By the time I’d finished reading John Cheever’s short story “Goodbye, My Brother,” to Mary, we were both in tears, and, for a time at least, thrown back upon ourselves as beautiful writing will do to you.

    We’d been thinking of the day — a day free of care, a day of no obligations, a day largely free of traffic, which every summer becomes worse — when, all of a sudden, we were impelled to reflect upon life, not just on its joys, which, of course, we try to do as often as we can, but also on its sorrows, not to mention its horrors.

    As is her fashion — she is a much more discerning reader than I — Mary laid it all out, everything Cheever, who has captured my interest lately, A.R. Gurney having led me to him, had been writing about. She knew the reasons why her tears had welled up. Why, she wondered, had mine.

    All I could say in reply was, “It was beautiful writing . . .  he really hit it.” He had hit the ball out of the park, and the ball — I’m quoting here from Dylan Thomas, thanks to Robert Lipsyte’s memoirs, which I reviewed last summer — had yet to touch the ground.

    “Cheever said in another story that merely to touch one’s longtime lover is transformative,” I said during our reverie. Mary liked that thought. Then, with a laugh, asked if I couldn’t trim my toenails.

    And in that way, through banter, we began to lighten our spirits, and soon — though I was to think throughout that day and night and the day following how exactly I would describe life — we were on our way. It works every time.

    If I didn’t have her to talk to, I don’t know what I would do. We’re joined, not so much at the hip — though that is true enough — but at our synapses. People in our family marvel at how much we have to talk about.

    Perhaps in doing so we’re fending off grief (which Cheever’s narrator in “Bullet Park” had once thought of as a foreign principality) for as long as we can.

    But you’re wondering, no doubt, what words I picked to best describe life. Well, at least in my case, there’s joy and sorrow . . . and possibility.

   Irene Silverman, knowing of the quietly desperate lives columnists live — even weekly ones, whom Jimmy Breslin once referred to as “retired” — gave me as she was walking up the back stairs the Wednesday before last a long essay from The New York Times on the “the power and glory of sportswriting.”

    Having thanked her, and having ventured hopefully that “it might be good for a column,” I began to read. And, lo, the writer, Nicholas Dawidoff, began with a rather depressing quote from Richard Ford, who he said had likened a sportswriter to “an old-fashioned traveling salesman with a line of novelty household items . . . there is very little that is ever genuinely creative to it [sportswriting] at all.”

    I presume Dawidoff went on to refute all that, but I remembered it differently: I had a quote of my own, I said, by the same writer, oddly enough, which I’d taken as a hearty endorsement of what I did. “I think I have the quote up on my wall. . . .”

    Moments later, I called out to her, having peered myopically at a number of curled, underlined, thumbtacked vade mecums, “I’ve found it! It’s yellow, shrunken, and wrinkled, but here it is. . . . ‘And I thought, What would a man do if he were living a happy life? What job would he have? Hell, he’d be a sportswriter! What else?’ — Richard Ford [!]”

    Back to Dawidoff. . . . “What Mr. Ford . . . overlooked is that for really good writers, sports offers an opportunity to express all the pleasure and passion of life.”

    Stop, read no further: That is why I call it the joy department.

    And that is why last night after having damned selfish and purblind capitalists in the voice of Cheever’s Mrs. Oxencroft, and having been warned by Mary, who sensed a columnar rant coming, that it was far easier to tear down than to build up, I, feigning hurt, said, “Well, as a sportswriter, I’m always building things up, I write about the spirit.”

    She knew damn well I wrote about the spirit, she said spiritedly. Who knew better than she, who contributed in such great measure to my happy state as muse, lover, helpmate, drudge.

    If “the essence of good sportswriting [is] empathy,” as Dawidoff concludes, then to do it locally, among one’s fellows, counts, I think, for far more than paying court to empyrean pros.

    Toss in a column that can be about any old thing, a woman who outstrips all praise and makes it halt behind her, and what could be better?

   Houses are just about all I’ve thought about this week, as we put the final touches on the second Home Book of the season. It will be a supplement to next week’s Star and distributed free to shops and gathering places.

    Choosing houses, or cottages as the case may be; finding appropriately sparky writers; convincing homeowners to let their names be used, and arranging for the inimitable Durell Godfrey to get photographs or obtaining others — these are all challenges, for sure. But it’s always fun. I am not the only member of the staff who puts on a different hat to make the Home Book happen, of course, and in the process, I’ve gotten to better appreciate their talents.

