Whether or not the East Hampton Town Board decides to ban or strictly limit duck hunting in Fort Pond, Montauk, the growing debate points to a certain reality: Things are not quite the way they used to be here.

    The sides are aligned so that on the one side there are a small number of hunters who use the pond during the late fall and winter duck seasons; on the other side are a number of year-round residents, including Jane Bimson, who works here at The Star. As far as I know, neither Jane nor a good, if untallied, measure of those who would prefer shooting end in the pond are opposed to hunting entirely. I assume, like me, they believe there are places where it no longer belongs.

    Several times in recent years the peace of a weekend morning has been broken by several of our neighbors shooting clay targets over Gardiner’s Bay — perfectly legal, the State Department of Environmental Conservation told me when I called to ask. Still, legitimate or not, the noise of their blasting away until all the ammunition is gone is an unsettling backdrop to a Saturday or Sunday morning, and my wife and I will not let the children play on the beach until the fusillade is done.

    As for myself, I do not go gunning much any more. I’ve even stopped renewing my state-issued hunting license. From time to time some friends and I may do a little plinking with a .22 rifle or shoot off a shotgun just for the hell of it, but only during the week and only during the depths of the off-season.

    My father, who I recall gave up hunting during the Vietnam War era, said at the time that there was enough killing in the world. I have his old Stevens 12-gauge shotgun stored away in case I get the urge to use it, though I doubt that I ever will again.

   Sitting in the living room last week, I enjoyed the warmth and dance of a fire in the fireplace as I began reading “Team of Rivals,” the book by Doris Kearns Goodwin on which the film “Lincoln” was based, a Christmas present. It, too, had something to say about fires.

    American schoolchildren have been taught that Lincoln, who grew up poor, huddled for warmth before one and educated himself reading by the light of an oil lamp. Ms. Goodwin does nothing to dispel that cozy, homespun image. Even more, she notes that sitting by a fireplace and reading were familial pleasures in the lives of most of those who were, like Lincoln, candidates for the Republican nomination for president in 1860. She tells us that one, Edward Bates, was a man who preferred the warmth of home and hearth to politics. I liked him immediately, as I sat by my fire.

    I don’t know if it will still be cold on Thursday when this edition of The Star comes out, but I am likely to light a fire nevertheless. I do most winter evenings. The truth is, I am the fire-builder in my house — and rather impressed with my own skills. My husband has learned to back off, although he will sometimes try — unsuccessfully, I might add — to tell me what to do with this log or that poker. But many’s the time I’ve had to ask a visitor, struggling to get more than smoke (and invariably of the male persuasion), to please step aside and leave it to me. Reading by the fire, I am warmed by the thought of how pleasantly old-fashioned I’m being.

    Unfortunately, however, this year I have a large store of precisely cut logs that — while nice and dry — are of a uniform, rather small size. My reading is interrupted as I have to keep getting up and down from my seat to replace logs that have burnt to ashes. (Although, I admit, this at least has the beneficial effect of keeping me awake as the hour gets late.) Better fires are made with logs of varying dimensions. Someone brought in a huge one a couple of weeks ago, which my husband dubbed the Yule log, and I’m still waiting to build up enough of a pyre to throw it onto. There’s no lack of kindling this winter, given all the winds and storms.

    If reading about the comfort of life for some of this country’s prominent families in the 19th century rang a pleasant bell with me this week, reading last week about the inferno in Breezy Point and about Afghans suffering winter without heat in a refuge camp in Kabul brought me up short. As the new year loomed, I couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky we are, even in this.

   I grew up in Manhattan. I traveled to school on a school bus and when I was old enough I used my school bus pass to take the regular public buses. The uptown buses often let you out right onto subway grates. Not a problem, we wore school uniforms . . . with bloomers. No kidding.

    While in grammar school all the kids took ballroom dancing classes. There were various austere ladies who taught such classes. We were obliged to wear party dresses and white gloves were essential. The boys wore blazers and also wore white gloves — no sweaty palms in ballroom dancing. My mother would travel with me to dance class, and the thing I hated about going, aside from being taller than most of the boys, was that the Fifth Avenue bus we took to get there stopped at a subway grate. Invariably I would be arranging myself and my crinolines, just off the bus, when whoosh, a subway would go by below me and up would go my skirt and petticoats. Deeply embarrassing for a 10-year-old in white socks, Mary Janesand a party dress, you can be sure.

