A child’s bucket, full to the top, of mantis shrimp sits in the office refrigerator. I picked them up on the beach early Tuesday, just after sunrise, before the gulls could get to them.

    There was a lobster, too, that I considered taking, but it was nearly snapped in two by the waves Hurricane Sandy pushed up, and it had already begun to smell. The mantis shrimp are destined for a cooking pot, provided I can get the sand off them.

    Oddly, until the bad winter storm of Dec. 26 and 27, 2010, I had not known that mantis shrimp existed in these parts. I had read about them and their remarkable snapping ability. After that storm, I found a couple of them dead along the beach; on Tuesday, the wrack line was strewn with them. I could have picked up hundreds.

    Several species of mantis shrimp — though not the ones we have here, apparently — have club-like claws they use to stun prey. Researchers have become interested in the appendages’ composition and structure, wondering whether what gives them remarkable strength could be useful breakthroughs in military or industrial applications.

    It is lucky that the Star office is in a part of town where we are among the very few on Long Island with electricity. This means that I can keep the rare haul fresh and presumably edible until we can have them for dinner.

    There is a range of interest in our family where shrimp is concerned. My wife, Lisa, is allergic to them; the 11-year-old loves them; the 8-year-old will eat a few, and Ellis, who is 2 and a half, spit them out the few times he tried them.

    Preparation, from what I saw on the Internet, is basic. You just throw them in a pot or on the barbecue for about five minutes, peel them, and eat with soy sauce. As the frenetic pace of post-storm reporting and activity subsides, I hope to find a moment to get them on the table. We’ll see what the family says — that is, if I can get rid of the sand.

   How do you write a column when a bad hurricane is on its way . . . and your power is likely to go off before deadline time? You could try to write about something else, something light and humorous. (For instance, I’ve been planning to get a column out of my husband’s odd fascination with casseroles, and how he made one of his own creation that was so massive we had to freeze quarts of leftovers.) But with the tension in the air, and the gravity of what could possibly happen, such thoughts get blown away with the wind.

    And so I decided to write about hurricanes past.

    I remember my first. The year was 1960, and the hurricane was named Donna. I’m sure we must have driven out to have a look at what was happening on the ocean beaches as the storm approached, but what has stuck with me all these years is the sense of excitement, the adrenaline rush, as we stood at the head of Three Mile Harbor being battered by the wind.

    I remember Gloria, in 1985, when we were without power for 13 days, and had to read by oil-lamp light. Being without power was — as I remember it, anyway — actually a lot of fun, like traveling back in time.

    I also remember the only hurricane — before Sandy — that scared us enough that the family evacuated from the house on Gardiner’s Bay. The year was 1976, and it was Hurricane Belle. Ev and I, our three kids, and our dog were invited, along with other friends, to join the Morrises in the big house at the corner of Buell Lane and Main Street in the village. Like this week, we were concerned about the projected storm surge and flooding.

    In those years, the 1970s, our house on Gardiner’s Bay was many yards farther from the shore, behind the protection of more dunes, and higher dunes, than remain as we go to press. Part of the reason we thought it safe to put the house there was that old-timers had told us the area had not flooded in 1938. (Unlike much of Napeague, just to the east, which went underwater.)

    Fortunately, Hurricane Belle weakened by the time it hit Long Island, passing over Jones Beach. The kids roasted marshmallows in the fireplace and a swell time was had by all. Still, the winds were strong enough to bring a large limb down onto the roof of the house we’d evacuated to; it fell on top of the room where we had gone to sleep. We all thought it was pretty funny that, as it turned out — because of all the trees in town, and the lack of trees in Promised Land — we had inadvertently put ourselves in harm’s way.

    In those days I drove a big Cadillac with a white hard top and an odd, beige-ish body color. (It was never my style, but I chose it because I thought it might afford a measure of safety for the weekly trips I used to make in and out of the city.) In the midst of Hurricane Belle, my Caddie, which a friend called the Brown Cloud, was elected to drive to East Hampton Town Hall on some errand or other. I don’t remember any feeling of exhilaration that time.

