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.

   It will be a good ole time in Montauk this weekend for the Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day festivities. The fun starts tomorrow at a luncheon to honor this year’s grand marshal, Jack Perna. It’s also an opportunity for everyone to pull the green out of their closets.

    Women will be wearing green dresses, green blazers, green shoes, green nail polish, and, like me, a green scarf. Green is not my most flattering color, so I keep the wearing of the green minimal. When I wear green it makes me look as if I’m sick. I don’t want people I’m talking to thinking I might be getting ready to puke on their new green shoes.

    Members of the Friends of Erin will all be sporting their green blazers and black derbies, and I have to say, some of them clean up real nice. Other men add a flash of green on their ties, and still others will smile with green teeth, but I don’t think that’s intentional.

    The best outfits are the ones worn for the parade on Sunday. That’s when spectators really dress it up. It amazes me how foolish some people will allow themselves to look during a parade. But hey, everyone loves a parade, right? Well, everyone except those who actually live in Montauk, many of whom stay home to avoid the rowdy crowds.

    Quite a few of the women lining the parade route wear green wigs, but I’m thinking a little hair dye might be in order and might offer myself up for the job. I can do it, you know. I went to hairdressing school and turned many a head of hair green, unintentionally of course, but they got over it, though some of the lawsuits might still be pending.

    While I was really good at doing hair dye for those who wished to sport a green head of hair, hairstyling was not my forte, which I learned the hard way, especially when women would cry when they looked in the mirror at my station.

    In beauty school, as they called it, experimentation was rampant. My husband never knew what I’d look like when I came home each day. I had streaks of purple hair before that was a trend, a shag haircut dyed brown that made me look more like Ringo Starr rather than Joan Jett, whose look I coveted, and various colors of nail polish, which was a stretch because I don’t usually wear nail polish. It makes me feel too dressed up for daily life in Montauk.

    We also did facials. And that’s when I really turned green. At beauty school — which is an oxymoron because most of the technicians weren’t even close to being pretty and they didn’t compensate with a good personality — we were encouraged to use ourselves as guinea pigs. So one day I got home early and slathered my face with a thick green clay mask. This was years ago when people still used all that junk. It had to stay on for a half hour, so I lay in bed reading while my skin was supposed to be tightening and getting younger looking, and I fell asleep on my side.

    My husband came home, walked into the bedroom, and called my name. I turned over to greet him with the green clay mask on, which by this point was all crackly and flaking and looked like the spackle painters use, and he literally jumped with fear, thinking I had caught some deadly disease at school.

    So, I’ll just stick to my green scarf this weekend. But I will be at most of the festivities, wearing my usual black pants and whatever blouse isn’t wrinkled. And if I get adventurous, I might add a few green streaks to my blond hair. With my luck, though, and lack of hairdressing talent, it might just fall out, and I’ll be stuck wearing a green hat!

    Or I might just stay home and drink green beer. I hear it’s good for you, no matter what the color.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   “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.

   It was on a stormy Christmas Day, 1811, that field hands and members of the Gardiner family on the island that bore their name made their way to the shore where a French sailing vessel was founding in heavy seas.

    Some 100 vessels were said to have been driven ashore on Long Island in the fierce northeaster that stretched from Dec. 24 to 25 that year. The blizzard slammed New England, then crossed the Atlantic, adding to winter turmoil that had troubled the Royal Navy greatly. Foundering just off the island, the Maria Louisa, a schooner of 230 tons, struck on an intensely cold day, Sarah Diodati Gardiner wrote in her “Early Memories of Gardiner’s Island.” An unnumbered portion of the crew died, to be later buried on the island, presumably, and the survivors were taken to the manor house.

    Her grandmother, then but a girl, was eager to see the sailors and crept to the door of the lower kitchen for a look. There they lay, stretched on bedding on the floor, where they “excited the compassion of the household,” Miss Gardiner wrote.