    The fact is, however, that I’m an armchair traveler. I rarely get to visit the houses we feature. I spend time perusing architects’ Web sites, contact homeowners, enjoy suggestions from many sources, and, eventually, edit the stories, choose the photos, and hope it all turns out well.Unlike most of the glossy journals that circulate here, The Star stays away from houses that are on the market. It may impact our bottom line negatively, but we aren’t comfortable with becoming a vehicle for property sales. We think our readers appreciate that we are in it on behalf of architecture and design rather than the real estate game.

    We broke that rule only once — that I know of — and we don’t expect to do so again.

    The history of the local Gardiner family trumped our scruples when the Karmely family, who own the Gardiner white house on Main Street, invited us in in 2010.

    My aim is to strike a balance between houses that are old or new, big or small, and decorated simply or to the nines. The features I like best are those that not only peer into distinctive interiors but also give readers a look at the way people live, the lifestyle that informs their aesthetic choices.

    As for me, I live in a house that grew from a small silversmith’s shop to a two-story gambrel-roofed residence with three tiny upstairs bedrooms, and then grew again into the house we have today after first and second-floor additions in the 1930s. A spirit of preservation, more than a taste for fashionable decor, decorated it, because those who lived in it before I did held onto old things and handed them down across the generations. Even though it is quite an extraordinary place, I don’t think my house belongs in one of our Home Books, however: It would seem like a kind of journalistic nepotism.

    For about 20 years, I held onto a photo from The New York Times of a relatively small house with a wall of windows that opened to a deck on one side. I’m not sure what I was thinking at the time, but I set down the architect’s name just in case I might need it some day. It was an inexpensive, one-story rectangle of a house that wouldn’t make the pages of The Times now (or even those of a Home Book, I’d wager).

    While I love my house, I can’t help having fantasies about other abodes from time to time. What would it be like to live with an attached greenhouse or conservatory? What about an azure-blue infinity pool? I sometimes imagine how the two-inch-thick marble top of the work table in my kitchen (which was once a printer’s stone in the Star building) would look as a coffee table in a modernist setting.

    The dream-fodder provided by years of producing Home Books is endless. But the marble top isn’t going anywhere, nor am I. In the words of the old song, written by East Hampton’s own Thomas Payne, “Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam / Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. . . .”

   Reading The New York Times on Sundays is one of the best parts of the day that my family calls Sacred Sunday. We try not to work or socialize on Sacred Sunday and devote our time to each other when we can. But lately, reading The Times has made me feel wholly inadequate, especially the wedding announcements in the Styles section. There’s not a chance in hell that I would ever measure up to brides of today.

    The brides I read about are so accomplished at such young ages that it puts me to shame. I often wonder how my announcement would read. Would it contain all the jobs I tried to do? Would I have to announce my time as a nursing student, chambermaid, cabbage-picker, hair-shampooer, lobster-picker, wannabe veterinarian’s  assistant? I don’t think so.

    But I will tell you, my dear readers, because if nothing else it makes for a good laugh. I imagine my announcement would read like this: The bride and groom met in Montauk, where she visited for a summer and fell in love with the Montauk native and never left.

    Before moving to the hamlet full time, the bride studied to be a veterinarian’s assistant, a job she found too stressful. During her internship, the animal doctors frowned upon her teary antics when dog owners were told their dog was very sick and had to be put down. At one point, the future bride had to run from the examination room and the good doctor told her he thought she might be a bit too emotional to handle the position. She agreed.

    In Montauk, her first job was cleaning up after strangers in local motels, a job, she said, she found disgusting and quit. After several weeks of unemployment, during which she spent most of her time lazing on the beach, the bride found work picking lobster meat from the crustacean’s claws and knuckles. It was a job she enjoyed but, alas, she ate too much of the product and was soon terminated. It turned out the boss ­didn’t appreciate the jar of cocktail sauce and tiny fork sticking out from her sweatshirt pocket.

    In autumn of her first year in the hamlet, she picked cabbages from a field in Bridgehampton. Each day the future bride and her friends were given hatchets to slice the cabbage heads from their bases. One day on a leisurely car ride to work the bride learned that the male workers were getting paid twice as much as the women, so she had no choice but to take a stand for women’s liberation and quit.

