My ex-husband came to Shelter Island to deliver the remainder of boxes I had stored in his basement, my former residence on the North Fork. “You have a lot of love letters in there,” he said. “Really?” I asked, surprised both by the information and the fact that he had apparently read the letters, which were not from him. I had been wondering what might be contained in the delivery that might be interesting, useful, or exciting, but did not consider love letters. Life is rarely anything similar to what I expect these days.

    Not just love notes, there were cards, drawings, and best of all, photographs of my various past lives. The interesting ’80s and ’90s hairstyles and outfits were pictured, along with every boyfriend I had in those two decades. I flipped through, flooded with memories such as a cruise to the Bahamas and trip to Las Vegas that my parents never knew I took. Now they will. Sorry, Mom and Dad. I am glad they survived raising four girls; it could not have been easy.

    Some of my relationship choices were considered mistakes by my family and friends. I admit that one or two were odd and even dangerous choices, but if I had not dated those that I did, I would have missed out on some amazing experiences. Many seem like a dream now. I would have never lived on Fire Island, barefoot on the beach for an entire spring and summer season. I wouldn’t have traveled to London and Amsterdam, or have spent six weeks in Key West. I would have never been part of Army life in Clarksville, Tenn.

    A few of the experiences were definitely not amazing in the euphoric sense, but were important in the grand scheme of life. They had to be. Take, for example, a terrorist attack with a resulting war that sent my husband to the Middle East, while I lived in the Hamptons opposed to the whole idea.

    I expected the trunk full of wedding memorabilia, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I put on the fancy wedding hat, looked at a few of the cards from friends and family, and was thankful to have an attic. “I’ll think about that tomorrow,” I told myself, one of my favorite Scarlett O’Hara lines.

    I did take the empty bottle of champagne from our first toast to the recycling center, a trip made to the soundtrack of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” As I drove away from the dump, my iPod randomly landed on my wedding song. One of the men pictured in the box of memories always said that there was a “spiritual D.J.” that sends messages through the stereo. I believe it. He is an example of a guy nobody could understand why I dated.

    Over all, positive memories poured from the box, with kind words and professions of love, as well as a picture of a tattoo with my name. Maybe I do want some of that again. Seeing all of the boys in the box together, most of whom I thought were “the one,” confirmed the validity of destiny to me. There is not “one,” not for everyone, anyway. I was in love for a time, and so were they, according to the letters. When the relationships ended, it felt wrong and painful, but the pain went away, and if there were no ends, the others would have never wound up in the box.

    Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

    What’s called a captain’s chair has been in the kitchen of the Rattray house in Amagansett since the 1960s. I’m not sure of the exact date it arrived, but I have never forgotten how it got there. My first husband and I had sailed over to Gardiner’s Island one summer’s day and gone ashore for a wander without being detected. The chair was in a small, tumbled-down building, exposed to the elements. I guess I must admit we pilfered it, yes, but at the time it seemed only right to save it from ruin.

    We owned a cruising catboat at the time (one of several we had over the years). They are centerboard boats with shallow draft and relatively broad cockpits. So it wasn’t particularly difficult to carry the chair aboard and take it home. Now, so many years later, I am amazed that it hardly shows any signs of wear. Visiting my son and his family, who live in the Amagansett house now, I couldn’t help but ponder how well built the chair was. It wasn’t new 50 years ago, and I don’t believe it has ever had to be repaired.

    Gardiner’s Island loomed large in our lives in those days, in part because the house is on Gardiner’s Bay and in part because the island’s future was uncertain. Robert David Lion Gardiner, who fancied himself as the Lord of the Manor, was the principal beneficiary of the trust that owned the island. He said contradictory things about what should happen to it. Because he had no heirs, his niece was in line to own the island, and, to thwart her, he went so far as to try to adopt a man named Gardiner from the South who may or may not have been a relative at all. It was all quite dramatic, and rather entertaining, too.

    One of my happiest memories of those summers long ago involves Gardiner’s Island, or to be more precise, Cartwright Shoal — a sort of sand archipelago that stretched into the bay from the south side of the sland — where we would go for picnics. We took a few friends there several times in a small Beetle catboat that we kept just offshore of the house. Beetles, which are raced in season on Georgica Pond, are uncommonly commodious and sturdy small boats. Ours was the only boat I was truly confident of sailing by myself. I remember the joy once of being at the tiller, heading back to shore with a grown man, his young son, and our big dog aboard.

