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.

   “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 mark is gone now where they laid Yoco Unkenchie. The year was 1653, and a group of Manhansett men were carrying their dead sachem on his final trip from his Shelter Island home to Montauk, where he was to be buried.

    Yoco was the chief of Shelter Island’s native people, and it was said that upon his death they disbanded, some to live among the Montauketts, others to join the Shinnecocks.

    Story has it that the place where his bearers laid Yoco’s bier by the side of the path between Sag Harbor and East Hampton was marked by a small hole dug to memorialize the spot.

    In his 1840 “Chronicles of the Town of Easthampton,” David Gardiner wrote that for more than 190 years passing Indians kept the hole as fresh as if it had been lately made. For the six generations that followed Yoco’s passing, he wrote, no member of the Montauketts would pass the spot without removing whatever sticks, stones, or leaves had fallen into it.

    The hole, about 12 inches deep and 18 inches wide, was still there in 1845, near the three-mile stone that set out the distance to Sag Harbor, when the Rev. N.S. Prime paused there.

     An 1899 history of the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church tells the story as well. Its author, the Rev. Jacob E. Mallmann, said he had spoken to an aged Sag Harbor resident who told him that Stephen Talkhouse, for whom the Amagansett bar is named, would kneel down at the spot whenever he passed and clear it with apparent reverence, “following the custom of his forefathers.”

    When the turnpike between the two villages was cut in about 1860, Yoco’s spot was lost. And, as Mr. Mallmann wrote, “the sacred memorial of over 200 years’ standing was obliterated.” My grandmother Jeannette Edwards Rattray said that the place was nevertheless known as Sachem’s Hole forever more, at least into her lifetime.

    New York State erected a marker supposedly on the site in 1935, referring to Yoco as Pocgatticut, a name by which he was called in some records. The familiar yellow-and-blue sign contains several errors, from what I can tell, giving the wrong date and changing Sachem’s Hole to Whooping Boys Hollow.

    I stopped by the sign this week. I had come from Sag Harbor, setting my odometer to zero near the Episcopalian church. As I stood by the side of the road I noticed the thin winter light coming through the stands of oak and pine. Cars’ tires hissed past. Snow remained here and there in a few places. The approach from the north had been up a long grade, I noticed, and I imagined the party that carried the funeral bier being ready for a rest as they reached the crest of the rise.

     Yoco’s burial place in Montauk is lost to time as well, and lost most of all perhaps to the development that began in earnest on its sacred hills in the late 1920s. Even so, it is an astonishing tribute to the man that his people and their descendents maintained a memorial to him for almost two centuries.

   The logo of an angry, two-fisted bee on the padded wall beneath the basket was a nice surprise. It put me in mind of the pugilistic hornet on the screw tops of Mickey’s Big Mouth malt liquor, one of which I’d last drained not long after I’d last set foot in the Bridgehampton School — graduation day, 1985.

    I’m speaking here of the Killer Bees basketball game last week against Smithtown Christian. I was there with my boy, Griffin, to introduce him to the joys of high school basketball. I’ve got to say, I could’ve done without the two-cop police presence, but that’s the world we’ve made, isn’t it?

    Griffin had just completed a few weeks of Hampton Youth Athletic League hoops sessions in Westhampton Beach. (Another sign of the times — kids get trophies just for showing up.) He dribbles pretty well, so I have hopes he’ll keep at it. He’s in only the second grade, however, and on this night he was a bit more interested in a can of lemonade from the vending machine in the corridor.

    Next to that vending machine stood another reason I’d brought him: a towering display case of Bridgies memorabilia, going back at least to Carl Yastrzemski. I’d hoped in vain that a plaque from the 1983-84 state championship team, or one from the following season’s almost-champs, might be propped up inside, adorned with a picture showing one pale benchwarmer’s face staring out — mine, as I posed with my hands clasped behind my back, trying to look tough.

    This fall I joked to a soccer mom how my riding the pine afforded me the best seat in the house for those title runs. The point of the exchange had something to do with how certain kids freeze up in the spotlight. Like me. Like a couple of the Smithtown Christian guys who obviously didn’t want the ball. I came to enjoy and look forward to practices, to the point of overhearing the coach at the time, John Niles, enthuse about the progress I’d made. But put me in at garbage time with all those eyes on me . . . it was enough to induce a Jim Eisenreich twitch.

    That progress was lost, by the way, when I declined to play summer ball in ’84 in favor of pursuing my version of Dick Cheney’s “other priorities” — doing absolutely nothing.

    So, what’s it like to set foot in your old school after 28 years? It’s like that Alfred Hitchcock innovation in which the camera zooms in on something or someone while simultaneously pulling back. Time compresses even as the past recedes.

    The school building itself, one imposing brick pile when seen from the street, inside now seemed almost cramped. (To say nothing of that rabbit box of a gym, with the sides of its 3-point arcs crossing over into out-of-bounds.) At the same time, it’s positively unchanged, heavy on the stone and impossibly solid. When that day comes when demographic changes and a shriveled tax base lead to the consolidation of all the schools around here, to take down Bridgehampton’s will require a bunker-buster bomb just for starters.