    The bride attended Wilfred Beauty Academy in Riverhead and completed her thousand hours to be certified as a cosmetologist (hairstylist). She knew the job wasn’t for her when several customers returned to the salon and asked for a do-over.

    The bride and groom were married on Oct. 27, 1973, and will celebrate 39 years of wedded bliss this year, with their three children. When she turned 40, the bride began taking writing courses at local colleges, and received a job offer from The East Hampton Star. She has never lost her taste for lobster, but no longer eats cabbage.

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer at The Star.

   Transitions are difficult. It is still summer, but the Canada geese are back in the fields. I already find myself concerned that it will soon be too late to make the most of the season. Suppose, I say to myself, you were on vacation here for only the last two weeks of August: What would you make sure to do?

    It’s hard for those of us who live here year round to break the rhythm we keep the rest of the year. But it’s a shame not to find time for the beach, to get on as well as in the water, to eat outdoors, to sit down with the people you enjoy who are rarely here during the rest of the year, to attend at least a few of the talks, shows, concerts, fairs — the myriad things that seem to have grown exponentially this year (not to mention the expensive restaurants and costly benefits).

    If you were here for the rest of August, you would be able to take advantage of everything going on around you, as well as of the farm stands at their best. They, too, seem to have multiplied this year. Depending on how serious you are about what you eat, you might even vacation here just for the corn and tomatoes, the squashes and berries.

    I was delighted recently to find blueberries marked “local” at one of the farm stands. I supposed they were grown on the North Fork, although I didn’t ask. They seemed to taste as good as those I remember from my childhood, which we picked ourselves on my grandparents’ farm. We had one cow for a while, but blueberry bushes had taken over the hilly pastures. My grandmother used to make a fine upside-down blueberry cake, which she insisted on calling a pie, but my grandfather’s blueberry activities were more unusual.

    Several times in season, he would pick enough berries to fill a big pail and then walk the three or four miles to the nearest hotels to sell them. When I was a kid, I thought he did it for the few cents they brought, but now I think he did it to relive his childhood in rural Mol­dova. (My grandmother once told me that she fell in love with him when he jumped from the ground to the top of a wagon filled with hay.)

    Summers are always too short, even if you are grown up and don’t have to go back to school. But I have to remind myself that the off-season is plentiful, and the weather is often exceedingly beautiful. I have relived my own childhood by picking beach plums and cranberries, and, yes, they are the fruits of fall.

   You’ve probably heard this complaint before; I’ve been irked by tote bags accumulating around the house for a long time. Now, I know I’m looking the gift horse in the mouth, and as problems go this doesn’t even rate — and I apologize, because I’m about to mix metaphors in a most egregious manner — but the straws that broke the camel’s back were two of my most recent unsolicited acquisitions: One, in cheery brown and orange, came from a home-furnishings business; the other, a gift from the Hampton Classic Horse Show, is super-sized and plastic-lined, with two inside mesh pockets.

    The issue seems to be that neither my husband nor I have learned to say no thank you. Waste not, want not, we think . . . and merrily shove these freebies into cabinets, drawers, and closets from which they are never again to emerge.

    This week, with no one else at home, I headed to the biggest trove, in a bin in the music-room coat closet. Alone in the dark they had multiplied to epic numbers. Among the rather handsome canvas ones were several more from the Hampton Classic. A few large numbers had unattractive corporate names or logos on them (including one that felt like rubber and would have been good in the rain, although no one had ever used it).

    The two that I’ve actually made good use of came from The New York Times; because they have zippered tops, I carry them a lot on Jitney trips, and even had one dry-cleaned once. A smaller version from The Wall Street Journal looked chintzy by comparison.

    Then there was the heavy red one from Cole Haan, which had a shop here for a while and donated a pile to the East Hampton Library. The company’s name is discreetly printed inside, but I had found it too big to drag around. A bright fuchsia bag in a waterproof fabric also had a discreet designer label. The color had been fashionable about the turn of the millennium, if I recall correctly.

    A few small ones, in cloth other than canvas, came from museum gift shops, among them one that was a memento of my trip to China with the New York Choral Society. Yet another, that I had wanted to keep as a reminder of our visit to Salt Spring Island, off the coast of Vancouver, was nowhere to be seen. More recent paper-thin totes, like a few from the Wainscott Seafood Shop, for example, had also disappeared. But I found several that I swear I had never seen before, including one that was mammoth and alarmingly chartreuse.

