Sunday afternoon, after having kept the kids cooped up in the house for the preceding 24 hours or more, it was time to get them out for some air. Lisa took our eldest off in one direction, and I loaded the other two into my truck for the drive from our house in Amagansett to Montauk.

    Our destination was the Montauk School playground, which is probably the best one around. A thick layer of ground-up tires covers the ground and provides an appropriate cushion for Ellis, our 3-year-old, who knows little in the way of physical fear.

    The air was cold with a northwest wind coming from where the school sits atop its hill. My knit cap, vest, and denim jacket were hardly enough to keep me comfortable, though the kids stripped down to T-shirts almost as soon as we arrived.

    Despite the wind going the other way, we could hear the starting strains of a band warming up at the Surf Lodge across Fort Pond. Evvy insisted that the music was from a vehicle parked on the street, it seemed so loud and close.

    After a while someone got hungry, so we drove the long way around, up Second House Road, down Edgemere, and into the downtown. I opted for quesadillas and a burrito at a back-street takeout joint, and we headed for the beach.

    I had wanted to see the new rock seawall at the trailer park and thought the kids would like to explore a bit. After they ate, Evvy and Ellis headed for the water’s edge. The tide was out and they could scramble across broken-up pieces of concrete. Then we headed for the stone jetty, where for more than an hour they collected seaweed, shells, and fishbones, piling them on a flat rock and declaring it “salad.” Evvy, who is almost 9, indulges her little brother in games.

    At one point a father with two young children came by. While he stood at a distance, the older of his girls scrambled right up to see what we were doing.

    “Where do you live? Here?” she asked Evvy.

    “Well, sort of. Amagansett,” Evvy answered, not seeming at all proud, the way someone older might have been.

    We played for a while, tucked out of the wind behind the rocks and concrete, then, into the sunset, we went home.

   Let us now praise all things good about Memorial Day weekend. It goes without saying that those who live here year round usually stagger away from the first onslaught of the season complaining: “Oh my God,” or, “Help us! It’s begun,” or, yes, “It’s never, ever been worse!”

    So what good things, you ask?

    Let’s start with the State Department of Public Works having filled most of the potholes and smoothed out the main artery into and out of town. Huzzah! The gods of traffic, I observe, have favored East Hampton over Southampton, where delays for road work continued into the week.

    And how about the rain . . . which didn’t cease until the weekend was almost over? Okay, rain may have put a hex on outdoor barbecues, but, on the other hand, it probably kept day-trippers, and the traffic they create, to a minimum, right?

    I’m not entirely certain restaurateurs or hoteliers would consider a steady downpour a good thing, but various shopkeepers have told me over the years that when it pours, people hide inside the stores. So that cloud had a silver lining, right?

    The rain also pushed the trees and bushes, finally, into full leaf. Home gardens are now overflowing with all the plants that survived the winter and the voracity of the deer. Bambi and company have just about destroyed the few rose bushes left in my backyard, but, on the other hand — I’m trying to stay on the bright side — I don’t remember the lilacs and narcissus and the irises ever being as lush.

    Memorial Day is also a traditional time for old-home get-togethers. My husband and I swam against the tide this time, traveling away to spend time with family elsewhere. Getting out of town is nice, too.

    As far as I am concerned, though, the absolutely best thing about Memorial Day weekend, rain or shine, is the reopening of farm stands and stands and farmers markets. Goodness, this is a land of plenty. Produce grown right here is suddenly abundant. Beautiful rhubarb, tall asparagus, big, bouncy lettuces . . . it’s almost impossible to resist any of it.

    Some years, when spring has been warmer, local strawberries were ripe by Memorial Day. They weren’t ripe yet this year, true. But isn’t it pleasant to reflect that we don’t have to settle for hard, tasteless red orbs from — far, far — away? (Caveat emptor: If you notice your local gourmet grocer selling strawberries labeled as local later than mid-July, ask to see the crate they came in; false strawberry advertising has become a bit of a scourge.)

