This day, with the sun glistening off the snow, is all the more beautiful because of the storm we’ve been through, a storm that was as punishing as the forecasters had said.

    The night of it, as I was reading by the fire, listening to the wind and the flue as it clanked in the chimney, there was a resounding crack that called me and Henry, who was splayed out on the other couch, to attention. I ran upstairs to see if a tree had hit the roof, and ran down and peered out the back. Nothing there. He continued to look quizzical, but I told him everything seemed to be all right as I resumed my vigil. It’s hard to sleep amid such wild uncertainty.

    The next morning it was very clear what had happened: two gnarled, thick limbs with many branches had come within inches of crushing our Prius. That and the snow — every bit as deep as they’d said, and very wet — summoned up my wellspring of self-reliance, which is to say that I threw myself, once again, upon the mercy of the Lelands, Bill and Danny, who kindly sawed the limbs loose from their embrace of our car, assured me the Cablevision wire the limbs had taken down was harmless, and scooped out enough of the driveway as to give me hope that I’d be able to dislodge the cars in time.

    Perhaps it’s a fear of death, but I can’t stand being snowed in. When, finally, I am able to get out onto the roads, going nowhere in particular in search of nothing in particular — and besides, One-Stop and the General Store were closed — there’s a feeling of triumph. Dare you see the sportswriter at the white heat. . . ?

    But who am I kidding. The Lelands sprung me — once again.

    With them, it’s all for one, one for all, the best of the American way.

   I’ve written of love recently, and of death. Is anything left? Ah, yes, Downton Abbey!

    We were without it for 24 hours during the blizzard, our Cablevision wire having been downed by heavy limbs, and I’m telling you the wait was torturous. There’s only so much reading you can do.

    I, as I think you know — perhaps all too well — have lately been reading Emily Dickinson, who, while clear-eyed, told the truth slant, so slant in a number of cases that absent Helen Vendler’s commentaries I would continually say “What” to her, as apparently a number of baffled men of her time did.

    Reading her reminds me that the best grade I got in college English graced at the upper right of a paper I’d written comparing and contrasting Dickinson and Whitman. What did I say? I haven’t the vaguest. That one had a white beard and that the other wore white? That both sang of themselves, one in hymn meter, the other in free verse? That one thought New Englandly and the other Long Islandly? I don’t know. And I didn’t know then.

    Where did I get off thinking I had the ability — I hadn’t read either of them in any depth — to say anything that was worthy of an A. The answer: I was 21!

    I knew it all then, or rather didn’t know that I didn’t know, which tends to render one insufferable. I marvel now at my four parents’ equanimity.

    Further on the feckless front, I played Hamlet, pretty much uncut, in my senior year in high school. The audience of spring prom-goers (we only had two such coed weekends) was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment for three-plus hours, even with my forgetting huge chunks of the soliloquies. 

    Of course I thought I was wonderful. I came across my framed photo later, mercifully stored by my mother in the attic. And recoiled from the self-important snob in tights. Who was that guy, buoyed by bombast, adrift, as Emily Dickinson would say, beyond the dip of the  bell?

    An aside in an editorial that appeared on this page last week threw down a challenge of sorts. In explaining why The Star persists in leaving the “s” off Ditch Plain, we said that it was in deference to old maps. Well, a reader saw this as an incoming softball and swung.

    “While you are at it,” David Buda wrote in an email, “why doesn’t The East Hampton Star use the historically correct hamlet name of The Springs, instead of plain old Springs?” Oh boy, here we go.

    Whether it is Springs or The Springs (with a capital “T”) has been a chafing point between those from here and those from away for as long as I can remember.

    I apply a couple of rules about place names: One: What did my father, the late Everett T. Rattray, a 12th generation East Hamptoner, call something, and two: How were places described among my peers when I was a student at East Hampton High School in the 1970s. The people I grew up with called it Springs; summer folk called it The Springs.

    Nearly every time I drive north on Three Mile Harbor Road I am amused by what appears to be a piece of black electrician’s tape apparently underlining the “The” on the Welcome to Springs sign. Deliberate? Perhaps. To my ear and in accordance with what my father would say, it’s just wrong.