    Having scattered them all over the floor for inspection, I proceeded to my husband’s bedroom closet to unearth yet another lode. My husband had left one batch on the floor, stuffed another batch into the biggest bag, and slammed shut the closet door. I hauled them all out. (He also had an honest-to-goodness, undecorated, vintage “boat bag” there, dating to the days when no one used the word “tote.” It was filled with Chris’s swimming gear: fins, snorkels, masks. I left that one alone.)

    I was about to walk away from the whole mess, having counted 37 tote bags in total, when other members of the household began arriving. What in the world was I doing, they wanted to know. I told them I was thinking of giving the totes in good condition away to people who were tote-bagless, if I could identify any. Maybe, I said, I could casually take a few to the dry cleaner’s and secretly forget to pick them up.

    My husband meandered in and scooped up a few, including the huge chartreuse one, saying we should keep them in the car to use for groceries. That gave me another idea: I would go to town and stand in front of the supermarket and give them away.

    By then, however, it was getting to be supper time. And it could be embarrassing to try to fob off tote bags on strangers, couldn’t it?

    Wondering if perhaps the Ladies Village Improvement Society Bargain Box might want them, for use at checkout, I folded up those still lying on the floor, arranged them in neater stacks, and squashed them back into the darkness from whence they came.

   As summer comes to an end (yeah!) a lot of people will look back with a fond memory of the summer concerts they saw. I saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965 and still smile at the thought.

    It was especially cool for two reasons, the first being that George Harrison and I made eye contact and the second that our seats were so good that several members of the Lovin’ Spoonful sat in the same aisle as me and my fellow 12-year-old gal pals, one of whose father worked for The New York Times and got us the tickets at the last minute.

    And that’s also why I’m a Belieber. Yes, I, who am old enough to be his mother, am a fan of Justin Bieber. I like the way he treats his fans. For lack of anything else to watch one night this summer, I watched a documentary that featured his recent concert tour. The kid’s a sweetheart and gives his fans what they want: an intimate contact through hand touching and picture posing. In the film, he went out on the balconies of his hotels and waved to the crowds of teenage girls who had staked out the place and sang to them, sometimes in their own languages.

    It seems most of the concerts I attended were held in summer. I saw Joni Mitchell (nosebleed section), Laura Nyro (a quiet venue), Chicago (general admission), and Neil Young at Nassau Coliseum, where I’m pretty sure I got a contact high from the pot fumes in the air.

    I always wanted to see Carole King, but knew it best that I didn’t. I’m sure I’d be thrown out for my attempt to out-sing her on her own songs. My voice would make my fellow concertgoers think there was a cat in heat ripe for romance under one of the stadium’s seats and call security.

    When George and I had our eye-contact dalliance it might have been that I was one of the girls screaming the loudest, even though I wasn’t a screamer and peer pressure provoked it. It may have also been the big-busted chick behind me that he looked at, but for one very hot and steamy moment he made eye contact with a little frizzy-haired girl and gave her a memory to last a lifetime.

    I thought his gaze meant something, like he was interested in me, which, since I was only 12, actually would have made him a pedophile, and he wasn’t because he never called me or sent a roadie to get me from the crowd to meet him for drinks after the concert.

    When the four mop-haired blokes sang “All My Loving,” which begins with the line “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you,” I puffed up my nonexistent cleavage just like the girl with real cleavage behind me and thought George would jump off the stage and make his way through the crowd to find me. I waited, lips pursed, for my first kiss that never came.

    When they played “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” my hands tingled in anticipation, but that could have been from the fiberglass that I had worked with earlier that day on my little boat in City Island. Whatever, George Harrison looked at me on a hot summer night and I’ll never forget it.

    The end of summer is always bittersweet, just like the appropriately named bittersweet vines that will soon sprout orange and red berries signifying that autumn has arrived. They will be wrapped on our mantles, doorways, and in vases to cheer us and welcome the new season and an opportunity to make new memories.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   Mary’s favorite show at the moment is “Newsroom,” but they speak so fast it takes me about half the hour to find out what it’s about.

    Don’t get me wrong, it is very good, but I think they’re all on speed. Either that, or I’m as dumb as I’ve always thought.

    “It reminds me why I didn’t stay in New York,” I told her the other night. “I would have been ground up and spit out long before now and sleeping under my Saks Fifth Avenue flannel-lined overcoat on the benches of Penn Station.”