    Another good thing about Memorial Day is that people who rent houses are past their annual rush, and can breathe for just a moment or two —at least long enough for a glass of wine on the porch. And the tradesmen who have been up to their eyeballs in stress trying to finish up plumbing jobs, pre-season landscaping chores, and the like, might possibly have a few hours free to work for their year-round customers again. I like that.

    Another thing nice about the end of May is the fact that the days are just about as long as they will get. The summer solstice is only three weeks away. And it’s all downhill after that.

   Sometimes nothing goes right. We were to be 12 at dinner, 7 adults and 5 children. Turkey breast, which had been marinated in an Asian-style sauce, was in the oven, to be served with rice, broccoli rabe, and zucchini, an apparently perfect meal for all. Chris had made a big bowl of cut-up fruit for dessert, and it was at the ready, along with cake pops. (If you haven’t seen cake pops, they’re round balls of cake that has been iced and put on a lollipop stick. A favorite with the kids these days.)

    The meal would be late for a school night, 7:15 or so before Dede, who had a ballet class, and her father, my son David, who picked her up, could arrive.  My daughter, Bess, had promised to take her youngest, Teddy, to the East Hampton RECenter for a swim, a rare treat. But she had been trying to finish some work, which delayed their going, and they arrived back even later. As we waited, some of the kids, Dede and her sister, Evvy, and perhaps even Bess’s daughter, Nettie, decided we should play charades. What a great idea.

    The only fly in the ointment was that I had been at home resting with a five-day-old cold, which apparently dulled my brain because I neglected to get the turkey in the oven until much too late. It was far from done when we finally were assembled. Furthermore, on the premise that I was no longer contagious after five days, I had set the table. This understandably alarmed my daughter-in-law, Lisa, and I slunk back to my bedroom, taking my germs with me as she re-washed the tableware.

    David decided to take matters into his own hands. He sliced some of the turkey off the breast and sautéed it on top of the stove in an iron skillet. The children were fed. At that point, it being later than planned, David and Lisa, who had not eaten, scurried their three off. They left so quickly that Lisa called from the car to apologize for not saying goodbye. Bedtime would be late in any event.

    Teddy and Nettie played about as the rest of us eventually sat down to the turkey. I came out of hiding. It wasn’t exactly the special family get-together we had planned for the last night of Bess’s family’s visit — although you could say it was memorable.

    Feeling responsible for the chaos, I consoled myself with the thought of how much fun the charades had been. All the kids took part, and even 3-year-old Ellis knew how to act out a movie — “Iron Man.” 

   The tenant in Brooklyn returned to Japan, so I took the opportunity to paint the living room and remove a bunch more belongings, not that I have space for them here.

    In the odd spare minute, I’ll go through shoeboxes filled with old photographs, mostly 31/2-by-31/2-inch Kodacolor prints, a blurred or fading date stamp on the back. Those that catch my eye get scanned and placed on a little stack on the desk, where they lay bare the magnitude of change.

    Forty years ago, two families piloted a late-’60s Nissan Patrol far down Gin Beach toward Shagwong Point. Swimming, running, laughing, the four boys were never happier, and may never be. Four grown-ups prepared a lavish seafood feast — lobster, clams, corn on the cob. The boys drained glass bottles of Coke and Yoo-hoo, the grown-ups gallons of wine.

    The whole time that rugged Nissan motored through the sand, the beach was entirely their own. A sighting of another human, another jeep, of any sign of civilization was so exceedingly rare as to draw long stares from the boys in the back.

    I haven’t seen it recently, but for decades that stretch of beach has resembled a miles-long and extremely narrow trailer park, a Jones Beach of recreational vehicles. From the westerly jetty, or from the boat steaming toward Block Island, the sight makes me wistful. I haven’t seen it recently because I don’t want to.

    More Kodacolor prints depict the scene in and around the house I grew up in. My father, Kenneth Walsh, was an artist. He’s been gone a long time now, and I had forgotten, or had never known, just how creative he was. His watercolor and acrylic paintings filled the walls, and the expanse of land on which our house sat, in Hither Hills, was similarly decorated with his creations. A wildly multicolored bird, at least six feet from beak to tail and wingspan just as large, flew a few feet off the ground, pole-mounted and turning with the winds. Great and small pieces of driftwood had been collected and fashioned into an abstract George and Martha Washington, or, perhaps, a seaside “American Gothic.” Another installation, a collage of New York City street signs and blown-up pictures of my impossibly young parents, brother, and me, the sand, sea, and sunshine a brilliant backdrop, illustrated the disparate worlds we inhabited.

