When fall arrives, people prepare by decorating their houses and businesses with colorful mums, Indian corn, and orange-tinted fairy lights. Children jump in piles of crunchy leaves, without a thought of the chiggers or ticks that are lying in wait, and smoke spills out of chimneys, filling the air with the wonderful scent of burning wood.

    It’s all a lot of fun, but it does mean the time has come for us hardy locals to settle in for a long winter’s nap, which I welcome, because what I’ll miss most about the end of summer are my dreams. In truth, I hope they continue, I have such fun in them.

    I continue to suffer from a painful knee condition that is baffling three doctors, all specialists, and I am on medication for it. I think that’s the reason my dreams have become so realistic and graphic. I’ve hung out with Julia Roberts, driven a race car, talked to Tom Hanks on the phone in the house I grew up in on City Island, protected Sarah Jessica Parker from a stalker, whom I then beat up, and sang in front of a large crowd and received a standing ovation.

    I almost had a romantic dalliance with Alec Baldwin, which is all I’ll say as my husband is a jealous man.  If I described that dream he’d be hunting down Alec and the two of them would make a formidable pair. I see Mr. Baldwin out here occasionally, and now I’m embarrassed. I wonder, does he dream of me? Should I say hi? Will he recognize me? 

    As I’ve gotten a bit older, my life has become more sedate. I’ve been married to the same guy for 38 years, raised three amazing children, and have a grandson whom I adore and get to spend a lot of time baby-sitting for, since his parents both work. It’s all good, because I’ve sown my wild oats — boy, did I sow my wild oats! My body is tired, but in my dreams I’m on fire, a wild woman, and I love living vicariously at night when I sleep.

    Entering the REM stage of sleep is like entering the Twilight Zone for me. I never know when I rest my head whose life I will be saving or who I will be partying with. When Julia and I hung out we were at a lake and we swam together, me in a bikini! Damn, I looked fine. In real life I’ve never worn a bikini; my thighs and hips were genetically doomed at birth. When Julia tossed her head back and laughed her trademark laugh, I stood next to her and tossed my head back, smiling my trademark smile, with my hair perfectly blown out, and looked just as good. Hey, it was my dream, and Julia Roberts was not going to upstage me in my dream!

    My hair is often silky-straight in my dreams, though I’ve fought a lifetime battle with curly, frizzy hair. If I still had all the money I’ve spent on straighteners and defrizzers, I’d be a wealthy woman, dreaming on a yacht and sailing to Europe.

    I look forward to spending a winter of dreaming. I just wish I could order my dreams like Netflix, and choose who I’d like to be in them. I’d order — oh well, I can’t say who I’d order, but let’s just say my movie star idol, Roy Scheider, would make an appearance. He’d be grappling with a huge shark and I’m sure I would save him from harm. I would dive into the water, hair perfectly straight, wearing my itsy-bitsy bikini with a belt wrapped around my tiny waist and a knife tucked into it to tackle the shark and bring him down.

    We’d celebrate afterward with chilled Champagne, aboard a large boat. I’d toss my hair back and laugh at all his jokes. Of course I’d invite my husband, whom I do dream about, but that we’ll keep to ourselves.

—

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The East Hampton Star.

    On the eve of the 21st century, a new generation of professional women entered the work force. With them, a trend in feminist surnames was emerging: the taking of their husbands’ last names as their own. Is the trend a shift backward? Or does it indicate the completion of a circle?

    Despite what people may think, the trend certainly symbolizes a desire for simplicity. The past three decades saw a deluge of information, new technology, and societal upheaval. As a result of this chaos, time seemed to speed up. Modern professional women were looking for a way to streamline the complicated issues they are confronted with each day. Identity is just one of those issues.

    As a young lawyer, I adamantly did not want to take my fiancé’s last name. I wanted my identity and my career to remain intact and separate from his. Fast-forward a few years to a different fiancé: I was giddy at the prospect of waiting on line at the D.M.V. to get my husband’s surname emblazoned on my driver’s license. What changed?

    On the surface, I thought it was simply because my husband’s last name was monosyllabic like my maiden name. The ring of my name did not change. A deeper examination revealed that I was beginning a different phase of my life and evolving into a new (and hopefully improved) version of myself. I became softer. Maybe even a little more patient. I was growing up.