    Now, we wait for Sandy. The generations who live now in the house on Gardiner’s Bay have gone for the duration to a house in the woods. Here on Edwards Lane, in the village, I hope I am benefiting from experience, having stocked up and heeded all the tips about how to survive without power. My son Dan and I waited patiently on line at the supermarket, hardware store, gas station, and bank. In fact, it was almost as if civility — so obviously lacking in our day-to-day rush, push, and hustle, in recent decades — had returned to town.

    The mood of those on line at the ATM I went to was actually jolly. “Mayor Bloomberg said to get cash,” a man said, adding a crack about Mayor Bloomberg being de facto mayor of East Hampton, too.

    “But there’s nothing to worry about,” he assured those of us behind him in the line. “My mother’s down on the beach right now giving the storm a hex.”

   To the marriage of true minds I admitted an impediment on our 28th anniversary, unaccountably forgetting to give Mary a card, a failure of the heart rendered all the more stark when I saw, in her card, that she’d opened her heart to me.

    The setting was tranquil, fittingly so for such an occasion, mother-of-pearl colors refracting luminously off white clouds while the sun went down behind a lone clammer in the harbor.

    As I continued to stammer, she said she hadn’t wanted to punish me, for God’s sake, with her gift, a pair of royal blue swimming trunks Gubbins would have for me the next day. Royal blue swimming trunks, I thought, for a royal pain in the ass.

    Neither of us got a kick from the margaritas — the first time that’s ever happened to me. I felt leaden. We ate up, paid the check, and drove home.

    “Are you ever going to speak again?” she asked as we returned later from a walk in the dark with the dogs. Then I sat down with a lined notepad and began to write. The words at first were forced, and I crumpled the page up, and began writing again.

    And then out of my anguish they began to come. I was “plighting my troth,” as the late Sheppard Frood, who married us in our backyard, said we were to do — as Mary, who was justly dismayed that I had not, had done earlier that evening.

    I remember her asking Justice Frood what the “troth” we were plighting was. It was our truth, he said, an old word for truth. She, being a truth-teller, then said she would plight it.

    I printed out what I’d written in script when I was done, folded it, put it into an envelope, and handed it to her, and went out of the room, awaiting judgment.

    When I returned to the living room she said what I’d written was beautiful and that she would always keep it, though it was strange that I found it easier to write than to speak.

    “Well . . . I wrote what I felt,” I said, happy that I had done so.

    She sometimes says, and rightly, that words are cheap. They are — except when they are true.

    Tonight I’m making the margaritas — with real lime juice.

   My son, Ellis, and I spent a few minutes one afternoon this week gathering great handfuls of eelgrass and making a quick pile of it after Saturday’s hard northwest wind pushed long lines of the stuff on the bay beach near our house. My intent was to add it to the compost; Ellis, who will be 3 in February, thought it was a fine place to drop down for a rest and look at the sky.

    Eelgrass has made what appears to be a comeback in Gardiner’s Bay, supporting a bounty of scallops. At the same time, the spongy, green Codium, a true seaweed thought to have spread around the world from the western Pacific, has all but gone away.

    When I was a child, my father referred to Codium exclusively as Sputnik weed,  apparently due to its appearance in our region more or less contemporaneously with the Soviet satellite’s game-changing 1957 launch. For decades, it was the most visible seaweed washing up on the beach at the southernmost reaches of the bay, where we live. Now rockweed is dominant in the near-shore shallows. The eelgrass, I presume, has repopulated in underwater meadows in slightly deeper water less affected by storms.

    The day after Ellis and I made our pile, we returned to the beach with a fish box and filled it with eelgrass. Then Ellis removed his shirt and shorts, tore off his pull-up diaper, and went for a swim. When he got cold, I had him hop on top of the box for a ride back to the house and a hot shower — with a detour at the compost bin to dump in the eelgrass.