    I had a thing for Saks Fifth Avenue once, and gin and tonics with twists of lime, and, above all, a white linen suit with a vest and buttoned fly that I think was a hand-me-down from my Uncle Jack.

    I fancied I cut quite a figure in the Halls of Ivy — I would have met myself under the clock at the Biltmore had I known who I was. The girls whom I fancied all had sonorous names. . . . “Wild nights — Wild Nights! . . . Might I but moor — Tonight — In Thee!”

    At least that was my wish.

    “I was very shallow, very callow then,” I said to Mary. “I’ve evolved over the years. From shallow to sallow. From a tweedy twit to a weedy wit.”

    The disaffection from the one I was persuaded me not to attend my 50th reunion recently. I didn’t want to be reminded of my blighted college years, when, knowing less than nothing, I thought I was the cleverest of them all.

    Now that I know I know nothing, and am moored in Bonac, things are going much better. I’m much more at home with uncertainty than I ever was, rowing in Eden, done with the compass, done with the chart.

   By one measure, 2012 has already been a notable year for tropical storms, though the Northeast wouldn’t know it. The ninth “named” storm of the season has developed and may grow into a hurricane as it passes just south of Puerto Rico.

    At this time last year, Hurricane Irene, which, like the Caribbean’s present visitor, Isaac, was also the ninth of the season, had Long Island in its gun sights. Its path varied from the forecasts, but it made an initial landfall in North Carolina as a category one, or lowest-level hurricane, causing widespread damage. Its center passed over Coney Island at mid-day on Aug. 28, though by then the winds had diminished to about 63 miles per hour.

    Eastern Long Island saw downed trees, some inundation by high tides, although that was limited, and prolonged power outages. The worst flooding took place far inland, and it was catastrophic in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, and parts of upstate New York. According to the official report from the National Hurricane Center, there were 41 deaths attributed to this storm in the United States. The total U.S. damage was estimated at $15.8 billion.

    The far eastern points of Long Island were spared by most measures. Montauk saw a storm surge of less than three feet. The 1938 Hurricane, the standard by which our storms are judged, brought with it a storm surge estimated at 14 to 25 feet as it roared ashore on an otherwise ordinary Sept. 21. Photographs of some of the hell it wrought here are on view through Oct. 8 at Clinton Academy.

    Irene, which had become a tropical storm when its outer winds and rain struck East Hampton, is all but forgotten now. The 2011 Atlantic season spawned another 11 systems, six of them hurricanes, though none threatened here. Tropical Storm Sean touched Bermuda in November, and for another year, Long Island had dodged the inevitable.

    Do take a look at the East Hampton Historical Society’s exhibit at Clinton Academy if you are in the area on Saturday or Sunday. It is an important reminder.

   Now I know what these people have been writing about all summer.

    The other night, playing in a doubles league at the East Hampton Indoor-Tennis Club across the street from East Hampton Airport, there was an Armageddon-like roar such as I’d never heard before. I could only liken it to an A-bomb test.

    Living in Springs, I’m not used to hearing a lot of aircraft overhead, and thus, perhaps, have been less sympathetic than I am now with those who built houses in the airport’s environs, knowing, of course, that they knew an airport was there.

    Once home, I thumbed through “American Prometheus,” the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and found the descriptive words I was looking for on page 309 in Oppenheimer’s reaction to the initial mushroom cloud, which he had taken from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

    I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. . . . That’s how it sounded. Then and there it became clear to me that jets like this should be banned from our airport. Let these destroyers of our world land at Westhampton and be driven the rest of the way in sleek stretch limos as they sip aged Scotch and watch “Wall Street Week.”

    Remember the sports car track in Bridgehampton? Closed down, in part, because the decibel levels on Millstone Road soared to power lawn mower range? The noise at the track was nothing compared to this. Nothing.

    Karl Grossman recently wrote of how these destroyers of our world pay $12,000 to be helicoptered to and fro. “It’s pocket change to them,” a friend of mine said, with a smile.

    “It’s a prime example of how twisted our society has become,” I said. “What is so important that they do on earth that their fellows here should be subjected to such obscenity?”

    They’ve got to do something. . . . Do you think that after re-routing air traffic from Northwest, where some of East Hampton’s politically well-connected live, to a corridor spanning Wainscott and Sag Harbor — whose well-to-do homeowners don’t like it either, and are making noise of their own — they’ll send it over Springs, the Queens and Brooklyn of East Hampton. It seems only right.