    Once I was frightened of becoming someone’s wife or mother. I never wanted to become someone else’s anything. I just wanted to be me. But slowly my fear of background relegation began to dissipate. I started to relish the idea of taking on the role of wife and mother. I was becoming aware of my true identity and, ultimately, my place in the universe. A transition such as this is often fraught with angst and fear as one struggles to pull away from the person formerly known as “me.”

    Once thought of as something people just did after college, marriage came to symbolize so much more. Marriage is the coming together of each individual to form a powerful unit better able to navigate time and space. Marriage is the creation of something bigger than oneself — a concept that the younger me could never appreciate. Marriage is an equal combination of characteristics of two people, where weaknesses are diminished while strengths soar. Marriage is about flourishing, not overshadowing.

    Today, professional women rarely keep their maiden names for their careers while reserving their married names strictly for their personal lives. In a world dominated by chaos and confusion, the use of two different names became too convoluted. Even less popular is the hyphenation method.

    And even less popular than that is the blender method, the blending of two names into one weird and confusing last name devoid of history. Typically, once a professional woman gets married, she will simply tack her new surname on after her maiden name with nothing more than a space to herald her new identity. After a sufficient amount of time has passed for colleagues to become familiar with the new surname, she will unceremoniously drop the maiden name.

    The idea of bucking the surname norm to assert feminist individualism started in the middle of the 19th century. Lucy Stone was the first American woman to keep her birth name after marriage, leading to the moniker Lucy Stoners for all those who followed her. (Women in my generation didn’t have to shun their husbands’ names to earn the “stoner” label.)

    In 1921, Ruth Hale, a journalist, formed the Lucy Stone League. Seeing an impossible social task, the league slowly disbanded. Since its inception, it has been revived three times. Now in its latest revival, which started in 1997, the league touts “equal rights for women and men to retain, modify, and create their names.”

    Despite the efforts of the league and its predecessors, a woman’s right to adopt her husband’s family name as her own continues to be a widely practiced tradition. According to a 2005 study conducted by Diana Boxer, a professor of linguistics at the University of Florida, the vast majority of women surveyed had taken their husbands’ surnames for the sake of family unity. Ms. Boxer depicts this as a failure of the feminist movement because “societal traditions and gendered hegemony are so hard to overcome.”

    Consistently viewing this tradition as harmful to a woman’s individual identity is antiquated. Instead, the return to tradition should be celebrated as a marker of the strength of feminist ideals and achievements while honoring family values.

    Women in America are successful. The acceptance of multifaceted roles such as wife, mother, and professional allows women to express themselves in ways never thought possible. It used to be that when a young woman was brought to the altar, her name was all that gave her any sense of identity.

    Professional women no longer have time to focus on a symbolic gesture when this world has entrusted us with more important tasks. Women make discoveries in science and technology. Women mold our society with legal opinions and social commentary. Women produce legislation. Women color our world with art while providing the soundtrack to the stories we write.

    While doing all this, they continue to define our future as nurturing mothers. It is precisely because of this ability to create and nurture as applied to their roles in American society that women have also made more choice for themselves.

    When a newly engaged woman starts thinking about her surname, she has many options. Not only is it a testament to honor and tradition that modern women are adopting husbands’ surnames, it is also a wink and a nod to the notion that a woman’s identity inevitably becomes entangled with her husband’s. Instead, she can continue her life’s work while gracefully fashioning a coexistent life as a wife and mother. If power is choice, then the feminist name game proves just how powerful women are.

    I did not examine the genesis of my husband’s surname or my maiden name until we were expecting our first child. We wanted to grace our daughter with a moniker that combined the heritage of both families. My Germanic maiden name, Marsch, means marsh, indicating that my paternal ancestors lived near or made their livelihood from the marshlands. The surname Kerr is descended from the Scottish Kerr clan, a border clan that often lived in and made their living from swamps.

__

    January Kerr, a lawyer turned writer, lives in East Hampton with her husband, their 23-month-old daughter, and an Alaskan malamute.

    Who is Shear Ozeri and why would I want to follow her on Twitter? The reason I ask is that Twitter thinks I would. Never mind, I can look her up on Google if I really want to know. The question arose when I got the following e-mail: “We’ve missed you on Twitter, Helen S. Rattray.”

    I had only been to Twitter once, so I was flattered. I clicked to find out what else it had to say. After all, Twitter has helped topple repressive governments, hasn’t it? Who was I to ignore it? That’s where Ms. Ozeri came in.