    Many years ago, when I was traveling around between high school and college, I ended up on Inisheer, one of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. There, I saw huge piles of kelp, which the inhabitants gathered to freshen their fields and to pack for export. The memory of those haystack-like mounds and the people who made them has stuck with me, as I hope Ellis will dimly remember our own late-summer afternoon on the beach when he is older.

   I was thoroughly puzzled when my husband, Chris, came home one night recently carrying a gigantic bag full of lima beans. He launched into a story about how his father had brought home unshucked limas once a year, and how — in homage to a neighbor’s family name, Lyman — they jokingly called them “Lyman beans” around the dinner table.

    “So what?” I wanted to know.

    Did he and his siblings actually like them?

    He said they all loved them, and that it was fun work getting them out of the shell, too.

    Now, I don’t dislike lima beans, but I decided long ago that they weren’t tasty enough to be worth the calories they contain. They apparently have more calories than potatoes!

    “I’ll shuck them,” Chris offered. That was a good thing, because I was determined to take no part in this particular idea of an amusing morning.

    Neither of us is as dexterous as we once were. Chris has been known to complain that it is getting hard to fasten the button-down collars of his preppy broadcloth shirts. I had been watching election coverage when he started in on the task, and I tried to pay him no attention. In a while, though, I started to feel sorry for him . . . or for his right thumb, anyway. We decided to shuck the suckers and watch TV at the same time. I pulled over a chair.

    Getting lima beans out of their pods is a lot harder than shelling peas. You could get callouses! Pulling off the string between the two halves doesn’t do the trick, as far as I could tell. Instead, you take your thumb and push firmly on the rounded end of the pod. It usually opens, at least a little. You can then pull the sides apart, and pluck out the beans.

    Eventually, with much toil, we had more than two people would want to eat at one sitting (unless, of course, they were lima-bean maniacs, like my husband). That was when I remembered that I had many years ago saved, but never used, a recipe from The New York Times for baked lima beans and pears. I found it easily in one of the crammed drawers near the stove. It sounded excellent, I had to admit.

    Here it is:

Baked Lima Beans and Pears

Three 10-ounce packages of frozen lima beans

Two large pears, cored, peeled, and sliced crosswise

1 cup chicken broth

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup chopped onion

1/4 cup light molasses

1 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. pepper

    Preheat oven to 200 degrees. In a heavy, two-quart casserole, combine ingredients. Bake, covered tightly, about eight hours.

    No, that isn’t a typo: eight hours.

    At supper, some 10 hours after we started on the lima-bean campaign, Chris cleaned his plate with obvious relish, and pronounced the recipe a keeper. But after all the fuss and effort, I didn’t find the lima beans particularly delicious. I’d still rather have potatoes.

    The Times recipe was by Lee Bailey, who once had a home-furnishings store in Southampton. Mr. Bailey was interested in entertaining, as well as food, and credited Nora Ephron’s novel “Heartburn” for the original recipe. Unlike my husband, he had the good sense not to try to shell them himself.

   Many of my 1,214 Facebook friends have told me that they wish their lives were like mine, and I agree, I wish my life was like mine, too — as it appears on Facebook. Days are filled with beach walks, boating, and hula hoops, and nights with sunsets and live music.

    A recent event has led to the opposite effect, however, and now I wonder, “Should I stay or should I go?”

    As a news reporter, I “liked” several politicians months ago in order to keep up with current events. One of those likes was posted on my behalf, with no clicks on my part, front and center in the Facebook news feed during the airing of the Democratic National Convention. I was made aware of the posting by a message from and old and dear friend that said, “Really? Or am I being hacked?” Upon further inquiry, I was informed that Big Brother had told the public, “Carrie Ann Salvi likes Mitt Romney.”

    I’m not sure what horrified me more, the fact that something was posted on my behalf, that as an unbiased reporter who is not supposed to have a political opinion I was tied to a political party, or that it happened during the opposing party’s convention. I feel used, violated, and fearful of what else has or will end up in the news feed with my name attached. I immediately “unliked” Mitt, and Obama, too, to be fair and balanced.