    Another survivor, a Maltese cat, became a member of the family. Miss Gardiner’s great-grandfather, as she told it, noticed the cat clinging to a piece of wreckage and asked that it be brought to him. The men were able to grab the cat, and presented it to him wrapped in a large silk handkerchief. Restored to health, the cat’s offspring were numerous, Miss Gardiner wrote.

    A generation later, when Miss Gardiner was a girl, an old friend of the family who owned one of the Maltese’s descendents offered to send it to her. A few days later, Miss Gardiner’s family, then living on Staten Island, received a package with the cat inside, which they christened Maria Louisa after the ship from which her forebear had been rescued.

    The cat’s bloodline is surely lost to time, but one does wonder if some of the local felines hereabouts carry a little of that long-ago Maltese’s spirit.

   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’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.

   If you are like me and do not have many friends or family between the ages of 18 and 25, it is possible that you aren’t entirely aware of the Selective Service System, in which 20 million young men are now registered — and therefore signed up to be drafted should a draft be instated.

    (It may seem strange to be worrying about a draft at a time when the United States is no longer at war in Iraq and when President Obama has said the last combat troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. But, taking the long view — and given the events of the past 10 years — I am not sanguine about enduring peace. Are you?)

    My own feelings on the issue of conscription were shaped by our nation’s experiences during the Vietnam War; for me, the very word  “draft” sets off visceral alarm bells. But there is, of course, more than one side to this coin. Is it fair for this country to rely entirely on volunteers to fight our wars, when volunteers are most likely to be from the disadvantaged backgrounds? Well, no, of course not. Clearly, an all-volunteer military does place an undue burden on people of color and on the sons and daughters of the poor.

    It is something of a cliché to say it, but it is no doubt true that congressional leaders would be less willing to endorse the costs of war if their own children were called up.

    I have read that most career military men, at least publicly, do not support a draft, instead holding that a professional force is the only way to maintain high standards. But Retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was the commander of the international forces in Afghanistan, has broken ranks to state on record that a revived draft is needed to address a burden that is shared unequally. “I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk,” he said last year. “You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game.”

   Thomas E. Ricks, an expert on military policy who is a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, has taken this argument to the next level. In a New York Times op-ed piece published hot on the heels of General McChrystal’s headline-making remarks, Mr. Ricks wrote that females as well as males, coming out of high school, should be conscripted and, moreover, that their service should be divided into three tiers.

    One tier would be 18 months in the military — not deployment, but non-combat jobs like staffing the Pentagon or maintaining military bases — with low pay but excellent post-service benefits, including free college tuition. Another would be civilian service, for a slightly longer period and equally low pay (with conscripts working as park rangers, teachers, aides for the aged, and so on). And the third would be the right to opt out of service by pledging never to accept government assistance of any sort whatsoever.

    Personally, I cannot help but think Mr. Ricks’s proposal would only create yet another draft that —  like the one that was in operation during the Vietnam War — puts young people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in the line of fire, while allowing the rich to slip away to safety. Who, after all, would be most likely to make the draft-avoidance bargain (declining future government assistance, from Medicare to mortgage guarantees)? Why, those who can afford to. And who would be most likely to sign up for military service in exchange for, say, a chance at college? The poor.

    Really, though, what all these pro-draft arguments boil down to, from my perspective as a veteran of the 1960s, is a pile of justifications for something that simply should not be allowed happen. While Europe and most of the rest of the world are downsizing their military, why are we still on the march?

    My own children are long past draft age, but I do not like the idea that my grandchildren might be legally required to register some day. The question shouldn’t be how to make the waging of war more equitable but how to make war no more.

   With birdsong starting to fill the air around my home and my gearing up for some heavy-duty spring cleaning, it has come to my attention that I need a wife. I almost found myself one in the fall, but after three dates I realized a divorce would be imminent. Besides, she had kids and I already have a few of my own, plus a grandson. I didn’t need any more children in my home.