    The dirt road I grew up on was paved decades ago, and the vast emptiness as far as young eyes could see has been divided and plowed and cleared and paved and built upon, and you can barely see the ocean anymore. The house has grown higher, a detached garage sits a comically inconvenient distance across the lawn, and a long fence, bisecting the land, obscures a swimming pool and all else behind it. Those bold, playful art installations are, of course, long gone. And if they weren’t, one or all of the multiplying summertime neighbors would have demanded their removal back in the go-go ’90s.

    Montauk was a paradise. I wonder if the hordes that clamor to be seen at the Surf Lodge, that crowd the share houses along the Old Highway, that brawl in spasms of drunken stupidity in the late hours outside the bars in town, can know that, like we did 40 years ago.

    I wonder if I don’t know a damn thing, if my 40-years-ago Montauk wasn’t already wrecked relative to 10 or 40 years before that.

    I retreat into Kodacolor and cliché, and Wordsworth, who died 163 years ago Tuesday:

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

   Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.

   As a cold rain slants down (and as the grass and mosses green before my eyes), it is pleasant to think of Cayo Levantado, an islet off the Dominican Republic to which we repaired recently to divest ourselves, however temporarily, of any untoward thoughts, or of any thoughts whatsoever, frankly.

    Things did not begin well: Our room, which was to have had “a garden view,” according to the Web site, gave out onto a macadamed back lot, which, although we were at a palatial resort hotel, seemed no different from what you might gaze upon were you at Motel 6.

    Yet, before I could say, “We could just as easily have taken pills,” Mary and I were, thanks to Ramon Santos, the front desk manager (que Dios le bendiga) whisked away to villa number 6, whose broad veranda faced the Caribbean.

    “Mi mujer esta feliz, y por lo tanto estoy feliz,” I said to Ramon, who replied, with a smile, “Happy wife, happy life.”

    To see Mary happy was a boon inasmuch as the call of duty lately has been insistent and persistent. As for me, I’m deaf; that’s my excuse, one that was all the more available to me down there inasmuch as one of my new hearing aids all of a sudden gave up the ghost and the other almost drowned, its forgetful owner having dived with it in place into the bathtub-warm turquoise water. Mary revived it with a hair dryer, I’m happy to say, which enabled me to continue with my Spanish lessons, one of the Gran Bahia Principe Cayo Levantado’s chief recommendations, to my mind.

    My professor, Estephan Cordero Salome, who was, above all, patient, said he could have me fine-tuned linguistically in a month. When I told him I probably never would retire, America being an expensive country and my job much to my liking, even at this late date, he offered to continue our dialogue through the Internet, which I plan to do. With gusto we sang “La Bamba” and “Alla en el Rancho Grande” together, songs I last sang with Eduardo Ponce de Leon, a native of Uruguay, as we drove along in a Jeep on Okinawa almost 50 years ago.

    In the tradition of “The Man Who Loved Dickens” — less sinister though no less obsessed — I reveled in the fact that I had among the employees a captive audience that was not only easy-going but willing — tips or no — to put up with “The Gringo Who Loved Spanish.”

    The novel I brought along to read, along with Helen Vendler’s “Poets Thinking,” was Santayana’s “The Last Puritan,” a rather strange book to take to such a hedonistic place, you might think, and, indeed, you’d be right inasmuch as the young brainy, athletic hero, Oliver Alden, was unlucky in love. That fed into a theory that had been taking shape in my mind — Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman having also figured into it — to wit, that, sadly, genius and a happy love life often were uncoupled. Was I bragging or complaining?

    Bragging, I supposed, for there was nothing to complain about on Cayo Levantado.

