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.

   Perhaps one of the more depressing, if relatively inconsequential, predictions of the results of the continued filling of the atmosphere with man-made carbon dioxide is that poison ivy will become more widespread and even more noxious.

    Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is among the so-called greenhouse gasses that are trapping heat around the earth. Researchers at a Duke University forest first noticed that a modest increase in the level of CO2, which they supplied to test woodland plots, caused poison ivy growth to surge. Headlines in the popular press followed the publication of the results in a scientific paper. Not only was the planet heating up, they cried, it is getting more dangerous, too.

    On my own little piece of ground, which is getting rapidly smaller every year, thanks to rising sea level-prompted erosion, bigger, badder poison ivy is grim news. Foolishly, about a week ago I went bare-armed at a weed-pulling effort around my two small, raised garden beds. Though I was wearing gloves, I got oil from poison ivy roots across my forearms. Then, I picked up our 3-year-old, whose side and back erupted in itchy welts a few days later.

    Ellis, who is in the indestructible post-toddler stage of youngboyhood, seemed little bothered by the rash. I, on the other hand, found the temptation to scratch nearly intolerable, and after trying Calamine lotion for a few days opted for cortisone — a steroid I usually avoid.

    I don’t know if you can overdose on cortisone applied to your arms, but at work one morning, I felt distinctly light-headed and had a strong urge to go hit home runs with Mark McGuire. Well, not really the home run part.

    CO2, the researchers found, causes poison ivy to produce a more potent form of urushiol, the oil that brings on the red and annoying allergic reaction in humans. Another study subsequently found that the juiced plants had double the growth rate and could bounce back from attempts at eradication more quickly.

    East Hampton Village, interestingly enough, where the Star office is, is more or less free of poison ivy. Reading a microfilm of a long-ago issue recently, I noticed an item about an early 20th-century drive to rid the village of the plant. Now, I can’t help but wonder if the predictions are right: Will the plant soon be, as one scientist joked, knocking at our windows?

   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.

   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?

   “Have you seen a white skateboard?” the woman asked me, a hint of desperation in her voice.

    I had noticed her a short time earlier at the Abraham’s Path kids park run by the town in Amagansett. We were on the basketball court, and she and a young girl were taking shots, talking in Spanish and English interchangeably, while my son, Ellis, and I passed a ball back and forth.

     Across the park, two boys, the woman’s sons, I assumed, took turns on a skateboard on the ramps, while several other girls who were under her charge rode bikes.

    On that late Saturday afternoon, it was chilly as the sun went below the Town Lane oak trees. Someone not far away was cutting something with a chain saw. A couple of older boys and one or two other adults taking care of children were the only other people in the park.

    Before it had gone missing, I had noticed the skateboard, a Penny Board, of the sort that my 11-year-old daughter had idly asked me to buy her a couple of weeks earlier as we walked in East Hampton Village. I said no, or more like, “No way. You already have a skateboard.” She probably responded, “You’re mean,” or some variant on that particular kind of guilt trip.

    For all the world, the boards, with molded plastic decks and wide, flared wheels, remind me of the first, junky skateboards we had as kids in the 1970s, before we graduated to laminated wooden decks and better wheels. But, as a middle-aged dad, there is much I don’t know about what’s cool and what’s not, or so I am reminded daily. Penny Boards, at about $100 a pop, are cool.

    Protocol at the youth park is casual as far as personal possessions are concerned. Things are left here and there as kids move from one activity to another. Those of us who are there frequently more or less know which gear belongs to the park’s free rag-tag collection of bikes and helmets and so on and which does not.

    There was an all-corners search for the white board; nearly each of the family in turn asked if I had seen it. Either a parent unsure about who owned what innocently packed it into a car, or, the other possibility (more likely in my opinion) was that one of the older kids, noticing an easy grab of desirable gear, spirited it away.

    I helped look for a while as Ellis and I made a few final rounds of the track, he on his three-wheel scooter, me jogging alongside. It was pretty clear that it was not going to be found.

