The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  I bet that’s a truly ancient proverb: People have been coveting what their neighbors have since the dawn of time. But when the phrase pops into my own mind, it’s usually because I’m looking not at grass but at pictures of gardens.

    It’s hard not to feel at least a little envious in a place where so many people have exquisite and expansive private gardens. Adding a little extra sting of the green-eyed monster is that I’ve been involved in The East Hampton Star’s gardening supplements for a good number of years, and they invariably remind me of how much time — and money — some people have to lavish on their peonies and pergolas.

    Truth be told, I don’t think you could quite call what I have at my house a proper garden at all. But the grounds here on Edwards Lane don’t look half bad, if I do say so myself. Sure, many a flower and bush I’ve planted (notably, the bottom third of a pair of April camellias) have been nibbled up by deer; and the David Austin roses my daughter chose years ago never quite thrived, catching too much shade in their spot between the brick patio and the sun porch. But the camellias continue to bloom valiantly, as do the old lilacs, and the old bleeding hearts, and the ancient shrub roses. As for the equally ancient beds of tiger lilies, we’ll see if the deer devour them again.

    We have an unusual groundcover here on the lane: Bright yellow flowers that open and shut with the sun and emerge every spring to do their best to choke out other plants. They are gone, now, for the season, and the grass is green again. Gardeners I have asked about this mystery flower say it’s marsh marigold, but I am convinced it is a rarer variety, which doesn’t require a wet environment. Some might consider it a nuisance but I think it’s a treat: What better way to bask in the end of winter than by having a rug of yellow flowers all around your house? Someone once remarked that I don’t have a lawn, I have a meadow.

    There are also wonderful mature viburnums on the grounds — which I can’t take credit for, either, come to think of it; they were planted sometime before the Second World War, most likely. The loveliest, a fragrant, old-fashioned snowball, bloomed earlier than usual this year, undoubtedly because of the mild winter, and then was beheaded in heavy wind and rain. I missed the chance to bring some snowballs in, but, no matter, there are other viburnums near them, including an expansive one with large, flat white flowers (shasta, perhaps?) that is in full bloom now at the back fence.

    The viburnums are what you might call gifts from earlier residents of this place, as are a host of yellow Dutch irises, which are also now in flower. A cluster of more delicate Japanese irises, which were transplanted from Amagansett, should be coming along soon, too.

    And then there are the narcissi. A good variety of bulbs were a birthday gift several years ago, and, although not all have survived, many of them brightened the sides of the backyard for weeks. Two more varieties seem to have arrived by chance, perhaps from a neighbor’s property. A few days ago I noticed an especially delicate flower with an orange ring at its center; and now, randomly punctuating the yard, there is a double white one that is very fragrant.

    Someday, perhaps, I’ll find the time to learn more about these plants and to take better care of them. Perhaps I’ll plant some things deer don’t find tasty. Perhaps, some day, I’ll even be able to say I have a real garden. For now, a delightful yard will do.

    If truth be told, and I’ll not tell it slant, I am quite unorganized.

   Our photo files, which, I tell everyone, are a Black Hole, are a case in point. I dare you, for instance, to find 1982. It’s utterly disappeared. I never did like to file those contacts and negatives anyway, which is why it’s such a mess in The Star’s attic. And I’m no better at home, a failing that has become all the more glaring given the fact that Mary is now an archivist.

    Still, while slovenly when it comes to record-keeping, I have a rather tidy memory, and so it was that I vowed I would come up with some important financial papers the other night and went in search for them. Soon after, having rummaged through several file boxes in my closet, I returned in triumph to the kitchen with some of the contents — three pairs of underpants, a bottle of Neutrogena conditioner, and two moldy leather glasses cases.