    Several of my Facebook friends whom I have spoken with personally have told me that they live vicariously through me on Facebook. So, aside from the occasional tragedy during which I have sought the community’s prayers and positive thoughts, I have happily shared photographs and “check-ins” to spread the joy of my striped bass and strawberry-basil mojito-filled life.

    That life contained no war, bills, cat puke, rainy days, stressful deadlines, or politics. But now it has been violated, bonds of trust broken. My information was used without my consent to endorse the campaign of a political party. I must seriously consider if I will continue to live there.

    Sure, there are other reasons that removing myself might not be a bad idea. There have been family disputes, broken friendships, stalker situations, and there is always the question of how much time is wasted. Oh, but the benefits . . . how could 955 million active users be wrong?

    I have formed online friendships with those I didn’t get to know during school years, found a job in the news feed, met a boyfriend, screened potential new boyfriends after that one ended up being “blocked,” stayed in touch with faraway relatives, and received much-needed support during the recent loss of my father.

    Most important, I love to take pictures. I don’t understand it fully, but photographing the things I see brings me joy, and the thought of downloading the previous day’s shots makes me jump out of bed in the morning. Sharing the pictures on Facebook and seeing who enjoys them is fun for me, too, and over the last few months, seven or eight have been chosen to grace the cover of The East Hampton Star.

    There are other places I can share my pictures, such as Instagram, which is promising, but Facebook is a habit that is hard to break.

    I also heard this week that voting numbers have increased due to Facebook posts, and just yesterday that a group of gang members were arrested as a result of the news feed, so good does come of this, but it is also clear that one never knows who will view your information or what they will use it for. For now, I will modify the ever-changing privacy settings and expect the best, or another message from a friend.

  Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

   A friend of mine who has a friend in Vegas who’s a bookie told me an interesting story the other day.

    He said his bookie friend had said that if Romney and Ryan win, my friend should pay for his round of golf when they played there and take him and two of his friends out to dinner. Whereupon my friend said that, in the alternative, should Obama and Biden win, he expected his bookie friend, a devotee of Rush Limbaugh, to pay for his round of golf and to take him and two of his friends out to dinner.

    “He wouldn’t take the bet,” my friend said. “Obama’s the heavy favorite in Vegas, at 1-to-2. That means a $10,000 bet will get you $5,000.”

    To me that bookie tale spoke volumes.

    On another subject, the Artists-Writers Game has become so serious that there’s hardly anything funny left to say about it anymore. Ou sont les madcap romps d’autant? The margin of victory is usually narrow these days, a run or two, and the games invariably go into extra innings. No spectators are getting beaned anymore by Alec Baldwin’s errant throws from third, no one’s running down the third base line, as Chevy Chase once did, to wrestle Ed Tivnan for possession of his foul popup. No Suzanne O’Malley in sequins with pom-poms to pump up the crowd. Come to think of it, no women played this year. It’s all come down to this.

    My eldest daughter said during a telephone conversation the other day that she was tired of the bumper stickers that say, “Heaven Can Wait.”

    “How do they know they’re going there?” she said.

    “I think it’s pretty likely that when it’s over it’s over,” I said.

    “Maybe they should say ‘Purgatory Can Wait. . . .’ ”

    “Or eternal damnation. . . . Ah, that would be a good one: ‘Eternal Damnation Can Wait.’ Though that might not fit. ‘Hell Can Wait’ would fit. But the fact is, Hell can’t wait.”

    “Dinner can’t wait either, Dad. Talk to you later.”

    My sister phoned last night to say that the bookshop in her Midwestern suburban preppy village had never heard of the playwright A.R. Gurney. Now this shocked me inasmuch as he’s been writing plays about suburban WASPs, i.e., her neighbors, for years. I told her I’d send her the four or five plays of his that I had, venturing that she’d find them funny.