    By the time we left, the woman seemed resigned that the skateboard was gone for good. Her kids asked me one last time if I had seen it. “It glows in the dark!” one said. “No, sorry,” I said, really meaning it.

   My 5-year-old granddaughter, Nettie, is good at wishful thinking. I doubt that an adult gave her the idea that if you told the Easter Bunny, like Santa, what you wanted, you probably would get it. I am sure the bunny left her and her 3-year-old brother, Teddy, baskets with appropriate goodies on Easter morning, but leaving the bunny a note about what she wanted for (ahem) Easter must have been her own idea. And it was a two-sided note at that.

    Because she is still learning to read and write, and because I know her parents wouldn’t have indulged her in this, my guess is that she had encouragement and help from a baby sitter. (I had helped her write two stories, about a dog and cat who defeated a dragon and about a mermaid who wanted a pet dolphin, on a recent visit.)

    On one side of Nettie’s note it said: “Plase can I have a black kitten that never grows pu.” The spelling of please and the reversed u and p were testimony to a child’s hand. On the other side of the note, she wrote: “Dear Easter Bunny please can I have an iPod my mom and dad said yes.” Her parents had said no such thing.

    An e-mail about Nettie’s notes capped a weekend in Bunny Land. East Hampton certainly goes all out for kids on Easter these days. There were at least three community egg hunts and there had been at least two a weekend earlier, in East Hampton and Amagansett alone. When my own children were little, we relied on family and friends for egg hunts. For many years, we gathered at Mary Ella and Jim Reutershan’s place at Stony Hill, in Amagansett. An expanse in front of their house sloped downward from a low brick wall at the edge of a patio and the grassy area was surrounded by bushes and trees. It was full of perfect hiding places for kids of a range of ages. It was a great party, and it was the 1970s: Those were raucous events for the grownups, bloody Marys and all.

    One year, my daughter, the same person who didn’t approve of an iPod for her daughter, decided she was too old for egg hunts. Instead, she went to the party in a bunny outfit she made herself, starting with a pink leotard and tights, and hopped around giving the littler kids foil-wrapped eggs.

    Times change. Private rituals become commercially sponsored events. The Easter Bunny at the community egg hunt at Amagansett Square on Saturday was more than six feet tall, and he/she was a friendly sort, squatting to hold babies while parents took photos of them in the bunny’s arms and squatting to shake hands or give high fives to little people. The event, staged by the Meeting House restaurant at the Square, was fun, and it was jammed, as I hear the other hunts were that day. Kids dashed about to find eggs, and were then invited to decorate eggs or cookies and to have their faces painted.

    The family Easter egg hunt migrated from my house to my son and daughter-in-law’s this year. They served bagels and lox, cream cheese and tofu, cake pops, and fruit — but there wasn’t a Bloody Mary in sight.

   “Childrens’ Garden — No Ball Games, Cycling, Dogs” reads a sign published with a recent story in The Guardian, an English daily newspaper, informing readers that “the sometimes vexing question of where and when to add an apostrophe appears to have been solved in one corner of Devon: The local authority is planning to do away with them altogether.”

    Eastern Long Island has more in common with Devon than the name of an Amagansett neighborhood and a yacht club. Like us, it is, according to Wikipedia, “the only county in England to have two coastlines,with bays for fishing and seaside towns that attract tourists.” So should East Hampton follow the lead of Devon, England, on punctuation?

    Although Devon seems to be targeting only street names, The Guardian reported on March 15, “the news of the Tory-controlled council’s (apostrophe required) decision provoked howls of condemnation . . . from champions of plain English, fans of grammar, and politicians.” A spokesman for the Plain English Campaign remarked that it would set a bad example for children being taught punctuation in school “only to see it not being used correctly on street signs.”

    Adopting an anti-apostrophe policy aimed at reducing potential confusion over street names also alarmed Ben Bradshaw, a former culture secretary and member of Parliament, who condemned it on Twitter. “Tory Mid Devon Council bans the apostrophe to avoid confusion — Whole point of proper grammar is to avoid confusion!”