    It’s a wonder we stay afloat. I hate tending to the details, which a teacher friend of mine once said was absolutely necessary to do if one were to get on in the world, if one were to live a responsible life. Thank goodness I have a responsible wife, for I hate dealing with personnel of any kind (living and breathing human beings are a different matter), I loathe paperwork, and abhor wrangling with the faceless inquisitors of corporate America. Such a waste of time.

    Time that I could more fruitfully be spending in trying to figure out how to beat Mary in backgammon. It’s been difficult, for I’ve had to turn the instructional book I’m reading upside down to make sense of it given the way she sets up the board. But that’s okay. Nurtured in the hot-type years, I can read upside down and backward.

    She has this foreboding that I’ll begin to trounce her once I catch on, but the truth is I’ll never catch on. My brain, nimble in some ways, is dense in others, especially when it comes to numbers, though as I write this I am mindful (and somewhat bemused) that our publisher, in a 1990 memo to new staff members, said that I never made a mistake and understood budgets.

    If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 and the bat cost $1.00 more than the ball, how much did the ball cost? I stared at that question for minutes on end last night, uncomprehendingly.

    Ten cents? Ten cents . . . right?

    No, no, no, a thousand times no! Now I know the answer is 5 cents, but only after I beat it into my head. And that rote approach, I’m afraid, is the only way I’m ever going to beat Mary.

    But wait! Why try to beat her? It will only piss her off. If I can just get to the point where I can give her a good game, that would be good. A good game . . . that’s what we all want.

   Nights for parents of young and getting-to-be-not-so-young children can be complicated, and by the standards of those without progeny at home, the things we celebrate must seem a little weird. Take, for example, the case of one editorial staff member here who was positively giddy on Tuesday morning because both her toddlers slept all the way through to 6:30 a.m.

    Such are the small victories of parenthood. In my case, I was pleased one night this week that the sequence of prebed tears, various and sundry risings, and some raccoons scuffling outside ended just before 2 a.m., and I was able to get back to sleep by reading half an article in The New Yorker about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Dawn came soon enough, with the songs of birds awaking me.

    School-day mornings are hectic more often than not, with hunts for missing sneakers, complaints about what is for breakfast, and then a sprint out to the end of the driveway to meet the bus.

    On Tuesday morning, however, I had to drive two of our three kids to school in Bridgehampton, and anxiety about what I anticipated would be slow-moving traffic had me more on edge than usual. At Wainscott, I bailed off Montauk Highway and went by way of Sagaponack, looping up to Narrow Lane and slipping into Bridgehampton. It is doubtful that I saved any time by this roundabout route, but at least we were moving and the views were grand.

    With Evvy, our second grader, off to her classroom, I took Ellis to a play yard to ride the trikes before his prenursery session began. There, I struck up a conversation with a woman who, it turned out, had just made the drive from Montauk, staying on the highway the whole way. We had arrived more or less on time with our  charges and were pleased with the accomplishment, as minor as it may seem to those who do not know.

   When Whole Foods and the Red Horse Market both opened in time for Memorial Day, my theory that East Hampton has one too many of everything seemed borne out. I harrumphed when I noticed that Whole Foods, clearly not a farm stand, is calling itself one (I suppose because it does not intend to carry as many groceries as it does elsewhere). Still, I was impressed when word went out of a well-targeted marketing come-on: orchids for sale for $10 apiece.

    I wasn’t really surprised that the Italian-specialty outpost of Citarella, which was in the Red Horse space for a few years, didn’t last, but its demise may have been simply a case of bad timing: Had Joe Guerrera waited until this year to launch it as an addition to the Main Street Citarella branch, it might have made it. The demographic gurus for Whole Foods and the Red Horse are calculating that the economic tide may have turned. We certainly all hope they are right.

    Judging by the crowds over Memorial Day weekend, there might be more people here “in season” than ever. Casting your eyes around the gourmet-foods shops, you’d never know there are families in town having trouble affording groceries. The latest summer crowds are those who, recession or not, have money to burn. (Or could it be we are witnessing a local bubble of a different kind — a merchandizing rather than a housing bubble?)