    I can’t say I saw anyone I knew in the bleachers, though that might have been different if the opponent had been the rival Pierson Whalers, always a hot ticket, instead of Smithtown Christian’s lovable rogues’ gallery of cellar-dwellers.

    The game? High school basketball is barely contained chaos. That was eye-opening and struck me as possibly a newish phenomenon. Each drive to the hoop was executed by a player not really in control of what he was doing, even when he scored. It was close for a while in the first quarter, but the Bees’ pressing D and balanced attack made it a laugher before long. (I know, I know, this hasn’t been the best season for them; the evening’s highlight was in fact the national anthem sung by the Bridgies cheerleaders in four-part harmony.)

    As for Griffin, the more I think about it, the more I think it’ll be okay if the only sport he takes a shine to involves chasing a little white ball around an overmanicured green. Just as long as there’s one sport he’s into. I’m not worried; he’s all of 7 and already a better person than I am — diligent, thoughtful, considerate. Who knows where such attributes come from? If not his mother, maybe the good Lord.

    Of course, as the Bees’ coach, Carl Johnson, would no doubt tell you, the good Lord’s got nothing to do with how hard you crash the boards.

   Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.

   While the nation wonders what should be done about the deficit, East Hamptoners are wondering what’s to be done about the surfeit of surf shit.

    Some even say it’s a metaphor for our times, emblematic of what they see as the country’s irreversible descent into deep doo-doo. And they’ve begun carrying flags that say, “Don’t Sh— On Me.”

    In rebuttal to the fecaphobes, some dog owners, I hear, are rallying around a Super Bowel Movement, a “shit-in” planned for Memorial Day at Main Beach.

    “Why are you humans so high and mighty?” Henry said to me the other day. “Aren’t you continually laying waste to the environment with your cesspools? Some of us can’t avail ourselves of indoor plumbing. Deer do it, squirrels do it, even nasty little ticks do it. And, frankly, I’ve been doing my part whenever I spy those beany piles.”

    “Ugh, deer shit.”

    “I know, I know, you always make a face, and give me a breath mint, but you’ve got to admit it’s the responsible thing to do. After all, we’re all in this together. We should pick up after one another, act collectively.”

    “You’re sounding like the president.”

    “I thought his second inaugural was wonderful stuff. ‘Out of many one,’ e pluribus unum, that kind of thing, rather than the same old ‘All for one/And all for one!’ ”

    “But you’ve got to realize, Henry,” I said, “that while this collectivist talk sounds good, there are so many slackers about that it’s a pipe dream. This country was built on people who picked up after their pets. On individual initiative. And now it’s all going to go to the dogs.”

    “Well, you’re fighting the good fight; I’ve noticed you’ve been picking up after me lately, at least when I don’t do it in the pachysandra. You’re a credit to your species.”

    “If the slackers only knew how virtuous it makes one feel — though, frankly, I’m happy you’re not a Newfie — I think we could get this country back on the right track again.”

    “Isn’t it interesting,” said Henry (he always has to have the last word), “that as you stoop for poop you’re not only contributing to the general welfare but also at the same time raising your self-esteem! Collective and individual effort are not at odds after all — the president would be proud.”

   Last week, when I was writing about the poignant story of Yoco Unkenchie’s final journey from Shelter Island to his Montauk burying ground, and the spot between Sag Harbor and East Hampton where his funeral bier was briefly laid, I thought how sad it was that knowledge of where his body was finally placed had been long lost.

    It is said that Gravesend Avenue in Montauk is so called because of the number of Native American burials encountered there by workmen in the 1920s. That may well be apocryphal; when the Montauk Development Company laid out roads in the hamlet, they grouped them by letter of the alphabet without much ado about local references. Then there also is a question of whether the burial ground of the time is really on the east side of Lake Montauk in the place known as Indian Field.

    The poet Walt Whitman, writing in an 1861 edition of the Brooklyn Standard, had this to say about Montauk: “It was the sacred burial place of the east Long Island Indians — their Mecca . . . Wyandance lived there. The remains of the rude citadel occupied by this chieftain are yet to be seen, surrounded by the innumerable Indian grave hollows. It was called Duan-no-to-wouk.”

    Wyandance, or Wyandanch, was a younger brother of Yoco Unkenchie, also known as Poggatacut, whom he succeeded as leader of the eastern Long Island tribes in 1653. Wyandanch was allied with Lion Gardiner, of the island that bears his name, and he granted Gardiner what is today Smithtown at a time of conflict between the Montauketts and Naragansetts. Wyandanch’s dealings with the settlers and other native tribes is described in detail by John A. Strong in the collection “Northeastern Indian Lives.”