    Rogue apostrophes can certainly make a writer or broadcaster appear less than competent. Much of the trouble seems to arise from someone thinking an apostrophe is necessary to create a plural, as when a shop advertises “tea’s and coffee’s” or a restaurant announces it is “open Sunday’s,” or a television weather report broadcasts an alert on todays “low’s.” Anyone immortalizing in print the word “potato’s” or “tomato’s” is in danger of being mocked as a real Dan Quayle.

    There are further good reasons for maintaining apostrophes. In most cases, they are informative. Take Roses Grove Road in Southampton, for example. I don’t recall ever seeing it with an apostrophe, so (as I am not steeped in Southampton lore) it’s impossible to know whether the road had a lot of roses on it at one time or was named for a woman or family called Rose.

    At The Star, we try mightily to hold on to original apostrophes and original meanings, relying on history and common usage, even though sources are often obscure and sometimes contradictory. Note: It’s Sayre’s Path and Hand’s Creek Road, for example.

    In the ordinary vernacular of East Hamptoners, we talk about Buell Lane even though the street is labeled Buell’s Lane on one frequently used local map and Buells on another. (I blame the mapmakers. They have also managed to misplace the entire name of Gardiner’s Bay — a whole other kettle of nomenclature.)

    Not far off Three Mile Harbor Road, a popular restaurant is Michaels’ at Maidstone, signifying more than one Michael involved and that they both are, or were, owners. (When I first saw the logo, however, I wanted to move the little airborne comma between the “L” and the “S.”) Meanwhile, in Bridgehampton, the logo for Marders Nursery has long since dropped an apostrophe between the “R” and the “S,” and who are we to insist on putting one in just because we know the family name is Marder?

    Barneys New York did something similar a decade or two ago, apparently because the marketing department thought it just looked better that way on packaging and bags.

    As in Britain, apostrophes are slowly but surely going out of style on this side of the pond, too, and not only in street names but in words where they can make all the difference. There is your versus you’re, of course. I cry blue murder if a wrong it’s (versus its) shows up in the pages of The Star. But the truth is I myself have knowingly left out an apostrophe in an it’s while texting, assuming that the recipient would understand when I didn’t mean to word to be possessive. Maybe I should cut to the chase and blame computers.

    I might not agree with her on the subject of the serial comma (also known as the Oxford comma), but on the subject of apostrophes I have to agree with Lynne Truss, the author of the best-selling “Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” in which she wrote, “No matter that you have a Ph.D. and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing: Good food at it’s best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot, and buried in an unmarked grave.”

   I was surprised when, on arising this morning, I was cheery. There was no reason to be, but perhaps I am programmed to be so, particularly when things aren’t going well.

    There is spring, of course. Where it is I don’t know, but everyone’s saying they can sense it; there seems to be general agreement as to its inevitability. And then, of course, summer, which I inveighed against recently, perhaps unfairly, but it had it coming. “Ou sont les etes d’autant?”

    I do these “25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports” columns each month, and it is interesting, as Pat Hope once said, to meet myself coming around the corner. Things go whooosh! Just like that. It’s gotten so that yesterday seems like today. Indeed, it may be “all one fuckin’ day, man,” as Janis Joplin said.

    Except some days do seem different — more cheery, less cheery — but if you always look at the big picture, which is impossible, I guess that it’s all one fuckin’ day. During which there is a time for this, a time for that, as Ecclesiastes says. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, nothing new under the sun . . . a chasing after wind.

    Therefore, we are to enjoy ourselves, he says, inasmuch as our days here are few and we’re all dead in the end.

    “Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might,” saith Ecclesiastes. Something to get the blood flowing.

    Amen to that. In fact, I understand the editor of The Onion recently advised such a course of action, and everybody’s marveling on Facebook that a funny man is such a sage. It’s good advice, though, for Americans, many of whose hands endlessly do with their might the bidding of monolithic corporations.