    When the first Citarella opened on the South Fork, I avoided it and made it a rule never to buy fish there. Call it chauvinism: I just didn’t like the store’s expansive counters of  apparently every fish that could possibly be transported here. East End waters — and fishermen and shops — provide an extraordinary variety already. What we can find at the small seafood shops here is, I think, incomparable; shouldn’t what is really local be enough? But even after the Water Mill Citarella closed, the one in Bridgehampton opened, and the two emporiums of anything-you-can-get-in-the-city seem to be thriving, regardless of my gimlet-eyed objections.

    It’s a wonderful thing that true farm stands and farmers markets have proliferated recently, too. (To the point that my husband has now taken to comparison-shopping, checking the prices of different homemade jams and jellies at stands around town.)

    We are so lucky that a fair number of agricultural fields — some of which were preserved because the towns and the county purchased development rights — have survived, and not sprouted McMansions.

    Now it is strawberry season. But apparently the popularity of supermarket strawberries, in combination with property values, has convinced some East End growers to give up. At Vickie’s Veggies in Amagansett this week, Elaine Jones was surprised to hear that strawberries were still being grown and sold in Wainscott. She gets hers, as do others, from the North Fork. The strawberry fields in East Hampton and Amagansett, Ms. Jones said, have disappeared.

    Perhaps farmers are instead planting corn, with which supermarket corn truly cannot compare. Or can it? This winter, someone brought home a neatly plastic-wrapped pack of four ears from lord knows where, their husks stripped away to show that the kernels were uniformly perfect. (Genetically engineered?) To my dismay — yes, dismay — they didn’t taste half bad.

    I spent a lot of childhood summers where the evening drill was to go out and pick the corn immediately before putting it in the pot. Those are wonderful memories.

    The population of the East End of Long Island was once dominated by farmers and fishermen. Many of us, people and organizations, with government help in some years, have done what we could to promote the preservation of the land and the waters. We know that the inshore fishery is dying. Could it also be that our taste buds are quietly reminding us that the traditional way of life is history?   

   If you believe that a multimillionaire who did well for a small group of wealthy investors by putting money creation ahead of job creation actually is a champion of the middle class, I’ve got a fridge I’d like to sell you — one whose vertical freezer section we can’t get into.

    Mesmerized by the refrigerator’s stainless steel exterior, Mary and I, in our collective wisdom, failed to take into account its design, whose faults soon became evident once we’d squeezed it into the hole between the counter and the sliding glass door. It looked good — it still does. Perhaps it is fitting that the freezer section is pretty much stuffed, not with frozen food, but with various-sized ice packs for the alleviation of pain — the valueless repository, if you will, of pain capital.

    It’s been a long time since I’ve nodded my head in assent when someone refers to “the collective wisdom of the electorate.” To the contrary, I have found that, since Reagan (another candidate who looked the part), we have not collectively been very wise. The income gap has become since Reagan an abyss, a dislocation that poses a dire threat to our national security. Will only the wealthy henceforth be effectively educated? Will only the wealthy be able to pursue happiness? To afford medical care? Will only the wealthy be spared the corrosive results of environmental degradation? Will only the wealthy continue to call the shots?

    When an acquaintance of one of my sisters-in-law said she might well vote for Romney because he was good looking, and was duly assailed on that count, the acquaintance said, “Well, Obama hasn’t done anything.” He had done things, my sister-in-law replied, and if he hadn’t done as much as he’d wanted in his first term, she continued, it was because cynical Republicans had blocked him at every turn. They had made a mockery of governing.

    I, for one, had hoped he’d do more. He had the bully pulpit, if nothing else. Latinos are right t0 wonder whatever became of his campaign promise of immigration reform. Workers are right to wonder why he did not do more to stimulate the economy, and why the palms of progenitors of the crash were greased. Those weary of our military’s overreach are right to urge that we begin to put our own house in order (the present financial mess having been caused in large part by “war on terror” profligacy) and insist that our allies step up.