    Maps themselves can be misleading. I myself have been embroiled in a more-than-five-year effort petitioning the United States Committee on Geographic Names to see the stretch of water between Devon and Goff Point properly marked as Gardiner’s Bay. I admit that Ditch Plain appears as Ditch Plains on some maps, and even an illustration in my own grandmother’s “East Hampton History and Genealogy” refers to The Springs.

    Still, I think tradition is on my side. East Hampton records from the earliest days do not refer to Springs at all. Instead, land allotments are at the Accbonack Meadows or at Three Mile Harbor. Through the 17th century, Wainscott appears, as does Montauk, but no Springs. In the 1870s, though, when there was a flurry of road building, nearly every reference I found does use “The” for Springs. However, there were quite a few place names with the word “the” in those days, such as The Fire-Place, which are no longer in use.

    The final word, at least as far as I am concerned, comes from an edition of the 1845-1870 East Hampton Trustee records published in 1927 by order of the town supervisor. In a description of the town’s villages and hamlets, it says, and I quote its entirety: “Springs. The name for this settlement needs no explanation.”

    One almost gets the feeling that people were arguing about it even then.

   The worst television commercials (IMHO) are those that hype drugs — those obnoxious, fast-talking “ask your doctor if” messages about panaceas for all kinds of ailments. They make me happy that I don’t watch much television.

    In the last two months or so, however, similar pitches (advertorials? infomercials?) have invaded my Mac’s inbox. I have clicked to request that the e-mail system filter them as junk, but so far it hasn’t worked.

    It is, in general, annoying that my e-mail address has gotten on lists for people selling such things as walk-in (rather than sit-in) bathtubs, arthritis treatments, and something called Sensa, which promises to change your shape without changing your life. You sprinkle it on your food and, voila, lose an average of 30.5 pounds in six months.

    These solicitations are trifling, however, compared to the vast variety of health-related e-mails that come from Dr. Mehmet Oz, or purport to. “The Dr. Oz Show” is the worst offender of them all.

    A Feb. 4 New Yorker profile of Dr. Oz by Michael Specter credited him with being an extraordinarily skilled heart surgeon and almost unbelievably gifted. Esquire named him one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. His TV show is reported to draw four million viewers daily. Wow!

    Am I really being spammed by the actual Dr. Oz? Or by unauthorized persons using his name? Perhaps the marketing whizzes at “The Dr. Oz Show” have just gotten a bit too overenthusiastic and hyperbolic in their copywriting?

    I certainly wish I could believe it when the Incredible Wizard of Oz is quoted as saying that the extract of green coffee beans is a “staggering new discovery,” proven to melt belly fat; that an extract of saffron is a “miracle appetite suppressor,” and that garcinia cambogia, which comes from the rind of tamarinds, is the “holy grail of weight loss” because it increases muscle mass and decreases body fat.

    I am afraid I missed the “number-one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat,” raspberry ketones; and I’ve missed the boat on red palm oil to help me live longer, too.

    According to a doctor I spoke with this week, the Dr. Oz who haunts my inbox is a purveyor of snake oil. When I asked whether it was fair to say that at least these products did no harm, my friend the doctor was adamant: There’s no scientific data for their effectiveness — or their safety — he said, pointing out that federal legislation in 1994 freed the herbal-remedy or “nutraceuticals” industry from having to report side effects.

    For me, Dr. Oz is the ultimate example of the blurring between fact and fiction that characterizes conventional wisdom in the digital age. (Not only received ideas about what is healthy and what is not, but about climate change, about politics, about crime, about . . . everything debated in American public life today.)

    To Eric Topol, a scientist and Oz critic, Dr. Oz is at fault for presenting what is real and what is magic as if they were the same thing. He calls what Dr. Oz does “medutainment.” And Dr. Oz does nothing to help his cause when he says, “Medicine is a very religious experience. I have my religion and you have yours.”