Eighty years ago last month, a boy was born in Eisenach, Germany, in a country already being torn apart as the Nazi Party rose to power. That boy was Karl Egon Heilbrunn, my father-in-law, and the story of his coming into the world, his defiant father, and what happened next is one of the millions of small tales of that terrible time that should not be forgotten.

In and of itself Karl’s birth, the second son of Siegfried Heilbrunn, a Jewish butcher, and his wife, Beate, was just another in the small city that once was home to Martin Luther and Bach. In photographs, Siegfried appears to be a tough guy; his family remembers him as a rough character, stocky with thick hands that could quickly take apart the largest steer.

It was he who decided to take out an ad in one of Eisenach’s newspapers, announcing Karl’s birth, and that was not out of the ordinary. What was, however, was that Siegfried Heilbrunn had the paper put the first four letters of his first and last name in bold type. Think about that for a moment: Sieg Heil.

At a time when the Nazis were ascending and had become a force in Eisenach, a Jew had to be brave to do something like this, mocking the party’s own spoken salute. Demonstrations quickly followed outside the butcher shop. Karl’s brother, Martin, then only 3, was sent to the hospital, where his mother was recuperating, with a tall bunch of roses and a butcher knife for her to hide under her pillow.

Word spread, and Julius Streicher, the master propagandist later to be put on trial in Nuremberg and executed for his role in the Nazi war crimes, denounced Siegfried in the pages of Der Strurmer. It was, Streichter said, evidence of “jüdischer Frechheit,” which Martin Heilbrunn translated for me this week as “insolent nastiness.”

That was not the end of it. Germany was soon to be convulsed in one of the greatest human tragedies in history. Whether or not the birth announcement had a direct role in what followed for the Heilbrunns is probably unknown now, but it is clear that the butcher shop came under increased scrutiny.

Martin told me recently that officials eventually went after his father on taxes, and in 1936, when his mother mis-charged a customer a couple of pfennig due to a confusing new regulation, things escalated rapidly. An Eisenach police officer who knew Siegfried warned him of the gathering danger and took him into custody for his own safety. He told Siegfried that he had but 48 hours to get away; if the Gestapo were to detain him, he would have been but 2 hours away from a concentration camp. Siegfried understood that he had to leave Eisenach. He agreed never to return and never to work in Germany again.

Beate remained behind to close the shop and sell the family house, Martin told me. Then the family fled for the United States, ending up in New Jersey in July 1937. Karl, whom I have not said much about so far, and whose first memory is of hiding under a bed while the Nazis entered his house, will celebrate his 80th birthday with family and friends this weekend at home in East Hampton.

   Now, I like Brian Williams. I usually watch his nightly news report at 6:30 p.m. But I have to take strong exception to the way he reported the emergence of millions of 17-year locusts expected in the next few weeks along the East Coast.

    Preaching to the choir, he was, full of anxious anticipation, brow furrowed with the threat of the looming plague. What’s next, he asked. First we are forced to endure mega storms, and droughts, and on and on. Oh the racket! Oh the horror we will now have to endure!

    The real threat, of course, is the spread of the urban mind-set. Mr. Williams chose not to report the real, wonderful story about the cicada nymphs appearing after completing their prolonged development underground, during which they sip fluids from the roots of deciduous trees. Trees, Brian. Remember trees? 

    With Earth Day nigh it’s time again for a wake-­up call, although it’s getting harder to hear one amid the suck and clatter of every wasteful form of resource removal imaginable. The bottom line is this: The world was not created for the comfort of Homo sapiens. The longer it takes for us to understand this, the more uncomfortable we will become, until the Earth takes back its garden.

    When pollen fills the air, flowering plants are not out to kill us with hay fever, as drug companies (sponsors of the nightly news) would have us believe. Hard as it might be to accept, plants don’t care about you or your hay fever. There’s a good chance our oversensitive sinuses are the result of the antiseptic lifestyle we’ve forced upon ourselves. 

    Superstorm Sandy was a big storm but she was deadly and inconvenient only because we were in her way. We have built too close to shore.

    Forest fires destroy homes in California and elsewhere because they were constructed where fire has always routinely blazed away to rid the woods of understory and to encourage new growth. 