    I’ve commenced a War on Error. The first order of business is to puff out the cheeks, purse the lips, and blow hard into the hole made by a closed fist whenever Mitt Romney says he’s an advocate for the middle class. I’ve got $10 that says he’s not.

   Monday night was the occasion of the annual East Hampton Star All-Star Awards in which we give recognition — and an dinner out with family or friends — to local high school juniors whose academic and extracurricular performance has been noted by their respective schools’ administrators. This year, as I drove to the dinner at East Hampton Point restaurant, I was thinking about what the world that these young men and women were inheriting would be like.

    As I do before such events in the privacy of my pickup truck, I talk out loud to myself, working out what I might say. But most of the time when the microphone goes on my better ideas go right out of my head, and I find myself wishing I had made crib notes. This time, however, one idea stuck: that these students, most of whom will be college-bound by this time next year and entering professional adulthood in five years, will be facing a time of unprecedented challenge.

    This, I told them, might sound scary, but in my view it was something to be envied. Out of great obstacles come great solutions, I said, thinking of climate change, global population growth, and economic inequality. If there was one generation I truly envied, I told them, it was theirs.

    The way the All-Star Awards night works is that a representative or two of each school’s administration or faculty gets up while dinner is being served to say a few words about their nominees. The range of accomplishment and background we learned about was, as it usually is, remarkable.

    Sometimes the selections surprise us. I was moved when Jack Pryor, the principal of the Bridgehampton School, spoke of two students, Vanessa Cruz and Made Aditya Nugraha,  who came to the district — and the United States — knowing little English and, through hard and unrelenting work, did well in their course work and won the admiration of their peers and faculty. Vanessa is from Mexico and Made from Bali.

    When her turn came, Maria Mondini, an assistant principal at East Hampton High School, said that when she spoke about her students’ sky-high grades, volunteering, and sports accomplishments, she couldn’t help wonder where she had been in high school. This is a sentiment I share each year at the awards. “This is,” I told the group in all modesty, “a club of which I would not have been a member.”

   Like most of us, I get a lot of spam — from politicians I do approve of, from organizations I don’t approve of, and from merchandisers of everything from country-style window treatments to sketchy-sounding laser-hair treatments. They really were annoying this week, however, when I got back from three days out of town.

    I had taken off thinking it would be nice to have a holiday from the computer. Unlike lots of others, I’ve been satisfied to have a cellphone that does nothing more than make and receive calls. No apps, no e-mails, no thank you. When I got back, though, my Microsoft Mail was full of unwanted missives too numerous to count.

    For months, I’d wondered why the “junk” function on my Mac wasn’t performing its alleged task, that is, putting mail directly into the junk folder when the sources I repeatedly clicked on as spam appeared. With little confidence in being able to adjust the junk “preferences,” and without consulting a guru, I had soldiered on. Until this week, there weren’t that many irritating e-mails each day. Now, however, the time had come to do something about it.

    So began what were hours of opening unwanted e-mails and searching for the tiny word at the bottom saying “unsubscribe.” Even the word “unsubscribe” itself is annoying. How can you unsubscribe to something you never subscribed to? In the once-upon-a-time days of telemarketing, all you had to do to get rid of a solicitation was to say, “No, thank you,” if you were polite, or hang up the phone without saying anything if you were rude. And telemarketers rarely left messages when you were out of town.

    We all know that telemarketing has been all but replaced by e-marketing. I am sure you can get an undergraduate degree these days in the various iterations of the art. But in my attempts to seek solutions to my spam problem I made the mistake of Googlng the word “e-marketing,” and came up with information that I fear one would need a doctorate to understand. Perhaps I am only proving how low down on the Bell curve I am when I admit what I gleaned from the following bit of information: “Facebook [yes, I understand] today started rolling out the new Open Graph [huh?] apps [maybe yes, maybe no] for its Timeline [what?] profile.”