    Some time back, I attempted to “unsubscribe” from various e-mail services trying to sell me things I couldn’t possibly want. It isn’t working. I guess I will have to bring in a computer professional to clean up my e-mail situation. (Or at least make those rude sales pitches for weight-loss and geriatric products go away!)

    I was whiling away some time last weekend at the library, when I spied a copy of “Salinger,” the recently published oral biography of J.D. Salinger, the author of “The Catcher in the Rye,” staring back at me from the shelf.

    And even though I have a half dozen other books gathering dust on my bedside table, I brought it home and have been plowing through it and look forward to watching the documentary of the same name, which will be shown on PBS’s “American Masters” series on Tuesday night at 9.

    I was one of those seemingly millions of snot-nosed adolescents who had their worlds turned upside down after being given a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” by a favorite teacher. Just like all the rest of them, I was totally convinced that Holden Caulfield was talking directly to me.

    While “The Catcher in the Rye” remains one of my all-time favorite novels and I’m fond of “Nine Stories,” which followed, I didn’t have much use for “Franny and Zooey” or “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction.” Those two books, which account for the rest of Salinger’s published output, are just so much pretentious tripe, if you ask me.

    If my fascination with Salinger was short-lived, he did have one lasting impact on me. It was because of him that I became a writer. And I think of being a writer as not so much having a vocation or even a serviceable career, but suffering an annoying condition, not unlike the astigmatism that leaves my world a soft blur when I don’t wear my glasses. There’s just not a whole lot I can do about it.

    Unlike Salinger, I found out early on that I simply lacked the creativity for a career in fiction. There were a couple of lousy short stories, but not even an inkling of an American novel, great or otherwise.

    It was almost by default that I became a journalist. It’s an occupation I believe Salinger despised and certainly one that I have had a love-hate relationship with all these years.

    Unlike a few friends and acquaintances, my journalism career never took me to the big city or a major publication. Instead, after college, I worked for a couple of years in a small town surrounded by big dairy farms, bigger forests, and not much else in central Wisconsin. I left there, planning to attend the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University to get a master’s degree, but aborted the idea as too expensive for the expected return on my investment and instead wandered off to work in the Chicago commodities markets.

    Seven or eight years later, when my wife and I moved east, I landed a job here at The Star, where I worked for several years before, tiring of a steady diet of planning and zoning stories, I quit journalism again, this time to try my hand at something called financial planning, which turned out to be nothing more than a financial disaster.

    When I returned 18 months later, The Star took me back into the fold and I toiled away contentedly at what I thought would be my life’s work, covering local government, picking up the occasional offbeat news story, and writing editorials, features, and even a handful of music reviews. I eventually moved on, this time to another newspaper, whose name I seem to have forgotten, where I put in another 121/2 years as an editor before having the rug pulled out from under me last August.

    That misadventure had me once again weighing the pros and cons of leaving journalism for something a little more secure and lucrative. But only a few weeks after being tossed to the curb, I found myself back at The Star on a part-time basis, where my editor, David Rattray, extended to me a lifeline by asking me if I’d like to cover the elections and whatever else I could find until something more permanent showed up.

    Unfortunately, my dear friends, that time is now. I recently accepted a full-time job starting Jan. 31 with The Sag Harbor Express, where it looks like I’ll be doing everything from writing stories and editing copy to shoveling the sidewalk when it snows.

    And maybe, just maybe, unlike a certain writer who toiled away, monk-like, in the woods outside Cornish, N.H., I’ll finally be comfortable in my own skin and accept the fact that I am a writer after all.

    Stephen J. Kotz is a temporary member of The Star’s editorial staff.

   “I felt so environmentally impoverished,” I said to Rusty Drumm, a Montauker, “as I drove the other day out of Montauk toward scruffy Springs.”

    “It’s God’s country,” he said.

    “You can say that again.”

    “It’s God’s country,” he said.

    “You’re not kidding. I’ve never seen such a sky. Radiant with filtered silver light cascading down through tiers of mauve clouds . . . as if the heavens were opening to receive me. How could you doubt an afterlife after having been vouchsafed such a vision.”