    Cartwright was little more than a low stretch of sand with a lot of seagulls and a nice view; it used to come and go, disappearing under the water, depending on wind and weather. But I was shocked recently to learn that it is now totally gone. Storms and the rise of sea level have put it three to four feet under.

    There are other furnishings in the Amagansett house besides the Gardiner’s Island chair that I am sentimental about. There’s a heavy-duty hutch in the kitchen that we bought the year my son (who lives there now) was born. There’s an oil painting in questionable shape and in a simple black wood frame of a woman holding a bouquet of red and white flowers. An older generation had discarded it, and we needed something for the living room walls. There are lightweight chairs with remarkably short legs, and what may be a Dominy blanket chest that was badly refinished before we were given it. There’s a trypot, belonging to my late husband’s maternal ancestors, the Edwardses, which I believe was used to render the fat of whales caught off Amagansett.

    I am beginning to think it is time to put the history of these things down somewhere for the youngest generation. I was about to say put the history down on ink and paper, but that would have dated me.

    Time has flown. Sea level is rising. But family roots just grow longer.

   The other night Mary realized she was missing the news.  “That’s good news,” I said, knowing that for her but to think is to be full of sorrow.

    (Keats said that by the way, not me, but I like it.)

    We are, as this is written, about to be transplanted temporarily in the ersatz environs of Palm Springs, where one of our daughters is to be wed. The weather ought to be good. Of course, it’s good here too, as it’s been all winter, inclining one to stay put, but at the end of the day filial ties win.

    In regretting an invitation to our college class’s 50th reunion recently, I said I rarely made it over the Shinnecock Canal anymore, and while that may have been a slight exaggeration it is true that I feel more and more at home at home. Bluebirds at the backyard feeders would make it perfect, but Bruce Horwith told me they prefer open areas such as you find around the airport and Napeague Meadow Road to the woods. We do have woodpeckers, though, goldfinches, flickers, nuthatches, and soon, I expect, irrepressible Carolina wrens that often nest in our flower boxes or in the outdoor shower.

    There are so many moles in the front yard that it would take a weapon of mass destruction to rid us of them, and so they, making themselves very much at home, continue to fluff things up. Walking on our mossy lawn is like walking on a lumpy mattress, a not unpleasant sensation.

    While I won’t be at the college reunion in body, I will be in spirit, in the form of a rather cheery essay on the passage of time. I should rail against it, but, for the moment, I can’t complain. And, as a result, I’ve begun to call myself the Pollyanna of the class of ’62. I told one of my college roommates that to remind me life was not all wine and roses I have a copy of Kafka’s short stories lying on my bedside table, and that, of course, I’d not yet read them.

   Out of the blue, our older daughter announced last week that she wanted a pig — sorely. This was not an ordinary pig, mind you, but some sort of supposed mini-breed she learned about on the Internet, which could be hers for $850, shipping from Indiana, or wherever, extra. I said no, of course, which set off a fit of wailing unprecedented for its length, if not for volume.

    My rationale against adding to our household in this way is simple: I don’t want any more responsibilities. When it comes to animals, the fact that I get up at least an hour before everyone else in our house means that I end up taking care of the three dogs: a pug, a small, curly-haired mixed breed, and a rangy Lab mix. Next it’s outside to the chicken coop to check the eight birds’ water and feed, and to open the door to their run.

    For whatever reason, it’s my job to pick up the poop in the yard, trim the dogs’ nails and the shaggy one’s coat, put the anti-tick stuff on them once a month, and so on. I collect and wash the eggs the hens produce and shovel their bedding a couple of times a year into the compost heap, which I drag over to the garden. Though I’ve managed to turn the garden, it has yet to be planted, and I have no idea what I am going to do to keep the deer out of it this year.

    The foregoing more or less was what I told the pig-wanting daughter, and her mother, who was somewhat sympathetic to her pleas. Moreover, it always had been understood that the middle child was the next member of the family in line to get her own pet. I had to draw the line.

    But the pig talk continued unabated. “I’ll take care of the pig!” our daughter howled. “You won’t have to do anything.”

    “I’ve heard that before,” I said.

    “I’ll prove it to you,” she said.