    It is said that you don’t need to know how an engine works in order to drive a car. And you don’t need to understand mathematical theory to add and subtract. But any analogy with the use of a computer fails. I will never understand how a computer works — programming, codes, algorithms, nanotechnology — but I wish someone would at least explain to me how to turn on the ignition and apply the brakes.

   Our daughter, who while she wasn’t particularly athletic has one of her own who shows every sign of being so, recalled the other evening that her girls softball coach had been a marvelous encourager and that, thus, she had grown, through his encouragement and through practice, to rather love the game and to play it well.

    I remembered, after some cogitation, that his mantra — what he told the kids when they gathered around him — was, “Pay attention.” Yet, often — certainly it’s been so in my case — we tend toward not paying attention. Maybe to pay too much attention will break your heart. 

    The coach’s first name was Leander. Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology” says his namesake, an exemplar of persistence, swam the Hellespont every night guided by a light held by his love on the far shore.

    Interestingly, Jane Brody in a recent column on optimism, links it, not so much to a chronically happy state, but to persistence, to engagement, and to genes governing the brain’s neurotransmitters.

    Much points, of course, toward a pessimistic view of life — we are here only for so long and then it is taken from us. Yet it is so wondrous, despite the horrors.

    Sometimes, though, life’s spark is extinguished even while we live, a prospect that gives me more pause than does a quick exit. Montaigne warns against such fearful thoughts. Get on with it, he says. Hey, you never know!

    And since you never know, pay attention to planting your cabbages. His own brother, he tells us, “died at the age of 23 while playing tennis; he was felled by a blow from a tennis ball just above the right ear.”

   Should I give up tennis then? No, because for me it’s pleasurable and I’m an optimist — ordained to be so perhaps. Still, I shouldn’t complain, especially given the fact that I’ve exceeded my threescore and 10, and, furthermore, to complain would be pessimistic.

    When Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote Emily Dickinson to tell her he was getting married, she said that was wonderful and that the greatest compliment she could pay him was that “you are yourself.”

    As for me, I’m an optimist. I persist. I take delight in life and in physical activity, and would like to think I’ve been an encourager to some, though I try not to pay too much attention. For to do so can break your heart.

   My British cousin, Jamie Gosney, recently decided to put together a compact disc — he calls it a family album — featuring the clan’s favorite songs as a tribute to his mum, my aunt Jen-Jen, who turns 80 in August.

    And he offered up a method with which everyone is familiar: “If you were, indeed, shipwrecked on a desert island, this would be the one piece of music you just couldn’t live without,” he wrote in an email.

    Well, you can’t ask me a question like that, it just opens up a host of others. My brain is a bad neighborhood, and if I spend too long walking down the dark alleyways, I will get mugged. And that’s what happened with this inquiry.

    First of all, as my wise 16-year-old pointed out, the question is probably about a deserted island, not a desert island, although it could certainly be both. No matter which, I would like to know how the hell I got there. For me to get to a desert(ed) island would require money for plane fare and plenty of vacation time, neither of which I have coming to me in the near future. I can barely afford to get to Shelter Island.

    Second, what am I listening to the music on? If I have a little portable CD player, what am I plugging it into? Or is it solar?    

    “It would run on coconuts,” explained the wise 16-year-old patiently.

    “Apparently, so would I,” I said.

    If I were cast away on a desert island I think I would be too busy trying to find food and plan my escape to sit about and listen to one song, over and over, on some newfangled coconut-powered electronic. 

    Would I become attached to this machine, this one relic of my past life? If it got sand in the works and died one day, would I be cradling it in my arms and screaming “Sony!” a la Tom Hanks?

    And then there’s the question of the song. This was easy for my kids. They just picked their favorite songs of the moment. When you’re a kid, whatever you’re listening to right now, today, is the best ever and you will love it until the day you die. Ask kids what is their favorite color, their favorite movie, their favorite food, and you get a cut-and-dried answer.