    And so began a deep distrust of the subways and their grates and the wind that came through them when the subways passed below. They became fashion danger zones. The dirty wind ruined freshly combed preteen hair and lifted skirts no matter how you tried to hold them down. I had never ridden the subway.

    In high school I had to actually ride the subways, daily. While going down the subway stairs in a very full skirt (with the subway coming into the platform), my skirt once flew over my head. After that I  switched to a wardrobe of straight skirts for the entirety of my high school years. (Dear reader, during my high school years girls were not allowed to wear pants, trousers, slacks, or dungarees in school. Even on snow days. No kidding.)    

    Pantyhose had not been invented yet, and black dancer’s tights were for beatniks only. Billowing skirts were for party dresses and fancy dances. A boy picked you up and you went by taxi. That was how it was.

    Graduation from college brought me back to New York, and the wonderful world of daily high heels and a job. Once more the subway grates became the enemy. Try to walk across one with skinny high heels in the 1970s and you risked a broken ankle or broken heel if the hole and the grate and your shoe lined up and created the perfect storm of a ruined shoe or a fall on your face. The subway grates and the equally evil sewer grates were famous for peeling the leather off of a heel like a banana. Walking in Manhattan is hazardous to shoes. Why do you think there’s a shoe repair store every block and a half?

    Working for a fashion magazine (Glamour) for many years allowed for wardrobe experimentation. The subway grates were no longer a threat to the dame striding down the street in great pants and silver Converse high-tops.  I was Annie Hall. Bring it on, sidewalk grate and subway wind. I was fine.

    Taxi money in your pocket for a fast exit. No, please driver, do not stop over the sewer grate, thank you.

    Largely untroubled, I still move around Manhattan like a native, remembering to close my eyes to avoid the soot coming up through those dreaded subway grates (now intent on making mascara run when a bit gets in the eye). In winter I know to avoid the grates because they are really slippery. It is Manhattan. We walk while looking down. Street savvy.

    Now I live in East Hampton. No more high heels, no more subways, no more petticoats (well once in a while), and yet. . . .

    I have developed a new fear of storm drains.

    I brought it with me from the city. The deep distrust of what is below the sidewalk clearly comes from the subways and my youth.

    Out here I imagine I know what is down there: In the storm drain is a river of water and a magnetic force that wants me to drop my car keys. And I know that when dropped, they will slide between the ribs of the grate and keys will float off to the Azores on a current so fast that they will be lost to me forever. Storm drains are scarier than the subway grates of my youth. No keys, no nothin’.

    When I get out of my car, keys gripped tightly on their way to the safety of my pocket (old habits die hard), right there at my open door is inevitably a storm drain, wanting my car keys. They follow my car. The storm drains don’t want my cellphone, they don’t want anything but my slippery car keys.

    You may see me driving around and around seeming to look for a parking space when there are many available. I am not looking for a parking space; I am being chased by a storm drain that wants my car keys.

    Durell Godfrey takes pictures for The Star when she is not being stalked by storm drains.

   I care not what others may say, I love steroids. Some were shot into me — my left shoulder — the other day, and the day after that I felt 20 years younger. And Henry, who got a contact high, had a spring in his step too.

    I celebrated by running two laps around Herrick Park while Henry, chained to a soccer goal post, barked encouragement. It was a good day for him and a good day for me. My fingers fairly tripped along over the laptop keys, the sun was shining, the air was fresh, and the pangs of a grievous error I’d committed the week before, in which I’d implied someone long dead was alive, had begun to fade into the “things to be less and less painfully remembered” folder of my brain.

    When asked by Mary recently what I wanted for Christmas, I replied, “A new shoulder — I think they’re having a sale.”