    Her name was Maria and she was young and energetic. I was so excited the first time she showed up in my driveway. She got out of her minivan, dark hair pulled back into a serious ponytail, armed with a bucket, cleaning materials, a vacuum, and rubber gloves. She took this cleaning job seriously, I could tell.

    After our first time, my stovetop glowed, the bathroom shined, and the living room parquet floors were scrubbed so clean, she nicked the wood in one spot. But I was prepared to overlook that because it was such a luxury to have someone else doing my domestic, wifely duties.

    I’m not some spoiled little housewife who needs someone else to do her dirty work; I just need help once in a while with the big things, especially in summer. My daughter and her boyfriend usually come home from Hawaii and stay with us for a few months, and my son, who has his own home in Montauk’s harbor area, tends to still live here and joins us almost every night for dinner.

    Factor in my (messy) husband, (shedding) dog, (spoiled) cat, whose name is Storm but is called Princess Pussface because of her disposition, and (beloved) grandson, who leaves little clumps of colorful Play-Doh in his wake, and you can imagine my workload.

    On our second date, Maria decided to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting on the kitchen floor cleaning out my refrigerator. Since I like to get out of the way when anyone is working in my home, I didn’t realize this until she left and I opened a now thoroughly empty fridge. I don’t keep old or rotting food in my fridge; I’m actually pretty fussy about that and have a two-day rule: If it’s not eaten in two days it gets chucked or saved for the cats.

    I didn’t need her to clean my fridge; that’s a job I do myself. I needed her to scrub the tub and shower stall, wash the kitchen floor, and do some dusting. A lot of food in the fridge was for the feral cats I feed in my backyard. One of them found her way down to my house from a colony at the Montauk Lighthouse many years ago, and she expects a good meal each night. There is not usually kibble on these cats’ menu, but that’s what they ended up with and seemed to relish. They’re probably sick of all the lobster, steak, fresh fish, and scrambled eggs I leave for them.

    The relationship’s defining moment came on our next date, a Wednesday morning, when Maria showed up with her little boy, about 4 years old. He was adorable and I got him set up in front of my TV before I went back to my computer in the back of the house to work. Soon, I heard a loud banging noise. I ran back in and found the no-longer-adorable little boy using a vintage wooden sailboat I keep on my bookshelves to smash though the invisible waves of my yellow-painted — and now chipped — coffee table. We quickly put a stop to that.

    Shortly after returning to work, I heard him making a swooshing noise. This time I found him surfing my rose-floral couch — with his dirty little-boy sneakers on! While he was riding the wave, Maria was cleaning my bookshelves, another job I would prefer to do myself. She rearranged every book on the shelves and tucked all my household candles in the lower cupboard section. She threw away some magazines I was saving, and tossed a few things that I didn’t want tossed. I was able to fish them out of the garbage, and while doing so, I knew our relationship was over.

    I haven’t had much luck with cleaning people; I have found them to be a bit persnickety. My brother and his wife, who are both medical professionals and probably the cleanest people I know, were recently fired by their cleaning team because they were too much trouble, they were told. Meanwhile, their house out here is rarely used in winter and only on weekends in summer. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen it messy, much less dirty.

    Another I hired from a cleaning service was lazy and wouldn’t do windows. When I left her a note and a bottle of Windex asking if she’d clean the back sliding glass doors, she left me a note that said she could no longer clean my house! And then she left — without so much as picking up a damp cloth.

    One brought her husband, who sat on the couch and watched television for the entire time she cleaned. When she left she charged me double for two people. She also threw out anything in my house that she didn’t like: glass vases, a sentimental conch shell, tin candleholders from a special Christmas trip to Maine, etc. That was it; I raised my white flag.

    So that’s my history with household help, a phrase I’m embarrassed even to use — I mean, I’ve been the household help! If I ever consider hiring someone again, the classified ad would read: Housewife looking for wife. Husbandly duties not involved. Must know how to clean!

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.