    If the world seems like it’s out to get us it’s because there’s too many of us. It’s easier for us to be in the way of natural processes. If we alter Nature’s balances by burning fossil fuels, melting the polar ice caps, and causing the seas to rise, it’s our doing. The Earth is only righting the planetary ship. 

    The attitude expressed by Brian Williams the other night, and by so many others of late, that Nature is somehow in the way — an alien force to be sprayed away, drugged away, dammed away, and kept at bay so that we remain comfortably ignorant of the planet — is fast becoming a Weltanschauung, a fundamental orientation, a way of seeing our place in the total scheme of things. How sad.

    It may seem like the Earth is fighting back. Greenhouse gases, sea-level rise, and pestilences of one sort or another appear to be examples of the Earth getting even. For some fatally flawed reason, we are doomed to think in terms of conquering or being conquered, insult and happy retribution.

    I think it’s worse than that. We may be numerous, but we are small. It’s much more likely the Earth isn’t in this tug-of-war. It just doesn’t care. If we screw things up bad enough, we’ll be gone, and the world will just keep spinning.

   Russell Drumm covers the waterfront. He is a senior writer for The Star.

   The family photos are scattered in clusters and packs all around the bedroom: They sit on the radiator, the desk, the three dressers — littered across any available flat surface. I got into this habit back in the days when I used to move between two houses every year (renting out what was my winter one to summer people), and needed to be able to scoop up all my pictures quickly, and pack them. Trouble is, they are getting quite out-of-date, and I haven’t figured out how to get prints of newer ones, particularly of the grandchildren.

    It goes without saying that I came of age before pictures were taken with digital devices, instead of bonafide cameras . . . before there were social-media sites on which to post them . . . before all of it.

    Actually, I must say here, I embraced word-processing in its very earliest days, and was among the first editors out here to edit on the computer. (I remember clearly that my Southampton colleague, whose newspaper operation was, in general, light years ahead of ours, insisted that copy-editing was better done with paper and pencil.) Now, however, communications technology is moving ahead more and more rapidly, and I fear I am being left behind.

     Naturally, I used to take photos with a camera, which I carried everywhere; I even knew how to get these photos off the camera on onto the computer, back in the 1990s and 2000s. Like most everyone, I don’t use a camera much anymore, which means I hardly take photos these days.

    I own a cellphone, yes, and it does have a rudimentary camera, but it doesn’t seem worth bothering with because of the poor quality. Everyone in the family seems to always be snapping away on snazzy devices — tablets, iPhones, I’m not sure what else — and e-mailing these images back and forth or, most frequently, posting them on Facebook. But, unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to harvest them and get prints.

    I’ve got a Facebook page, too, mind you. But I am being a bit slow learning how to finesse it. Sometimes I get e-mail notifications about photographs that friends have posted, but I don’t know why they come from some people and not others. I am also, I admit, reluctant to visit my Facebook page at all, because it accumulates everything everyone I know has ever posted, and I don’t know how to pare it all down; it would take hours to scroll through all the vacation photos, petition links, silly cat videos, outraged political rants, and so on. (Maybe I need to hire a teenager to sort me out?)

    Now things have gotten more complicated.

    Someone has set me up with a Twitter account. (If Pope Francis, @Pontifex, can work one, I guess I can, too.) I occasionally receive word of tweets, and I felt puffed up with accomplishment when I clicked to follow something recently. Next thing you know, however — as I learned at a family party last weekend — it turns out that the young set has migrated to Instagram, which apparently does everything the earlier sites do, and more quickly. At least that’s what I think I learned.

    So we come to my question: What will happen to family archives?

    Being a newspaper family, we have always documented everything, from baby steps on the beach to wine-saturated picnics in the Walking Dunes. We, quite seriously, have more than one old wooden filing cabinet filled with these prints. And now? Will these memories be forever consigned to cyberspace, instead of paper and ink? Left hovering without frames? How will future generations retrieve them?

    Children, listen: We old folks used to be told that we should label all our photos on the back, so that those coming after us would know who their forebears were and what they looked like. Which bald uncle once had a cowlick, how flat the landscape was from Pantigo Road to the ocean. But who will know how to find, let alone identify, everything posted on the Internet now?