    So a couple of times this week, I have not had to feed the dogs. Lulu, the shaggy mutt (or, in other words, a Cavachon — half cavalier King Charles spaniel, half bichon frisé), has been given a bath that I did not have to initiate. The keening pleas have diminished somewhat.

    The answer about the pig is still no. But I worry that some members of the household may be plotting to move me out into a sty.

   Even though the “Mast-Head” this week is about the editor’s household and backyard pets (see below), I can’t help but get in a few words about how I wound up with a 23-pound cat named White Boots.

    About seven years ago, my oldest granddaughter, the pig-wanting girl in the “Mast-Head,” happened to be taken to the Animal Rescue Fund’s kennels for a special afternoon adventure on the occasion of her fourth birthday. That she might fall in love there with a kitten had not really been considered by her mother, who happens to be allergic to cats.

    Thus began my granddaughter’s first tearful campaign for a pet of her own. She begged her aunt to adopt the kitten for her, but that wasn’t practical: Her aunt was working in New York City and wasn’t often in her small apartment. She pleaded with her maternal grandmother, who lived in a Manhattan apartment and, well, didn’t know from cats. Then she got to me.

    I like to say I am more of a dog person than a cat person, but our family had had plenty of cats over the years, and I was between pets at the time. So, aware of what was in store, I went back to ARF with her to take a look. Although there was some question about whether he was the same kitten my granddaughter had fixed on originally, we chose a gray tabby with a luxurious white bib and tidy white boots. She gave the kitten the kind of name a 4-year-old might choose, White Boots, and she promised to visit all the time to take care of him. How could I say no? It not only meant a pet, but visits from a grandchild.

    As might have been expected, her cat-tending visits and interest waned. Besides, her parents had more to do than to make sure she kept her cat appointments. As time went by, she was treated to a dog of her own, the shaggy Cavachon mentioned in this week’s “Mast-Head.” And it was she, who will be 11 on her next birthday, who recently decided she wanted a pig.

    I had forgotten how old White Boots was until he started showing signs of indigestion and was taken to the vet this week. His age had been duly noted when he was neutered and information about him was still on file. That’s also how I learned what the formidable White Boots, the largest cat I’ve ever known, weighs. (I’ll resist the urge to insert a pig joke here.) A simple, over-the-counter remedy and a change of diet were prescribed. I have every reason to expect him to thrive. With all this talk of pets, though, I can’t stop thinking that it is time to get another dog.

    After my last dog, Goodie — named for colonial East Hampton’s reputed witch, Goodie Garlick — died, I decided that I couldn’t get another dog unless we put in an invisible fence, and I had qualms about those. Now, I’m beginning to think I might find a dog who wouldn’t mind spending some time by him or herself in a portion of the backyard that has a conventional fence. We do already have such a fence, but I’ve been afraid that a dog would howl in despair at being left there or would be able to dig out.

    As I imagine it now, I ought to have a dog that is neither too small nor too big. Although if someone offered me a Newfoundland, like the lovable Meg — the first canine of my adult life — I would have a hard time saying no. If anyone wants to take this as a hint, they’re welcome.

   It’s winter. The summer people are gone. But I still go around town expecting to recognize faces in the crowd. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way anymore.

    Let me give you an example.

    Figuratively speaking, Guild Hall’s simulcasts of classical music — world-class operas and symphony-orchestra performances beamed into the John Drew Theater, live in HD — are right up my alley. But they are also, quite literally, right up my alley: The hall is a very short stroll down my lane, which runs next to the Star office, and across Main Street. I love classical music, and it would make sense for me to know quite a few people in attendance at these programs, but I recognize very few.

    It’s always more than a bit dismaying when you realize — as we constantly keep doing, around here — that the familiar community you knew and loved is gone, has slipped into the past.

    Still, Guild Hall should be congratulated for drawing new audiences.

    Like other South Fork institutions, the Parrish Art Museum and Southampton Cultural Center, for example, it is broadening its reach. (Guild Hall’s HD series has been so popular that the programmers even considered — but eventually decided against — showing the four operas in Wagner’s Ring when they are performed one after another at the Met in the spring.) I should add that, as might be expected, the new audiences for these classical-music events don’t include many young people; I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that attendees under the age of 50 are few and far between.