    She was among three “people” Twitter thought I might want to follow, the others being the White House and CNN News. I don’t know why Twitter picked them. I do know that Big Brother Internet has a way of keeping track of and letting marketers know the e-mails we send and Web sites we go to, but I had never met anyone named Shear Ozeri and don’t think I have ever corresponded with the White House or CNN News.

    Apparently, Twitter didn’t like my not having visited it since August — and that once was only because I clicked on a tweet, at the horse show’s Web site, about how the Hampton Classic Horse Show had taken down all its tents and postponed opening day because of Hurricane Irene. I gave myself a user name and put in a password and then tweeted the word (with an exclamation point) “whew!” It was the first time in a decade that The Star was not publishing a newsletter called The Daily Classic for the show, and, given the power failure and all the rain and wind, I was relieved.

    I’m something of a late starter — at least age-wise — at this Internet game, but my skills are improving. Spending a few days last weekend in my husband’s New York apartment, I decided to stop trying to figure out how to get where I wanted to go on the subway by looking at an old, tattered, fold-out map. Going to the computer, instead, I was successful. I used four different trains on three lines, transferring between two of them, and wound up exactly where I wanted to go, feeling a bit smug.

    I have been getting better at choosing the right search words to dig up information and articles (something kids today learn in, I suppose, second grade). To give an example, I had for a long time been in the habit of searching for things I might want to buy by entering their general category (“rain boots” or “vacuum bag”) and then clicking on the companies Google presented.

    I’ve finally realized that you can fine-tune the search by being absolutely specific. If I want another pair of Levi’s petite mid-rise jeans, well, I enter the brand, the size, and the style . . . and, presto, here are several outlets that have what I’m looking for, and without shipping charges.

    Back at my desk in East Hampton, I turned back to the Twitter question. Okay, so I looked up Shear Ozeri. But Google just directed me to . . . Twitter, where I read one of her tweets, a coarse remark about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s taste in women. Meanwhile, this column will be live on the Web by the end of the week; I wonder if Shear Ozeri will friend me on Facebook? Help. I think it’s time for a classic novel and a nice cup of Hu-Kwa.

The annual onslaught of ticks is in full swing around here now, which has prompted talk of drastic measures. Each of the members of our human family on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett has pulled at least one of the horrifying little pests from his or her person recently, and our animals have been playing unwitting hosts as well.

Leo the pig, whose pink skin and white bristles make it easy to spot ticks, seems to enjoy being examined each night. The dogs, with thick, darker pelts, are more difficult to groom and have both been diagnosed this year with various tick-borne diseases. Weasel, a Lab mix, stopped eating anything other than the softest foods, and Lulu, a long-haired mini-mutt, is finishing off the last of her prescription pills after first being given a big dose of antibiotics in a shot at the veterinarian’s office.

My wife, Lisa, has had enough. With good reason, she worries about Lyme and the other illnesses ticks can carry, and is nearly beside herself about the Powassan virus, which is fatal in a 10th of its cases. If it were up to her, she would have the lawn sprayed with something noxious as soon as possible.

I, on the other hand, am loathe to poison our surroundings, especially since we live surrounded by marsh and boggy places and birds and amphibians of all manner. According to its manufacturer, Ortho, one of the leading home-use products, kills more than 150 kinds of insects, including ants, bees, caterpillars, grasshoppers, moths, and, presumably, butterflies, and one of its key components is highly toxic to fish.

No way do I want to put that sort of stuff into our environment. Besides, the dogs are likely to bring ticks into the house from farther afield anyway. For now, I think I have prevailed in arguing for monthly applications of Frontline to the pets and nightly tick checks for the kids.

Next, of course, will come the mosquitoes. But that is a discussion for another day.  

    Tuesday’s lunch was delayed by a stop at Egypt Beach, where I tried a little surfcasting. October’s early days are among the most enjoyable here, with their easy pace. The office phones ring far less often, the urgent calls of public relations people reduced to a trickle.

    With the letters to the editor checked for grammatical consistency and put in some semblance of coherent order, it seemed okay to extend my usual run for food a little. The bass had not yet begun their run along the ocean beach, this I knew, but giving them a try just in case seemed a reasonable excuse.