    I didn’t have to look far for an example to give her of his type of humor: “They asked me for the East Hampton High School Hall of Fame plaque which sports I’d played when I was younger, and I told them soccer, baseball, tennis, lacrosse, ice hockey. . . . And after hanging up I remembered what Dad once said after I’d written him a letter thanking him for always being there for me. ‘It was the best letter I’ve ever received,’ he said, ‘but you left one thing out.’ Somewhat taken aback, I asked him what that was. ‘I taught you how to play squash!’ ” I phoned Jim Nicoletti back and asked him to please add squash to the list.

    A.R. Gurney would have loved it.

   People don’t throw things along the side of the road the way they used to. This is a good thing; nobody really likes to look at litter.

    That wasn’t quite the case when I was a kid growing up on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett. In those days, my cousin Cleo, who lived just down the road a piece, and I would walk the grassy margins hunting for discarded matchbook covers.

    We thought ourselves collectors of the highest order. We would carefully unfold each matchbook, removing the single staple that held it together and throwing away the double cardboard butt where the matches themselves had once been anchored.

    This came to mind Sunday when my wife, Lisa, and I decided to get at the papers and various and sundry items that had fallen, or been placed, behind a tall kitchen hutch. Working on the opposite side, Lisa called, “Do you want these?” In her hand were three pages of matchbook covers that Cleo and I had taped in orderly rows onto lined paper and stored in a three-ring binder.

    Did I want them? To me, they were solid gold.

    The collection, if anything, seem­ed as good as it did more than 30 years ago. Among the graphic gems were one in brown block letters on pale yellow (how ’70s!) from the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, a barely legible silver-and-white one from Lenhart’s Motel and Cottages in Montauk, and one from the Bridgehampton National Bank when it had but one branch, for crying out loud.

    From out of town, there was the promise, “You’ll be dynamite. Learn electronics, create a new career, enjoy a whole new life style. Build your own CIE color TV.” One  matchbook offered, “Valuable pos­tage stamps from 77 countries! Free!” Another advertised a Rand McNally road atlas for $1.25. Yet another offered, “15 ways to get ahead.”

   The crown jewel of the collection, as far as Cleo and I were concerned, and a sentiment probably shared by those of us who grew up around Amagansett at the time, was from the M & P Diner, which had been in the building that now houses Art of Eating catering. This matchbook cover never made it to the three-ring binder; instead, it was given a place of honor in a small gold-tinted metal frame. On one side is a photograph of a topless woman covering her breasts, her hair alluringly tangled. The other side advertises steaks, chops, and cocktails.

    As far as I know, the only people who ever went there were kids to whom Mike, who ran it, supposedly would sell beer with no questions asked, and a few cops. Cleo and I were ecstatic when we found it.

    The drinking age was 18 when I was in high school, and the story was that kids would follow the warrens of dirt- bike trails that in those days wove through most of town to get to the M & P Diner, which was known uncharitably as Maggot Mike’s. Then, after a hurried transaction with the vaguely intimidating man behind the counter, they would ride away with a six-pack cradled between their legs. I never went in the place, which made me nervous even as I drove by years later. I thought about it though, and now I have a matchbook to remind me.

   Since I’m not really in the fashion game, I’m just going to put this out there. This fall’s fashion, designed mostly by men, is horrible. I believe there is a conspiracy theory to take us back to the days of women’s suffrage and the deposition of the petticoats from 1776.

    The top fashion magazines are all featuring layouts from the top clothing designers that they seem to revere. Why else would they suggest we wear such ridiculous outfits? One advertisement that features a group of women sitting on a train is downright scary. They all wear blank expressions, except for the one with big, googly sunglasses, and tall, really tall, floppy fur hats that look as if many animals were injured in the making.

    They look like a crew of clones traveling to have their organs removed for their originals. If I were to happen upon that train in my jeans and floppy cardigan I would not walk, I would run, scared for my kidneys.

    Another ad features women who look as if they have spent the last 10 years underground, dead and buried. They are pale, with big dark circles under their heroin-laced eyes, and blood-red lips. They are propped against each other to prevent slump, wearing fancy clothes and really big handbags, presumably to cover their embalmed bodies. Oh yeah, that’s exactly what we women want to look like.