    Many of you reading this — who remember the small-town mood that lingered even into the 1990s — have certainly experienced something similar: There you are at Rowdy Hall, say, or on line at the Sag Harbor Cinema, craning your neck to say hello to old acquaintances, but . . . they’re just not there.

    When I was The Star’s editor, I was often called by city journalists to comment on trends or anything intriguing in the local news. Once upon a time, Bonackers were able to divide the world into two categories — “from aways” and locals — but I remember sharing with some magazine reporter or other the familiar bit of humor that there were three categories of residents here: year-round people, summer people, and year-round summer people. Back then, I thought I knew or could make educated guesses about how most everyone fit into these categories (as did we all). But in the new East Hampton, it would take an in-depth demographic study to identify who’s who.

    The next time anyone from away asks me what my town is like, I am going to beg off (unless they are interested in hearing about the geography, the flora, or the fauna, which, I’m happy to say, haven’t changed all that much).

    The idea that the John Drew would attract a big audience for an opera on a snowy afternoon in midwinter would have been incredible even just a few years ago. This change is really to my benefit, if I can only come to think of it that way. Perhaps I’ll meet a few friendly opera lovers at intermission.

   After getting my new hearing aid, and phoning Mary, I told her she didn’t need to shout.

    “But that’s the way I always speak when I’m talking to you,” she said.

    “Well, just tone it down a bit, I’m not deaf.”

    And then it occurred to me that, indeed, I am no longer deaf. The technology — though pricey — has finally caught up with me, and I can no longer plead hearing impairment when it serves my purposes to do so.

    “It’s all a cacophony,” I said. “The peanuts squeak between my teeth as I’m chewing, I look like ‘The Scream’ whenever the toilet flushes, the stairs groan unbelievably when I tred on them. . . .”

    “Welcome back to the real world.”

    “But I preferred my own. Despite what I used to say about participating in the dance — dance, it’s more like a stampede — of life. Things were quieter then, I was less tuned in, and rather liked it. For instance, the office, which I used to think was utterly silent, with everyone staring at their computers, is far more distracting than I thought.”

    Of course I can always shut my door — I am one of the few so privileged — but that would be a retreat into the nostalgic past. No, I must face the music. I no longer am in the world yet not of it. I must communicate — a strange imperative to come from the lips of one who’s been in the communications business for as long as he can remember, even when he was in the Army tapping out “Ben’s best bent wire” in Morse code in a Fort Bragg classroom.

    But how can one think with all that’s going on, to my left and right, before and behind, above and below, inside and out — plaints, scratchings, squeaky chairs, rumbles, phone conversations, the incessant traffic, the slurping of soup, the ingestion of sandwiches. . . .

    Accepting the fact that I’m now like everyone else will take some getting used to. It doesn’t quite fit my otherworldly persona. All of a sudden, within the span of a few weeks, I have a laptop computer, the first I’ve ever owned, and a professional-looking case to put it in, and a hearing aid that . . . will you shut up out there! . . . won’t abide my evasions anymore.

    And I thought these were supposed to be the Golden Years.

   There were flowers, balloons, hugs, and a wind-up jumping plastic frog Friday at Bucket’s. Friday was the day when Everett Griffiths’s 33 years of running the place came to an end and the still youthful-looking deli man and his wife, Angela, got ready to take life a little easier.

    At lunchtime friends hung around the door to Everett’s tiny kitchen waiting to wish him and Angela well. It was from here that he had served up thousands of egg sandwiches, made the salads, and provided a willing ear to those who had something to say.

    The jumping frog, according to the regular customer who brought it in, was intended to remind Everett that he was no longer going to be doing the back flips for others, that it was going to be someone else’s job to wait on him for a change. Hearing this, Everett and Angela erupted with laughter and wiped the mingled tears of sadness and amusement from the corners of their eyes.

    I had gone in to get one last sandwich and offer my thanks to the Griffithses and their staff. It is impossible to get close to an estimate of how many lunches I got there over the years, but considering that I went several times a week while in high school, missed about a decade due to college, work in New York City, and other things, but got back on track in 1998, it is safe to say the total is in the thousands. In the last decade alone, as I calculated today, I probably had 1,400 Bucket’s sandwiches, which, with a bottle of seltzer and perhaps some pretzels, cost me about $10,000 in all.

    Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lives in East Hampton, extolled Bucket’s in a poem we printed in these pages last week. Mr. Schultz wrote, “When Augie, our 12-year-old, told me about the sign / on the door he looked away, maybe from the idea itself — / he already knows things change and sometimes disappear.”    In a place like East Hampton, change is not all that often for the good, which is one reason Bucket’s ending is so bittersweet. There are fewer family-run businesses here every year. Losing one, especially this one, reminds us of what helped define our sense of place.

    I’ll miss the food, I’ll miss the laughter, and I’ll miss Everett, Angela, and all of those who made me my lunch over all the years.

   Three big does are concentrating on tufts of early grass at the left side of the front yard this evening. They, or their sisters and brothers, have already dined on the snowdrops in the backyard, although they haven’t eaten up the small daffodils that are just budding, at least not yet.

    Sitting at my computer at the front of the house, I can see what they are up to. I spy on them as they come and go, mingling among what remains of the many-decades-old rosebushes they decimated last summer.

    These three does are probably the same ones that watched me drive away from the house early this morning. They’re a wily bunch. A few nights ago I spied 6, hiking diagonally across the yard, and, about 10 days ago, I counted 12 marching through, moving quickly.

    I wonder where all these animals go when they aren’t in my yard. The adjacent properties are protected by deer fences; are the deer slinking across Main Street to some secret deer reconnaissance site?

    As I sit looking out the window I am eating an early supper of asparagus and a vegetable chili made with . . . venison. How do you like that, deer?

    (The recipe, on an old yellowed clipping, comes from The Star’s “Long Island Larder” column, which was written for many years by Miriam Ungerer. Miriam, who lives in Massachusetts now, told me the other day that someone was interested in publishing another book of her recipes, using that title. Miriam has four cookbooks to her name and it’s time she added a new one. I hope it happens.)

    It must be obvious that I am not squeamish about venison, or wild fowl, or any wild edibles, for that matter, having been treated to these local foods from the earliest days of my marriage to Ev Rattray. He was brought up here and had hunted most of his life. One day, though, after our first child was born and John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he decided to put away his shotgun. “There has been enough killing in the world,” he said.

    That didn’t keep us from enjoying others’ quarry. We rationalized it, telling ourselves that it would be worse to waste something that had already been shot. For about 10 years, we were the recipients once a year of a deer that had been hunted on Gardiner’s Island. It would hang in the barn for a time before being taken to a butcher. We liked to make venison stews, and most of the recipes are still around. I am pretty sure we never made venison chili back in those days.

    The chili, with zucchini and peppers and carrots and, of course, beans, was really good. If you told anyone it had been made with beef, they wouldn’t have known the difference. The venison arrived in three huge frozen patties from a friend of a friend of a friend. I guess the intermediaries are a bit squeamish.

    In a Star editorial last week, David Rattray blamed deer for destroying the understory of the woods, suggesting that hunting might be the only practical way to bring their population into balance with that of other woodland creatures, including birds. This week, we will publish a letter from Bill Crain, president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife, who argues against hunting and believes that immunocontraception would work and should be tested.

    I’m of many minds about what would be the right thing to do. Clearly, something must be done. Maybe there is more than one solution. But although tonight’s juxtaposition of does on the lawn and venison chili in my dinner bowl was rather startling — if admittedly somewhat amusing — I am not going to become a vegetarian any day soon.

I do not know if you can ever understand loss, no matter how many times you experience it. In most things in life, repeated experience is a teacher, but each time you experience true loss, the circumstances are always unique, so the lessons are limited in use.  

    The second time in my life I experienced loss was in 1963 when I was 7 years old.

    There was a little patch of dirt on the side of our house on Lexington Avenue in West Hempstead. Every day that summer, I took my dump truck and my cement mixer and my bulldozer and I built a road in that patch of dirt. My roads may have led to nowhere, but they took me on a daily journey.

    I would speak for the imaginary men involved, who always seemed to be named Joe or Mack.

    “Hey Joe, better dig that hole right there,” Mack would shout.

    “All right, Mack.” And the hole would be dug, only to be filled in and redughe next day.

    And every day our neighbor, Mr. Laurel, would stop by and lean over the white picket fence that separated my construction site from his driveway and ask me what I was doing. I would explain to him the various ongoing projects, and he would smile and nod his head as if what I was saying to him was real and meaningful. I enjoyed talking to him because he actually listened to me.