    But if these steroids work, maybe I won’t have to get one. I told her that in the alternative she could get me the Shakespeare plays I’d ordered, the final nine or so I have yet to read. I have been collecting the paperback Folger series. They have notes and clue you in as to what’s coming up, and, even more important, they fit in my office bookshelf. Very colorful too, as if to say, this is no ordinary weekly journalist, this is a man of substance . . . of substance abuse, in fact. A steroid user and proud of it.

    Further on the subject of Shakespeare, when I told a fellow who’s embarked on the same project as I that I didn’t find the comedies very funny, he said not to worry, that the tragedies were.

    Jack Gilbert, the poet, who died recently — I happen to know because I read it in The New York Times — says we become too intelligent as we age. That our strength (what we have hoarded) deprives us, that we become moderate.

    So just shoot me up.

    When I told Tim at the club that my doctor had said I couldn’t play tennis this week, he said, “He probably thought it was unfair to the others that you’re on performance enhancing drugs.”

    “I bet I would have won 30 games.”

    “See you on January 3rd.”    

    “On the 3rd. . . . I hope they haven’t worn off by then.”

   A curse for someone who has to sit down in the morning and write a column is to be asked, “What are you going to write about?” It is doubly effective if the question comes right before the last one to be written in the year, when, I suppose, it is time to strike a note of some gravity or prediction or resolution.

    So, as I sat down at the computer on a quiet morning the day after Christmas, I came up blank. There was little noise in the house other than the breathing of our ancient pug, who was resting in the dog bed she reluctantly shares with our pet house-pig. The north wind of the night before had stopped; looking through the kitchen windows, even the smallest of winter’s bare branches were still. Our children were still asleep, tired from a long run the day before. Starting early with presents, then a brunch here, then a round of visiting that ended at nearly 11 p.m., it had been a good day.

   So I sat, thinking that I welcomed the near-total silence in the house. The year, and especially the month or two leading up to the day after Christmas, had been demanding. Summer had come and gone with its frenetic pace. And then, when I thought things were about to wind down, Hurricane Sandy upended normal routines. Against the tense backdrop of the presidential race, the war in Afghanistan and drone strikes in Pakistan continued to add to the lists of the dead, though Americans seemed increasingly immune to the news. Then came the Newtown, Conn., killings.

    This has been a year for reflection necessitated by events, but events that are difficult to process. The great annual reset that is the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day, could not come soon enough, as far as 2012 is concerned.

   I love winter here: The office phones ring less in January and February. The great and unrelenting river of e-mail narrows a bit. There is time for a walk on the beach, time to plan. There is time to be with our thoughts between distractions, and this I look forward to most of all.

   It may seem funny, but I sometimes think the nicest part of my day, at least on those days when I have to work, is the walk between the house and the office. The few moments it takes to stroll the 250 feet to or from The Star, absorbing whatever the weather is and looking at the sky, keep me happy.

    A similar feeling of joy in the outdoors occurred on Christmas Day when we went to spend time with my son David and his family in the house on Gardiner’s Bay where he and my other children grew up. Being out in the wild landscape — and the blustering wind — of Napeague lifts my spirits and, this week, reinforced the daydream I indulge in that someday much of the sandy and exotic land that surrounds the house will become a park.

    Perhaps we all were meant to live in the outdoors. Or maybe it’s just that being outdoors reminds me, personally, of the well-being I felt as a child on my grandparents’ 108-acre farm in the Catskills or as a college student during the summers I was a counselor at a summer camp, where we slept in lean-tos or teepees or under the shelter of a covered wagon. In any case, when our house on Napeague was finished in 1963, I embraced the rare landscape that surrounded it. The house was not just isolated, it was, in fact, one of the only houses in sight and the only one on our empty road that was lived in year-round.

    These days there are plenty of houses along Cranberry Hole Road, but, as far as I am concerned, it is still one of eastern Long Island’s last great places.

    I have saved part of a column that Larry Penny, The Star’s nature columnist, wrote in these pages some time ago about why Napeague is to be treasured. I am not sure that those who make decisions about how the Town of East Hampton uses its community preservation fund think often about Napeague, or the part of it called Promised Land, but here is some of what Mr. Penny had to say:

    “The water table is only a few feet below, and fresh groundwater continually wicks up to supply the bearberry and heather with enough water to keep them thriving. Trees don’t stand a chance, except for the pitch pines in little hollows, as the winds sweeping across from south to north in the summer and vice versa in the winter keep any from getting a toehold. This close-knit dune plain as far as I can tell is the only one of its kind in New York State, maybe in all of America.”