    And what’s with the big boxy coats this year? They make even the starving supermodels look fat, so can you imagine what they would do for us real gals? Yes, Mr. Designer, we look fat in those coats, all of us!

    Shoes are no better. One ad suggests that we all need to buy bigger and better shoes for winter, black oxfords with pilgrim buckles that make the slimmest of legs look chunky. The shoes are similar to the ones the nuns wore in parochial school when they still believed they could torture us. The heels are a bit higher than the nuns used to wear, which is a good thing, or I might have been scarred with a heel print on my forehead, or on my arse, as my Scottish grandmother used to say.

    Let’s face it, the fashion editors are scared of losing the revenue the fashion designers bring to the magazine, so they proclaim how wonderful and functional the fall fashions are. It’s just hard to believe they would betray their readers and allow us to even consider wearing these outfits outdoors, in public!

    The only designers I would even consider buying are Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren (but not the horsey stuff, which, really, Ralph, is not realistic; not all of us, not even most of us, are horse people, hanging out at the best of stables on a Sunday afternoon), and Donna Karan. The three of them live out here and are obviously inspired by their environment — and us real people.

    It’s baffling to me that most of the top-name designers are men. And why do they want us dead and buried, wearing really silly clothes? Do they miss their grandmas and are trying to recreate their look? Are they purposely trying to humiliate us? I miss my grandmothers too but that doesn’t mean I will ever dress like them. All I need to remind me of Nana Haulty and Nana Foster is a butterscotch candy melting in my mouth.

    Let’s not allow this, ladies. We’ve come a long way, baby, and I don’t think any of us wants us to go back to silly hats, heavy wool coats, and below-the-knee skirts, without even a side slit.

Janis Hewitt is a senior reporter, covering Montauk, for The Star.

   I changed my voice mail message this morning, announcing my return from “cloud nine” and my intent to attend once again to all things sporting.

    When Debbie Salmon asked on my penultimate blissful day where I’d gone on my two-week vacation, I said, “Here.”

    “Ah,” she said, “you took a staycation.”

    I had, and a wonderful one it was. As usual, I had worried how the paper would get along without me, and whether I’d be able, being so close at hand, to keep the steering wheel from turning up The Star’s driveway. I did have a couple of urges, but sat down and held on until they passed.

    A lot of my time I spent in the 15th century, having set myself the task of getting through the plays Shakespeare (with some help from his friends in some cases perhaps) wrote about the War of the Roses, and, aside from the mellifluous language, found the pickings rather slim, though Joan of Arc did say something in Act 3 of “Henry VI, Part 1” that proved helpful to Mary on her way to say a final farewell to her much-loved aunt: “Care is no cure, but rather corrosive / For things that are not to be remedied.”

    Aunt Peggy’s death two days later got me to wondering, as I thought about her — a live wire if there ever was one — and Mary and her cousin Tom and his wife, where in Emily Dickinson’s poems was the invocation having to do with the birds and the butterflies and the bees. I found it when I returned this morning:

    “In the name of the Bee —

    And of the Butterfly —

    And of the Breeze — Amen!”

    And of Aunt Peggy too.

    Often I went with Henry to Louse Point at the end of the day and hit him tennis balls to fetch in the channel there. Old now and hardly able to climb the stairs at the office, he’s a teenager in the water, when he swims toward me in the golden path of the setting sun.

    I paid attention to the birds too, as Mary would have done, and took my sweet time in the outdoor shower.

    Her mother, a Stoic, on one of my visits said no one should be allowed to live past 85, and we laughed at that. “But first I have to read all of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Greek myths,” I said, “which will pretty much bring me full circle.”

    She’s a parasite of the state too — at least that’s what I said after I’d learned she paid no federal income tax. I still loved her, I said, “even though I know you’re laughing all the way to the bank on the third of every month as my shoulder’s to the wheel.”

    That wheel has been at rest lately, though now it’s begun to turn again, and pretty much on its own.