    Perhaps another Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg will figure out how to create retrievable albums in space — to source and collect them for posterity — and make millions.

   So, it’s spring — a bloody spring, a promising spring. Not long ago, when the Olympic committee was proposing to ban wrestling from the Olympics — wrestling, which, besides running, is the Olympic sport — I said to Mary I’d never met a wrestler whose character I didn’t admire. And now, given the abomination in Boston, that generalization is swept away — with the dead, with the maimed.

    I thought wrestling taught you to stand on your own two feet and not to whine, that it taught you to take what comes, whether defeat or victory, and that the dignity that crowns struggle is uppermost.

    It’s a tough sport, not for the faint of heart, not for those inclined to cast blame, certainly not for those inclined to blame “them” whenever things don’t go the way you want. I always thought wrestlers were courageous, not cowards, which is why I find it very hard to accept the fact that one of the bomber brothers — or I should say one of the alleged bomber brothers — was indeed a wrestler. I can’t understand it. I can’t understand why anyone would want to kill spring.

    And America, to my mind, is spring — the hope that it brings. You think, as you do when spring comes, that things will be better here. There’s always that hope, else why do people keep coming?

    The runners are right. We can’t let despair win. There will always be evil — even the evil that would pose as good. It cannot be wished away, yet it cannot win the day.

    Of all the sports, running to me speaks of life, of joy, of camaraderie. I’ve never been to a race from which I’ve not come away energized, hopeful, and, yes, radiant. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it.

    Dr. Sheehan said running is joy. I know because I recently sent my son his book about running and being, and peeked into it before I sent it off. I never thought anyone else would outdo me in quoting philosophers and thinkers of times past to buttress his thoughts, but he did, leaving me in the dust.

    We can’t let despair win.

   A story in The Star last week about recycling left me, and perhaps many readers, with an uncomfortable awareness that the state law requiring that all refuse be separated at its source is honored more in the breach than in the observance.

    A spokesman for one of the largest carters on Long Island told The Star that even though separation at the source is the law, nothing requires carters to do anything about what their customers throw out or how they do so. The only requirement is that carters dump what they collect at facilities approved by the state, some of which are reported to actually sort refuse, while others accept specific kinds of waste. He estimated that only 10 to 12 percent of what the company collects is recycled.

    How garbage is handled is not a sexy topic, but it isn’t always boring, either. When Tony Bullock stepped down at the end of 1995, after eight years as town supervisor, he thought he had left the town with a state-of-the-art recycling and composting program following a state mandate that all Long Island landfills be closed. Men were hired to stand at a conveyor belt or picking station, where they sorted everything into the defined categories (a sorting that was also required of those who took their own garbage to the dump). Educational campaigns were undertaken, licenses for carters established, and those who didn’t comply with the regulations were fined. But things did not pan out quite like that.

    By 1996, the town had a $500,000 recycling deficit because sales of recyclable goods were not large enough to cover the sorting expense and having other waste picked up and whisked elsewhere (perhaps to incinerators) was costly. Taxes went up. At the same time, out-of-town carters with alleged Mafia connections were starting to compete with local businesses, too. What had seemed a noble effort was having unsavory consequences.

    In 1997 and ’98, Len Bernard and Pete Hammerle, Republican and Demo­cratic town board members, respectively, worked together to straighten out the mess. They alternated writing a column for The Star called “Divide and Conquer.” Amid tales of employees forced to deal with unhealthy and unmentionable waste, the sorting facility, eventually, was scrapped. The workers were no longer needed, and the recycling center became a transfer station.

    Costs to run the waste-management system are now so low — there isn’t  even a facility manager anymore — that the town reports it makes money on garbage. But I’m not sure that means we are doing an environmentally decent job.

    It’s hard to pin down exactly what percentage of the town’s waste is being recycled today, and I think this is an issue that we residents should get more passionate about. It’s easy to feel good about how Earth-friendly we are when we buy organic vegetables and carry them home in chic cloth shopping bags, but if the bottles for all that mineral water we drink are just ending up in a landfill, how green are we really?