    Edible wild mushrooms and prickly pear cactus grow on Napeague. There are other rare plants, including lady slippers; cranberry bogs can be found off the road to the south, and wildlife, from toads to snakes to foxes. We have found huge old whale bones, over the years, in the dune craters between Cranberry Hole and Montauk Highway; it is easy to dig up arrowheads, too (although I won’t tell you where).

    If I could, I would gather botanists and zoologists, birders and expert environmentalists and ask them to draw a heavy line around the part of the landscape that remains, in Larry’s words, “very much intact” and, as Larry suggested, preserve it “for future centuries.”

   “Peeloff the partisan war paint,” said President Barack Obama a few days ago, and I couldn’t agree more. The last thing we need is division when it is quite obvious that the opposite is required for the good of all and quite possibly is the point of all of the disasters of late.

    I never fit into the black and whiteness of the blue or red parties anyway. I guess I’m part of a purple political party. A patriotic peace activist, I support veterans and military spending, but prefer it be spent on servicemen and women’s salaries, so we don’t have enlisted families who earn so little they are eligible for welfare. At the same time, yes, I wish for the return of all troops, for the end of war, and for the National Guard to be here doing what it was created to do for our country.

    I have hippie-ish qualities such as a passion for socially responsible living, but I usually wear makeup and sometimes high heels while I am burning incense and sage. I also enjoy being barefoot on the beach listening to drumming with a hula hoop spinning around me, which does not make me a vegetarian, as was assumed recently. I love pigs and also bacon; I love deer and also quite a few hunters.

    I strongly believe in the separation of church and state, and religious freedom without taboos of unorganized practices such as Paganism, an earth-based religion that does not  worship Satan. I am in favor of the legalization of marijuana and feel that most pharmaceutical drugs should be illegal.

    I tried to wrap my head around the Sandy Hook massacre this week and here’s what I came up with: After an altercation at a school, a 20-year-old, mentally ill man was denied a rifle in Danbury, Conn., due to gun control laws that required a 14-day waiting period and background check. This did not stop him from having several guns in his possession and using them to kill 20 innocent children and 6 adults in that same school. Why then, is gun control the loudest discussion I hear?

    Yes, control over the hands an assault weapon lands in makes sense, but many laws already exist and are not enforced, or simply do not work for criminals who, by definition, do not usually obey the law or apply for a permit or license. In some communities, heightened gun control has led to more than a 30-percent increase in gun violence, as well as a rise in smuggling of cheap machine guns.

    I was a pre-kindergarten teacher in what seems like another life, and I cannot begin to imagine the horror of a gunman in a school. In another former career, I worked with those who had mental illness, among them a friendly man with pyromania who told me he felt like burning the building down. I have also known those who struggle with mental illness, and studied psychology as a concentration in college. This is the issue I would like to hear more about.

    With skyrocketing rates of suicide among both civilians and military members, stigmas need to be removed and resources found to identify and help those who desperately need it. Domestic incidents reported to the police and school psychologists are a great starting point. With some told by police that their mentally ill family member must be charged with a crime in order to receive “assistance,” it’s clear that programs and support for families are a necessity too.

    Obama Care should address mental well-being, especially personality disorders, which afflict about half of all psychiatric patients and are characterized by deviant social behavior, ineffective coping skills, extreme anxiety, distress, or depression, usually traced to childhood or early adulthood.

    It should be as easy to see a psychiatrist as it is to buy a gun. I have heard too many stories of suicidal people, including military members with post-traumatic stress disorder, who had to wait over a month for a visit.

    Law-abiding citizens who use guns responsibly shouldn’t suffer, but they should exercise common sense. First off and most important, keep them locked up, whether there are kids in the house or not.

    As for school security, the “American Legion Creed” preamble almost reads as a job description, and many other former military members of all ages would qualify and appreciate the job.

    Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter for The Star.

   When I asked her to explain WiFi for me — and, for that matter, anything else that had to do with airy nothing that has found local habitations and names in the Internet, PCs, iPhones, et cetera — Mary was helpful, but not altogether enlightening.

    “It’s all a mystery to me,” I said. “Like the afterlife.”

    “How do you know there is an afterlife?” she said. “At least we know there is such a thing as WiFi.”

    “So you say,” I said, which is what I say when I don’t know what to say next.

    There is so much more than is dreamt of in my philosophy that all I can say, sitting in this Jacuzzi in a desert, with mountains behind it, and above them the vastness of the universe, listening to Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, and Jim Hall playing “Concierto de Aranjuez,” is, “I may not be very smart, but I know what heaven is.”

    We have some time on this vacation to take delight in each other, and to remember why we were magnetized from the start. The feeling is always there, but the distractions that are in the aggregate largely known as life often get in the way.

    This week in Palm Springs is, in our 28th year of marriage, our honeymoon. She reads to me from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, I read to her from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and though I overdo the steaks and underdo the pork chops on the grill, it’s all right. The margaritas I’ve got down pat, thanks to Alex Silvio.

    It’s been a week in which everything’s been more than all right. No appointments to keep, no need to strip the bed because the cleaning women are coming, no urgencies, no duties of any kind.

    Ah, I’m telling you, to do nothing is to progress wonderfully.

   The Edwards tradition of cutting a white pine from their own Northwest wood lots for a Christmas tree goes back to the time Christmas trees first became popular among East Hampton’s old-fashioned Presbyterians.

    And so it was in the 1960s and ’70s when we followed Jeannette Edwards Rattray, my mother-in-law, into the woods to get ours. She would also take home clumps of different mosses and winterberries, with their glossy leaves and small red berries, to build a miniature landscape scene in a big bowl: moss for grass, tiny wooden farm animals standing under the branches of the berry-laden  tree.  I don’t know if this was a local tradition or if it was a family invention, but I loved it, and for years would do the same thing, adding bits of other small plants or perhaps burying a pocket mirror (standing in for a pond) to complete the storybook tableau.    

    As might be expected, our forays into the woods weren’t always as full of holiday cheer as we might have liked. One or the other of the kids would object, strongly, to the tree the others wanted and make a fuss until we gave in and conceded to choosing another; then the process would be repeated until everyone was in a foul temper, stamping around under the green canopy, crunching deeper and deeper into the woods to find the perfect one. Our inability to come to agreement may be the reason why we always chose an extra, little tree for the children’s teddy bears. I still tell myself each December that I am going to have a bear tree, but I usually don’t.

    White pines are delicate. Their branches get dragged down by even moderately heavy ornaments, and the finished, fully ornamented and lighted product is, depending on your point of view, either a tree some woodland fairies might dance around or one you would expect to see on the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Sometimes the children’s friends would laugh at the sight.

    One Christmastime in the ’70s we had cut our tree and gathered everything up and were heading home on a road that was still paved in dirt and devoid of houses when a friend, who was buying and selling real estate at the time, came along in his own vehicle in the other direction. We were satisfied with our haul and feeling pretty merry.

    Ev rolled down the window of his big, green International Travelall truck.  “What are you doing in our woods?” he shouted, knowing our friend would take it as a joke. The friend’s two-word response was a loud, “Whose woods?” This answer had the ring of a portent — funny because it was already kind of true, then — so imagine how it resounds now, in retrospect?

     We don’t own any wood lots anymore, or any house lots in Northwest either, unfortunately. But I must confess that in recent years, we have held onto the tradition by surreptitiously finding places on public property or roadside byways that have overcrowded stands of white pines, cutting one, and scurrying away, hearts pounding.

    Frankly, I can’t believe I am admitting this in print. But I hope that if any of you readers catch us in the act, you will be forgiving, and let us go, if only for sentimentality’s sake.

   I got the best present ever for Christmas this year. It came a little early but I already love it.

    It’s a brand new titanium knee, given to me by Dr. Eugene Krauss of the Krauss Center for Joint Replacement in Riverhead. He was the fifth orthopedic surgeon that I saw and the first to find that I had tibial plateau necrosis, a dead bone.