    It is this facelessness, this growth of unanswerable power that is scary. We need flesh-and-blood contact, not machines telling you if you know your party’s extension you can dial it at any time. While you wait — because you never know your party’s extension — you could be finding something to do with your might.

    Let’s not get put on interminable hold. Our days here are few.

    And with that I’m off to Cayo Levantado.

   In the early East Hampton Town records accounts are frequent about the initial apportionment of land by the trustees, who were the only governing body. Though it is not stated in an obvious fashion, it appears that the grants of acreage were conditional in that recipients were obligated to abide by certain obligations, some spelled out, others apparently assumed.

    Requirements described in some of the records are for keeping a road passable, as in 1667 when Thomas Chatfield and John Miller were told, “Ye highway being still to remaine as they are already layed out.” Elsewhere in the old town books are orders that landowners had to keep their lands properly fenced.

    Property owners in those days seemed to be able to sell their land, however, more or less the way it is done today, with a private transaction signed in the presence of witnesses and officially recorded. In a 1678 contract signed with an X, John Edwards sold 10 acres “near a place called Indian well” for the sum of 20 pounds. And so it went. In 1693 Samuell S. Brookes sold his eight acres at Hog Creek to Jacob Schellinger for 45 pounds. Another transaction involved about six acres “lying neer the walnuts . . . in accabonick Neck,” among other plots.

    Little is said in the early town records about what a property owner could do on his land. (They were mostly men, of course.) Far more time and ink seemed to be spent listing the earmarks distinguishing cattle and who would be responsible for watching the herds sent each spring to Montauk to graze.

    It is a far cry from today’s Town Hall, where even the color of a shop’s new business sign can be the subject of several weeks’ debate. Want to build a house near a wetland? It will take up to a year to secure the necessary approval.

    Yet in some aspects property ownership 350 years ago is strikingly familiar. Then as now, land meant making money, if at a somewhat smaller scale.

   When Hillary Clinton, in an intense primary battle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, said she was ready to lead the country from day one, she started an avalanche of everyday people using day one. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says the use of these words to indicate the start or the beginning of something dates back to 1971, but, in my opinion, it wasn’t really common in the popular vernacular until an estimated 2.5 million people watched the candidates debate in 2008.

     I have no big objection to day one. It’s catchy and emphatic enough. By contrast, I never could stand hearing Hillary’s husband, President Bill Clinton, saying how he thought we could grow the economy back in the 1990s. Before the era of Bill, the verb to grow meant to raise something, specifically something organic. Now, it has acquired a second meaning: to improve or increase.

    This is unfortunate, and it makes my brain hurt, but, clearly, there is no going back.

    I wish I had studied linguistics. Scholars, I am sure, can pinpoint the origins of such changes in English, and revel in tracing those changes, rather than just wincing and moaning about them. I am afraid, however, that at heart I am a dyed-in-the-wool conservative where language is concerned. Call me a word curmudgeon.

    Would you like to know another emerging usage that raises my hackles? It is when people say to gift when they really mean simply to give. As in: The sponsors of the V.I.P. suite gifted all the Oscar nominees with swag bags of goodies.

    How about the words “going forward”? I certainly would not use them to mean in the future and would ban this phrase from The Star if anyone would pay attention to me. The TV pundits say going forward all the time, these days, so I have to assume that those who use it in everyday speech are addicted to television news programs. (It’s almost as bad as at this point in time, another morsel of television-ese that makes my hair stand on end.)

    Then there are the overused words “transparent” and “transparency.” They are frequently heard lately in a political context, meaning the actions of a government entity are available for public perusal or the reasons for a decision are clear — or not. But Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary hasn’t caught on to this definition yet. It still gives the first definition of transparent as “the property of transmitting light without appreciable scattering so that bodies lying beyond are seen clearly,” although its second definition, “free from pretense or deceit,” gets closer. This is one case in which I think the new usage is actually useful: It gets to the heart of a previously somewhat complex idea, in short order.

    Right here is where I should end this column with the maladroit “that said” (or, perhaps, even the ear-torturing that having been said). But, well . . . do I need to say more?