    Mr. and Mrs. Laurel had moved in that spring. They were an older couple. Mr. Laurel was the first adult I had met whom I considered a friend.

    One day I was digging, with Mack barking orders to the ever-compliant Joe, when an ambulance pulled up in front of the Laurels’ house. Two men got out of the vehicle with a stretcher and went inside.

    A few minutes later they came out, carrying Mr. Laurel. They put him in the back of the ambulance and drove away.

    I never saw him again.

    My parents tried to explain death to me, but it was a concept strange, foreign. I remember that Mrs. Laurel came over one afternoon to sit with me.

    I had experienced loss the first time more than a year earlier. It was not a person or a thing I lost, it was a place.

    My father was, and still is, a writer, a newspaperman who also wrote short stories and, recently, a book. Before him, his father was a newspaperman and a writer, a very successful short story writer, selling over 100 stories to The Saturday Evening Post. His name was regularly featured on the Post cover with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Booth Tarkington, Agatha Christie, and Ring Lardner. His success gave him something most writers don’t have: money. The McMorrows weren’t rich, but they certainly were affluent.

    He took some of that money in the early 1920s and bought the family a beach house in the newly formed village of Ocean Beach on Fire Island. The house sat on a dune at the end of Bungalow Walk, facing the ocean.

    My earliest memories are like glittering grains of sand, splashed across the floor. The ride to Bay Shore. Daddy parks the car. We get on a ferry, cross the bay, get off on the dock. We have a wagon, our wagon. If there wasn’t too much on the wagon I’d pull it, or even ride in it. Ice cream cone at John and Anne’s, head down Bungalow Walk, cross Midway. Midway was magic. We were almost there, the ocean, the house. Sleep at night, the sound of the waves, sometimes crashing, sometimes gentle, the lullaby of the waves.

    Breakfast in the morning, out onto the beach. All day on the beach. Me and my two sisters and mom and Tante Frieda and Mum-Mum, Dad there on the weekend, all women during the week unless my cousins were there, in which case there were three other boys to play and race and wrestle and fight with. Splash in the ocean, dig holes in the sand, run along the beach. Before dinner, we’d go back up to the house. Play around the house, but stay off the dune, never play on the dune. The dune was sacred.

    If it was just me and my sisters, maybe we’d take turns riding the wagon downhill on the Bungalow path from the beach across Ocean View. Or else they would do girl things and I’d get out my trucks and dig away.

    If our cousins were there, I’d play with Bunky. His name was Tommy but to me he was Bunky. We weren’t supposed to go under the house but one time we did, opening up the storage area, pulling out old toys our own fathers had played with.

    Dinner was fish, almost always fish. One time a bone got stuck in my throat. It hurt. The adults were concerned. There was a doctor nearby. We went there and he reached in and pulled the bone out. To this day I love fish but am phobic about the bones.

    At night, the adults smoking, laughing, drinking. Mum-Mum always had a little whiskey and ice in her glass, the sound the ice cubes made in her glass, a light clinking-clink.

    Then to bed, to sleep, to rejoin the ocean’s serenade.

    In my memory, those were the summers of my early childhood. In reality, they were the May and June and September, even October. The house was always rented during the season to pay the bills.

    March 9, 1962. The house in West Hempstead. Somber. Dark outside and dark in. My father, distraught.

    He was holding pictures of the beach house, where he’d grown up and then started to raise his own family, large photographs that a newsman had taken of the wreckage. Piles of wood were all that was left. Smashed by the ocean. Holding the photos in his hands, slowly tearing them up, one by one.

    A storm had hit, a powerful northeaster. It began on March 6, the same day as the new moon, the highest tide of the month. It battered the East Coast for three days, for five high tides.

    The Army Corps of Engineers had built a huge revetment to protect the houses on the dune on Ocean Beach. Over the course of five high tides, the ocean had breached the dune behind the revetment, forming a powerful pulsing wave of water running behind the dune, a stream that sucked in the homes that sat there, one by one.

    In the end, only three houses remained on the dune after the storm. Ours was not one of them. The land that the destroyed houses had stood on was condemned by the state, never to be built on again. 

    We went to Ocean Beach once that summer. It was strange, sitting on the beach in front of where our house had been — that beautiful two-storied shingled beach house, now just an empty dune, glistening sand — returning that night to West Hempstead.

    T.E. McMorrow is a reporter at The Star.