    For the two years since I had a meniscus repair surgery I pleaded for relief, the pain was so debilitating. It would always hurt more on Sunday nights and I would cry. And I’m not usually a crybaby. As tears ran down my cheeks, I would beg my husband to find me help. Besides getting me in to see all these doctors, the best he could do was keep the ice packs in rotation.

    Some days I couldn’t even walk on it, other days it wasn’t so bad, but I always had a limp. I told one doctor that I was broken and nobody would fix me. I was like a doll that was missing a limb and thrown to the bottom of the toy chest, along with Elmo, the Cookie Monster, old Barbie dolls, and broken Matchbox cars.

    The bone crumbled and fell into other parts of the knee before disintegrating. One doctor told me it was all in my head. Seriously? I walked in to his office with a cane. And, no rhyme intended, but I am somewhat vain. As a woman of a certain age, I’m fighting the aging thing on every level. The last thing I wanted people to see was me on a cane!

    There have been many things I’ve imagined: Santa Claus, the ghost of my mother, and the Boogeyman under my bed, but never would I self-willingly inflict pain upon myself. That’s no fun, and I never thought I was that powerful.

    I must say, though, that people are much nicer to you when you walk with a cane. I had doors opened and held for me, I was told to go to the head of the line at the pharmacy, and people moved out of my way, always casting me a look of sympathy.

    Another doctor giggled when my knee didn’t jump as my reflexes were checked with that tiny gadget that looks like a hammer used by elves in Santa’s workshop. The doctor said I had a dead knee, which I didn’t realize at the time is something that could actually happen to a person, and then she giggled. Looking back, I wonder why that doctor didn’t help me more, or at the very least contact my surgeon to say, “You know, I think she’s got something there.”

    I was told I had arthritis, edema, bursitis, and a severely bruised tibia, which was somewhat true — but it wasn’t bruised, it was dead, tongue hanging out of its cartilage dead, floppy dead, disintegrating dead, suffering a slow and painful death that was harder for me than it was for the bone.

    A top New York surgeon who operated on me for another meniscus tear in February told me in June when I returned to see him because the pain was so bad that I should just keep riding the stationary bike until my thighs quivered. He said the pain would eventually go away. At this point I’d like to see his head quiver until it went away. He took an X-ray and said the knee looked fine. But shouldn’t a doctor of his reputation know that a necrosis does not show up on an X-ray? Surf the Internet like the rest of us, Doc.

    My husband never lost faith that I would stage a comeback, even after I thought this was it, this would be my lot in life. The whole experience made me realize just how much he must love me. He did the grocery shopping, cooked all the meals, emptied the dishwasher when it was needed, and walked my dog, which was the job I missed the most. Instead of Mom always in the kitchen, the kids got used to seeing Dad bent over the stove and setting the dinner table.

    Finally, I called Dr. Krauss for an appointment that took over two months to get. He ordered an MRI of the area beneath my knee where I was having the worst pain, and lo and behold, he found the dead bone. Apparently my blood got lazy and stopped flowing to the area and it killed it. During my worst days I told my husband that I felt like I was walking around on a broken, crushed knee and it turns out I was walking around on a broken, crushed knee.

    I hope I’m not boring you with my knee story but to others who are suffering from chronic pain, I’d like to give you this gift: Don’t give up. There is a doctor out there who can help you. With my husband nudging me, I trudged to doctors in Southampton, Garden City, Manhattan, and, of course, East Hampton, before Dr. Krauss was recommended.

    And so, Santa, I’d like to say thank you. I’d also like to thank all the people in Montauk who have helped me through this in so many little ways over the last two and half years. I can say with confidence that I think I am now fixed. I might even tie a bright red Christmas bow around my leg on Tuesday.

    To the doctors who failed me miserably I say, Bah humbug to you. But to Dr. Krauss, who had compassion and looked a little deeper, I say thank you. And if I never visit a doctor’s office again Santa has delivered my Christmas wishes. And to my family I say, Mommy’s back. Now, get out of my kitchen!

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.