    For adults, or at least this semi-adult, it’s not so black and white. Rather than think of a song, I started thinking about that song’s qualifications, like some sort of psychological evaluation.

    I would want to add a song to the family album that was something that the whole family, from the doddering elders to the bouncy brats and everyone in between, could enjoy.

    The song would have to be up, and happy, and evocative of people doing stuff collectively, family activities, since those are the things I would be pining for on the island. I would want the performer or performers to sound like there were in-jokes, a feeling of camaraderie and teamwork, while they performed. In fact, the song would have to be about teamwork and doing things together.

    And if by chance I were not to escape from that island prison, and my anguished bones were found one day, with the cursed song still playing on the fruit-energized machine, I would want it to define me, for people to nod and say, “Ah, yes. That song was pure Bridget.”

    I was putting a lot of pressure on this song. And on myself. I lay awake at nights, cursing my sweet cousin James, looking at the endless empty line of an imaginary horizon, waiting for a ship, a plane, anything to come and remove me from my solitary hell.

    This went on for months.

    Until just a week ago, as I was on a long-distance drive and a song came on the radio. I hadn’t been thinking about Jamie’s question, and yet, here it was. The song. The song that fulfilled all my requirements. A song I could, if need be, listen to over and over, using the tune as a musical crucifix against the blood-sapping repetitiveness of lapping ocean waves and eternal sand.

    I quickly sent it off to Jamie and have been doing my very best to wash the taste of raw crabs and seaweed and loneliness out of my brain-mouth ever since.

    I hope I never do get marooned on some faraway strip of sand in the sea, but whenever I travel, I will be sure to take the “family album” with me, to chase away feelings of despair until help inevitably arrives. Let’s just hope there’s plenty of coconuts there.

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter for The Star. If she were on a deserted island, she would choose “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by The Beatles as the song she would most like to hear over and over and over and over.

   The North Carolina Legislature earned no small degree of derision recently in attempting to tell scientists there how to predict sea level rise. A bill pending in the Southern state would constrain how its coastal commission calculates the rate of increase, requiring that numbers be based on trends only since 1900. This would leave out exponential shifts that may follow unforeseen changes, such as accelerated melting of the polar ice caps.

    In coastal parts of that state, officials will have to skirt the new law to plan for what current research says could be sea level rise in excess of the limit. As on Long Island, much of North Carolina’s coastline is highly vulnerable to inundation. Policy makers will have to take that into account, the state capital be damned.

    That some municipalities there have actually passed resolutions prohibiting work on meeting the challenges of the predicted inundation is beyond belief. Of course, that may be a step or two better than what has happened here, at least in the Town of East Hampton, where officials have sidestepped the issue for years and acted as if it will all go away.

    These are big problems, and you can understand why elected officials, very few of whom have a background in the sciences, are not equipped to deal with them. Still, the best available evidence shows that the sea is coming and long-term preparations must be made.

    Where I live, on the bay in Amagansett, the beach has moved landward at the rate of about a foot a year for almost 50 years. The erosion is irregular; some years nothing much happens. Then, in one night, 12 or more feet can be sheared off the low bluffs. And, guess what? It never comes back.

    Back in the early 1960s, when my parents chose the site for the house, they put it as far back as they could, buying us time. Neighbors were not so cautious, and after the last bad northeaster, several of their foundations were battered by the waves.

    As lawmakers dither, somewhere King Canute must be smiling. He was the Norse leader whose courtesans told him he was so powerful that he could hold back the tide. Legend has it that to prove them wrong, he had his throne carried to the water’s edge, and, as the sea rose, he pointed out the hubris of his sycophants.

    Canute was making the point that no man, not even a great leader, could force heaven and earth to bend to his will. North Carolina lawmakers, it seems, have not yet learned this lesson.