    It’s hard to describe, but fellow anglers know this: Sometimes the water just doesn’t look “fishy.” This was one of those times, but I cast awhile anyway — more just for the doing of it than in the expectation of catching anything.

    The ocean is notably warm for the beginning of fall. This, a surfcaster friend tells me, is the reason there are no fish to be found, except at Montauk. Few birds passed overhead, and few sandpipers or plovers could be seen picking for a meal on the sloping foreshore.

    It was, now that I think about it, my second trip to the beach of the day. My wife had an early class to teach, so I had our toddler, Ellis, and some time to kill before work. We stopped first at Main Beach, then went to Wiborg’s. There, a small knot of people and dogs stood off to the west, the dogs digging and barking, the people chatting.

    Ellis “asked” to put on his rain boots, the ones with the smiley faces on them. We walked hand in hand down to the wrack line, where he picked up sticks and poked at the tangles of eelgrass.

    As I recalled, at his age each of the children began to have an interest in throwing things. Ellis, in his turn, found each of us a proper piece of driftwood and beckoned me to follow him toward the water. I did. We threw our sticks in several times until a bit of current took them away.

    The wide ocean beach is a wonderland for a child. For an adult, too, those of us able to steal a few minutes to enjoy it.   

    By the time I got home from the Hamptons Marathon I felt as if I’d run one. Standing for a long time trying to find recognizable faces from whom to cajole quotes in a crowd of 2,000 can make you feel like you’ve hit the wall.

    My time was four hours and change. Coffee stops at John Vassilaros’s stand in the parking lot got me through it.

    He and I talked a bit about tennis and about how a fellow player with two knee replacements — as is the case with me — had been persuaded to get a new shoulder too. That gave me an idea. We should have an all-prosthetic tournament! Scott Rubenstein once phoned to see if I’d be interested in being the fourth in just such a grouping, but I called back too late, they’d already found somebody. I forgot to ask if he was whole or modified.

    The marathon, half-marathon, and 5K weren’t the only sporting things going on that day. There were a whole bunch of other contests scheduled as part of the high school’s homecoming, not to mention the rugby team’s fall debut here — too much excitement (or ennui, as the case may be) for a septuagenarian who’d been told recently by his mother-in-law that he was stooping again.

    She was right. I had been feeling as if a weight were pressing down. I couldn’t wait, frankly, for Carolyn Giacalone’s men’s stretch class at the Y to begin again in mid-September so that I could resume my fight against gravity.

    I not only did so through that hour and a half of stretching, I did so on the tennis court when I turned to my partner and asked him if he’d heard the one about the shrinking man.

    This guy, I said, goes to a doctor and tells him he’s shrinking. “You’re shrinking?” says the doctor.

    “Yes,” says the man.

    “Well, you’ll just have to be a little patient.”

    (I owe that one, by the way, to Mary.)

    The only other joke I know that’s worth telling is the one about the Dalai Lama and the hot dog vendor, but you’ve probably heard that.

    Thinking about Buddhists reminds me of the laughing boat that was supposed to sail all over the world promoting laughter. Perhaps it’s been torpedoed or hit a mine. I don’t know, I haven’t heard about it lately. It sounded like a good idea.

    Certainly we need more of that kind of thing. Everyone knows laughter’s good for you, releasing the endorphins that running long distances releases, but in much less time (and without running the risk of hyperthermia) so that you can do other things. Like take a nap.

    At dinner with friends not long ago, we got to cataloging all the terrible things abroad in the world, from natural disasters (tsunamis, floods, and earthquakes) to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to severe malnutrition among millions in the Horn of Africa.

    I was reminded of that old saw purported to be an old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

    There is no evidence that this phrase, which sounds a bit like a witch’s spell, is actually Chinese — much less ancient — but it seems particularly apt for our post-millennial days.

    It’s possible, or even likely, I’ll admit, that the times we’re now living in might not actually be more interesting than other decades; maybe the impression of dark days and watershed moments has more to do with our increased awareness of what is occurring around the globe.

    Still, I never expected that I would live to see some of the truly interesting events that have transpired so far in the 21st century — the Arab Spring, for example. (If these revolutions are the fulfillment of some mystical curse, clearly it was cast not at the people in the streets of Tunisia and Egypt but at the leaders of those repressive regimes.) Like the Arab Spring, the occupation of Wall Street, which came as a most “interesting” surprise to me, is a positive movement in American history: The Tea Partiers are not the only activists with conviction and spirit. 