    My grandmother Jeannette Edwards Rattray in her book “Montauk: Three Centuries of Romance, Sport, and Adventure” wrote: “Most graves in Indian Field cemetery are marked only by rough field stones, set in circles deep in the tangled grass. . . .”

    Between Fort Hill, where the Montauketts built a palisade redoubt 180 feet square, and Signal Hill, the site of the Montauk Manor, is Council Rock, where, the story goes, the tribe met for meetings. Wyandanch died in 1659, the victim of poison, Gardiner said.

    Wyandanch had lived his last years in North Neck, on the high ground on the west side of the lake, overlooking Fort Pond, according to a 1651 reference. This observation from the time leads me to imagine that both he and his brother were buried there, and not in Indian Field.

    The precise location of Wyandanch’s “citadel,” as Whitman put it, and his resting place are gone to time, as is his brother’s. Little remains to remember these men, who tried to navigate two worlds: their own and the Europeans’.

   We are in flux. Though we’d love to hold on to those whom we love, it can’t be done. That much of them lives on in us is the most we can hope for. The body is gone, though the spirit, to the extent that it was transmitted to us and to the extent that we received it, remains, and, in the end, it is only the spirit that is real, I think; as real as the grass, the trees, the rocks, the hills, and the sea.

    “It comes in waves,” Mary said of her mourning in the days following the death of her mother, as apt an allusion as can be imagined. The waves are high-pitched, though, frankly, I told her, I thought it would be worse, that when the time came she would slump to the floor in grief. “Well, I am on the floor,” she said, “inside.”

    Meanwhile, she has been working at living. There are duties with which her mother entrusted her that she must carry out. These take up quite a bit of her time. And then there is work itself, which I’ve found in such times to be a blessing. And then there is the family, the older, younger, and youngest generations.

    “How’s she doing?” Kathy, who each week recreates our newspaper, asked.

    “She’s carrying on, better than I thought she would,” I said.

    “We’ve got no choice,” Kathy said sympathetically.

    The kids’ reactions have been striking. Our daughter Emily’s 6-year-old son, Jack, said, when told, “Grandma equals Infinity.”

    I remember Emily, at just about the same age, saying, when I told her that her grandfather, my father, had died, “I feel like a broken umbrella.”

    And Ella, our daughter Georgie’s 4-year-old daughter, said to Mary as they went into her bedroom one recent night, “Nana’s in the stars now. . . . Come, let’s look!”

   Do people who live in hot climates get into the concept of comfort food, as we do here where winters can be harsh? In my mind, comfort food should be warm, and generally also soft, sticking to the ribs —  with a spoonful of nostalgia stirred in, of course. With temperatures having been unexpectedly low recently, I’ve found myself keeping warm over the stove.

    Enter therefore quiche. I was a little embarrassed to realize that my almost-12-year-old grandson had become proficient at making a dish that I have always been hesitant to attempt. But I didn’t admit to him that I was a novice when, one recent afternoon, the pantry and refrigerator were almost empty — but for some eggs and a pre-made pie shell.

    The truth is, I love cookbooks, although it must be said that I read them more for entertainment than to follow directions. The quiche recipes I perused called for things I didn’t have on hand (ham and gruyere, for example), and I didn’t fancy a trip to the grocery store over slick roads. But the fine print suggested using whatever was on hand, so instead of announcing we had nothing for dinner that night, I made a quiche with a sauteed mix of onions, green pepper, and mushrooms, along with a goat-cheese filling. It was easy. Never fear the quiche!

    On another frigid day, I found myself cozily reading “At Oma’s Table,” a Jewish-cookery book by Doris Schechter — a friend of a friend — when a recipe for  Flanken With Vegetables caught my eye. It called for short ribs, turnips, parsnips, and a new jar of Gold’s horseradish. I went a bit overboard at the market on the vegetables and wound up with a huge amount of stock in addition to dinner for four. Those who shared the meal thought it a little bland, but, nostalgia being what it is, I liked it a lot.

    (Anyway, if you ask me, “slightly bland” is practically a requirement of the best comfort dishes. How else would you characterize the dense, stodgy, classic mac and cheese, or mashed potatoes — which, by popular acclaim, are the ultimate American comfort foods?)

    The vast quantity of beef-vegetable broth leftover from the flanken presented something of a challenge. After pondering the variables, I put most of it to work as the base of the best lentil soup I ever made . . . with a little help from Mollie Katzen’s original “Moosewood Cookbook.” In addition to the starchy favorites mentioned above, soup — glorious, hot soup — is a standby for winter comfort. Where would we all be without chicken noodle?

    There is one old-time, local comfort food, however, that I am long overdue to make again: samp, the hulled and dried kernels of corn that were a once-upon-a-time staple of the East End diet. I never made it the old-fashioned way, as a porridge served with milk, but many years ago developed a recipe that called for the broth that results when you braise a ham, French-style. Perhaps if the weather stays nasty into February, we’ll have samp for Valentine’s Day. Not terribly romantic, I admit. But heartwarming? Yes.