    Later, when I told Durell Godfrey, many of whose photos on these pages are heavenly, she said, matter-of-factly, “I know — it was as if you could hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”

    “And the Vienna Boys’ Choir too. Not to mention the Harlem Gospel Choir, the Mississippi Mass Choir, the U.S. Naval Academy Men’s Glee Club, the Hamptons Choral Society, and the Swingle Singers.”

    I stopped on Old Montauk Highway and took photos, but as with the full moon I once saw over the Maidstone Club, I learned later that they weren’t quite as astounding as what I’d seen with my mind’s eye. And still, I had seen glory beckoning.

    With this thought in mind, I turned to Unamuno’s “Tragic Sense of Life” where, on page 240, he says, “And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for a never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled.”

    An ever-expanding consciousness, along with the Universe. Not a bad idea, though perhaps we simply become extinct. Either way, you’re inclined to do your best, to be mindful as you can be rather than just muddle through — to continually aspire to live in wondrous Montauk rather than to be sequestered in Tiffany Estates.

    It’s hard, of course, to be always alert to the wondrous, especially when there are so many distractions making claims on oneself and so many forms to fill out. We — I say ‘we,’ though it’s predominately she — are going through one of those muddle-through times now. When, she wonders, will death and duty loosen their hold and let her live again, when will “D&D” yield to “R&R?” Will it happen in Cayo Levantado at the end of the month, or will we be taken hostage by the sequester? It’s hard to become one with everything when your cellphone keeps ringing and when your mailbox is packed with forms requiring immediate attention. They say we’ll be incommunicado on Cayo Levantado. “Estoy incommunicado en Cayo Levantado, que maravilla he logrado . . .” and so on.

    Which reminds me, there are taxes to attend to. I think we’ve almost reached the point where we’re going broke for our deductions. It’s our way of keeping hope alive.

   “I want your life,” said my Aunt Pat from California upon seeing me at my nephew’s wedding on Friday night. “I joined Facebook just to look at your pictures,” she said.

    “No, you don’t,” I assured her. I don’t post an update when I struggle to make the rent, I explained. I don’t share a picture of that. But yes, I live on an amazing island and I am blessed with a breathtakingly beautiful commute to East Hampton, by land and sea, and I enjoy capturing it when I can and sharing.

    I’m sure Aunt Pat is not the only one who thinks I live the life of Riley, whoever that is. “In her color portrait world, she’s got it all,” sang Rob Thomas in his song “3 a.m.”

    I did post one picture of myself being pulled over, I thought. I just had to, the contrast of the Mardi Gras beads on the rearview mirror and the red flashing lights offering an opportunity not to be passed up. But the next four times I got pulled over, for an expired inspection, were not so colorful, and the last one brought me to tears, when I really just needed a quick drive to the ocean for a breath on deadline day at the paper. I have been trying to remedy the inspection issue with estimates and regular visits to mechanics on my days off, with no success.

    The next time I saw Aunt Pat I was crying in the glamorous ladies’ room of the Fox Hollow Inn after it hit me that my father was never going to take my mother onto the dance floor again. My therapist told me I have all five of the top causes of stress, and people think I have the perfect life. In some ways, I do. Aunt Pat hugged me and cried with me at the loss of such a huge presence in our incredibly close, large family.

    My cousin Lisa was also impressed with my life as determined from my Facebook posts. “I see that you’re a journalist for a newspaper!” she said. That is so exciting and fun; you are so lucky, she said.

    I agreed, but I wondered if my gorgeous cousin had any clue how much my hairstyle suffers progressively from Monday through Wednesday as deadline approaches, along with the decline in the number of breaths taken, my level of patience, and my ability to socialize. (Many know not to talk to me on a Tuesday; some find out the hard way.)

    We Star writers pour our hearts into our weekly stories, before editors fine-tune the words to flow smoothly for the reader, and we wait, wondering what might be sliced and diced. Lately our stories have often had to be cut or held, what with the decrease in advertising leading to a much smaller paper at this time of year.

