears.

    When I had to reach under my sweater to scratch under my bra strap I worried that someone would think I was flashing them, so I maneuvered my arm so as to get at it. Anyone watching me move my arm back and forth against my right side would have thought I had a tic.

    After the ceremony we celebrated by going to dinner in Montauk. My hair smelled so bad from that little boy and my face was so red from my reaction that I felt I had to explain to anyone greeting me that I was wearing some strange kid’s cologne.

    It reminded me and my sister of a time when we were in elementary school and my mother used a new detergent on both of us and our two brothers. By midmorning, Mom was called to the nurse’s office to collect the four of us. We were itching and scratching so bad the nurse was afraid that whatever we had could be contagious. Scabies is not something to be shared. But it wasn’t contagious, it was an allergic reaction to the detergent.

    To say Mom was embarrassed would be an understatement. At home, we all quickly showered and put on clothes that hadn’t been washed with the itchy stuff. And, being the wise children that we were, we managed to allow her guilt to fester and cajoled her into feeding us treats for a week to compensate for the embarrassment we told her we’d been put through at school. (Actually, nobody cared. The other students considered us lucky to get out of school early.)

    A mother’s guilt is something that is very much alive and active. Most of us mothers have had it at one time or another. We deserve to be celebrated on Mother’s Day. We also deserve a really good gift. Take my advice, bring plenty of cash when shopping for her. And if you see any of my three children around Montauk tell them they should read this column.

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