    Meanwhile, while I’ve happened upon the subject, I think it’s time to abandon this idea of the Chinese curse and other so-called Chinese (hence exotic or mysterious) thises and thats. At The Star, we’ve had a longstanding rule against using the term “Chinese auction,” for example, in our editorial columns. Silent auction is a perfect substitute. More often than not, our forebears tacked the word “Chinese” in front of a noun when they wanted to suggest that whatever it was was spicy, mysterious, secretive, and hence intriguing. (Because, don’t you know, “Orientals” are inscrutable?)

    Even worse is the continuing use of the word Chinese to indicate something that is confused, disorganized, or inferior. A Chinese fire drill may sound harmless enough, especially when it refers to a collegiate-style prank in which everyone in a car that has stopped at a traffic light gets out and circles around it. But it also is associated with a number of other phrases dating back to World War I that have, thankfully, disappeared from common use. (A “Chinese national anthem” supposedly once referred to an explosion, for example, and a “Chinese ace” to an inept pilot. Oy!)

    I am sure that no one in any of our local organizations that sometime hold Chinese auctions ever realized the term could be considered outright derogatory at worst and obnoxious at best. Two of my grandchildren now go to a school that is making the study of Mandarin Chinese mandatory. When I went to grade school, it was likely to be Latin. But, well, we live in interesting times.

    On Saturday afternoon we were invited to go crabbing as a family with friends at one of the local oceanside salt ponds. It was also to be a picnic. Some friends were bringing a brazier and a big pot; others would bring bread, wine, salads.

    I arrived first with Ellis, our toddler. The bed of my pickup truck was filled with buckets, a cooler, crab nets, and stakes to which our bait lines would be tied. It was early, not quite noon. Shorebirds lined the edge of the pond, disturbed only as my son ran near, rising and settling on a small sand island nearby.

    The rest of the picnic crowd came slowly, gradually setting up the fire, several folding tables, and an umbrella. Several of us began the crabbing, throwing an old bluefish head and a couple of whole porgies along with the usual chicken wings to draw them in.

    After a slow start, the action was good, though most of the blue claws were small. In one bucket I saved a few of the shorts for blackfish bait; another bucket held those destined for the afternoon’s pot. After a while, the kids arrived and took over. The crabs were aggressive, and netting them was easy.

    The day was warm. The sun felt hot on the face, sheltered as we were behind a dune. Though I was busy jogging between the crab lines, I felt like taking a nap, which brought to mind picnics of my youth during which I would be perplexed by one of the grown-ups in particular who would always fall asleep once lunch was done.

    In those days, my father would drive us to out-of-the-way places he had gone to as a child with his grandfather before World War II. Bottles of wine would be opened, and one of the men, a food writer, if I recall, would find a sunny spot to lie down. This was baffling to my pre-teen mind. But Saturday, as the afternoon went on, I looked wistfully at a certain spot under a wedge of Rosa rugosa and imagined sprawling out for a few winks. It was not to be, of course.

    Fresh from the steaming pot, the crabs were a great success. As the day grew late, four children stood around a table, picking the sweet white meat from the last batch. In their seriousness about the task, I could see myself at their age and hoped that they, once they were middle-aged and had children of their own, would remember this October afternoon.

    With the economy hesitating to recover, is it time to think about finding or changing jobs? Normally, about one person in 10 changes occupations per year. Nowadays, about twice that number contemplate switching. What’s so good about saying goodbye to a job or career? What’s good about being fired?

    Finding a new job and changing jobs, careers, or occupations can lead to job satisfaction. Many studies (and our personal experience) show that job satisfaction is an important predictor of job performance. A happy worker is a productive worker. So it’s not surprising that changing occupations led us, and can lead you, to career satisfaction. But how do you find your true calling, your passion-at-work?

    Some of us acquire practical job satisfaction by changing careers repeatedly until we find what’s right for us, sometimes through chance encounters. (Louis Pasteur, who discovered penicillin serendipitously, said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”)

    But our studies of thousands of downsized employees and job-changers prove that there’s a special population who learn how to find or switch jobs naturally, easily, and freely. They find new ways to direct themselves in new avenues, to use their skills and strengths. They figure out how to find a job that dovetails with their skills. They arrive at a kind of inevitable match to their work. Their skills fit their work like a glove. They are invigorated, not exhausted, by work. They fully enjoy the exercise of their signature talents and their strongest and most enjoyable skills. One of these rare individuals put it this way: “My work is now a worthy expression of who I am.”