    This week I saw a lot of negative posts about the media, but I wonder if those people are supporting print newspapers and public radio or simply the drama-filled, sensational television news. I wonder how many have a subscription to The Star. I wonder how many even read any full articles at all, or rely on the scrolling words at the bottom of a television screen or their Twitter and Facebook “news” feeds, or, worse yet, extremist radio personalities.

    Our paper is well done. So much energy and detail go into its content and photographs, in addition to checking facts and fairness. It is an amazing group effort, and some of us who rely on the income from the work struggle greatly to make ends meet in positions not known for high pay. But we think it important that messages get out, and are drawn to furthering that purpose.

    We are a cool bunch. Through our own stress and trauma and those of people we write about, we support one another with empathetic glances and cupcakes. We share a kitchen in a lovely historic office, with uncomfortable chairs and vintage equipment that frustrates us but sustains a pleasant simplicity.

    Sometimes there are the delightful sounds of children gracing the building, and there is almost always a dog or two, and even the occasional visit by a miniature pig, but not lately, due to circumstances too funny to mention. (Ask David Rattray if you must know, and definitely before you go out and get yourself a miniature pig.)

    A pig is just one of the things David must deal with while managing all of the sections of the paper, the angry complaints, the letters to the editor, keeping employees happy and paid, preventing lawsuits, and creating an online presence to keep up with high-tech readers. All while picking up children from school and taking them to their various lessons.

    It is not easy. But it is worth it. Sharing the truth and the good news is exciting, and it is important to warn residents of the bad news. Perhaps if it wasn’t for our stories and editorials, the situation here would not improve.

    News needs to be read. I hope that those who understand its value will support newspapers and share the content whenever possible. Meanwhile, we will continue doing our jobs in hopes of a day we can make a living from such a career, or at least the appearance of brownies on our kitchen “share” table.

   Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

   Two Novembers ago I was set straight by Jane Callan, who tends the flowers in The Star’s windows, as I was bemoaning the season that was falling into “the sere, the yellow leaf.” Winter, she said, to the contrary, was not a sad time — not a sad time for a lover of flowers, at any rate — but a time of renewal, a time for gathering strength “so that they’ll come back even stronger and bigger than they were before.”

    There is a wonderful resilience in nature that is eminently evident to anyone who has ever had a plant, but too few of us, she thinks, really pay attention. “Most people,” she said during a conversation this week, “want the plant to be where they want it to be, not where it wants to be. I see that a lot when I go into people’s homes.”

    She traces her love of plants to her childhood when she visited greenhouses in New Jersey. She likes to see them grow and thrive. She won’t go so far as to say they speak to her, but by keeping an eye out she is attentive to their needs, which, she says, are not great. The flowering kind basically need proper light, proper water, and to be free from stress — just as we do, in order to live long lives.

    “I can see that that one,” she said, pointing toward a hibiscus in the window, “needs a drink.”

    Anybody passing by this office can tell that these plants, which include the aforementioned hibiscus, gardenia, jasmine, and citrus tree-form “standards,” as well as cyclamens, roses, begonias, lantanas, bougainvillea, and flowering cacti, are where they want to be, and that The Star truly “shines for all” in their case.

    “I’m not sure what direction the sun is coming from,” she said in answer to one of my questions, “but they like it, and they like the cool nights. In the summer, I take them home and keep them outside in the pots so that they can have the sun, fresh air, and the rain to wash over them.”

    Interestingly, she keeps no plants in her own house. “There’s no light. Because of the overhangs. It was built in the ’60s.” Were she to do so, her plants would languish, merely exist, rather than live.

    “I feel sorry for the plants I’ve seen that haven’t been properly cared for. You can tell — they look scraggly, sapped of strength. Most people don’t know what they’re supposed to look like . . . they’re just there. They’re thought of as a design element. It’s always a problem: Who are you thinking of? The plant? Or yourself?”

    A question we all, or most of us anyway, could take to heart.

   April showers bring May flowers, but March showers bring peepers. These tiny frogs are rarely seen but heard every evening from now until late summer. They begin as a thin chorus, gradually growing into a stunningly loud, high-pitched din by the peak of breeding season.

    In past years, when the peepers reached their orgiastic crescendo I would phone my friend Todd Osborn in Seattle and, saying nothing, not even hello, just let the frogs do their thing while he listened. Todd died last year from cancer, so this season’s frog-song carries for me a mournful note amid all the hope and amphibian lustfulness and biological imperative it signifies. I will be thinking of him as the frogs rave on.

    Tuesday’s downpour and warmer daytime temperatures were enough to draw the peepers from their winter hibernation, and a knot of them could be heard calling just after dark from the marsh near the driveway. It was too wet to stand outside and give their song a good listen, but comforting that the sound signaled the end of winter as I walked in from the driveway after work.

    As I do each year, I wrote the date of the peepers’ arrival on a basement wall in pencil. Ten and 12 years ago, the peepers would not be heard until the week of March 20 or later. This may be too short a time sample to mean anything, though the trend toward earlier appearances is clear from my basement record.

    From the day the frogs first sing there is no turning back. Osprey will soon appear overhead, joining the red-winged­ blackbirds, house wrens, and other early arrivals on the South Fork. Striped bass season opens tomorrow. It’s difficult to believe: Just a week ago, we were shoveling out and groaning under yet another dump of snow.

   The flight from La Guardia to Halifax is a cinch: A small plane operated by Chautauqua Airlines for Delta gets you there in less than an hour and a half, and makes it hard to believe you are traveling to another country and have to bring along your passport. So it was with what you might call careless abandon that, in the air headed to Nova Scotia, I filled out a Canadian customs declaration. Too much abandon, as it turned out. Just exactly why I answered in the negative when ticking off the query that asks if you are bringing in food remains unclear even to me.

    I had checked in my suitcase at La Guardia. In it was packed a small round of soft French cheese, Petit Livarot from Normandy, doubly wrapped in a balsam-like box, inside my cosmetics bag. It was a gift for my daughter, who lives in rural Nova Scotia (a land of many lobsters but few cheeses). I was dismayed when, after a delay of a two hours, we landed at Stanfield International in Halifax and I didn’t find my suitcase on the carousel at baggage claim. “The airlines aren’t supposed to lose suitcases anymore,” I thought, fretting. But the airline hadn’t.

    Turning around to find someone to ask about it, I spied the suitcase leaning against a barrier with a uniformed guard standing nearby. When I walked up and expressed relief at its being there, I noticed that a green tag had been placed on it with the words: “Take to Inspection.”

    It didn’t occur to me that anything was amiss as I got on a fairly long line of recently debarked passengers whose bags also had been cherry-picked. And then, with my suspect luggage up on a low counter, a customs official asked to see the form I had filled out; he surveyed my answers, then asked whether I was carrying any food. Blithely (no, foolishly) I said “no.”

    Only then did it dawn on me. Cheese! An official sniffer dog had identified something in the outer pouch of my suitcase . . . and there it was, the Petit Livarot, wedged between toiletries. I had no good answer when asked why I had not declared it. Shame-faced, I listened to a rundown on Canada’s customs regulations. I began to get quite anxious. Would I be fined? Jailed? How serious would the penalty be?

    A second official walked over, peered at the little package of cheese, looked at me, and said, “My dog, Roscoe, is never wrong.” After rifling through the rest of the suitcase and finding no other contraband, the inspectors apparently decided that I wouldn’t have left the cheese in an outside pouch if I had intentionally been attempting to smuggle it in. Then, they actually put the cheese back in its little box, zipped the cosmetics bag back up, and let me go on my way.

    It wasn’t until that evening, when I had presented the cheese, along with the embarrassing story, to my son-in-law, that I realized how brazen was my crime. Even if there hadn’t been a professional customs dog named Roscoe on duty to sniff it out, the jig would have been up. “What is that smell? Good lord!” said my daughter, coming into the room. My own sense of smell hasn’t been very good for some years now — and so I wasn’t aware that I had, apparently, illegally imported to Canada the smelliest cheese in all of France. We double-wrapped it back up, and sealed it in the refrigerator, because it was stinking up the kitchen.