    Parents or well-meaning friends may suggest to career-bewildered youngsters, “Become a lawyer or a doctor, and you’ll never have to worry about making a living.” We find that many lawyers and doctors later in life, after following this advice, actually experience a rude awakening: They have a mortgage, a lifestyle, and a family to support and realize they’re doing what their parents wanted, not necessarily what they want.

    Career changes late in life, now common, are difficult: Is perfect paralysis better than imperfect movement?

    The workplace is filled with those who do find satisfaction. A landmark study of young people by Eli Ginzberg, a Columbia University economist, found that as adults almost two-thirds had moved in a “straight-ahead career path,” entering and remaining in one field. Almost a third pursued a “broad career pattern,” shifting fields within their occupation. The rest (some 13 percent) zigged and zagged in a “variant pattern,” changing career directions completely.

    The study concluded that achieving career satisfaction is not a fully conscious process but had to be learned from the alternatives encountered — by trial and error. Those people who switch jobs or careers (by getting fired or quitting until they find the right fit) tend to be productive and satisfied in their work . . . eventually. Hard work, years of random or systematic job-changing, and even floundering may be necessary.

    Compared to other countries, the U.S. labor force works the most hours annually and has the shortest period of unemployment benefits and the shortest vacations of any capitalist democracy. Charles Darwin observed that variability of offspring “coupled with the energetic searching for a niche” produce hardened survivors. Layoffs and career-changing help give us a productive American economy because of the variety and energy in our work force, in our start-ups, and in our established companies.

    Changing jobs or careers lubricates and smoothes the operation of the economy. “Free movement of workers between occupations,” according to economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “can be beneficial to both the individual and the economy.”

    The global economy drives local labor supply and demand in the U.S., making rapid competitive responses essential. For example, FedEx keeps cargo planes in the air half-empty so they can mobilize promptly in response to changing demand conditions.

    Similarly, workers can mobilize their dissatisfactions as motivation to change jobs, occupations, specialties. So work force versatility and even employee unrest or layoffs become a resource waiting to be used — a virtual national asset. The U.S. economy can, in effect, turn on a dime when necessary by allowing versatile, talented, and productive workers to shift jobs or careers with ease and alacrity, as facilitators to the survival of the fittest. This is as true for laborers and tradespeople as it is for lawyers, business executives, or doctors — no matter what color collar they wear (white, blue, plaid, pink, or gold).

    We do work harder and more efficiently when we work at jobs or careers we like. “The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface,” Darwin wrote, “with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.” Individuals striving to find jobs or penetrate an economy (a face of nature) are similar to sharp wedges. The incessant blows that move us forward are our confident refusal to accept job loss, our energetic persistence, our struggling to the utmost, our willingness to push ourselves.

    Getting fired and changing jobs or career directions may not only turn out to be good for us, but may also be good for the economy. Saying goodbye to a job layoff or career mismatch can provide a new lease on life and lead to genuine career satisfaction. Isn’t imperfect movement better than perfect paralysis? You don’t have to break glass to get fresh air. You can open the window.

    Stephen Rosen is chairman of Scientific Career Transitions, which specializes in the career problems of scientists and physicians. Celia Paul, his wife, is president of Celia Paul Associates, a New York City-based career-counseling firm specializing in lawyers. They live part time in East Hampton.

    Women hikers and campers are as common as men these days, or so it seems, but 100 years ago? My grandmother-in-law was one, a concept I could not imagine until I saw the evidence that didn’t fit my stereotype of Edith Banister Cordes — until someone dropped the notion in my lap. Ede, as she was known by her friends at the time, was the older sister of Jud Banister, the East Hampton Village mayor from 1936 to 1954.

    That someone was Everett T. Rattray and the vehicle was his book “The South Fork: The Land and the People of Eastern Long Island,” the paperback version of 1989. One of many sources for our research on Banister, my wife, Carol’s, great-uncle, it carried a number of stories by Everett’s maternal grandmother, Florence Huntting Edwards. He dedicated the book to her for passing on the urge to story-tell. The stories he tells are wonderful and those about his grandmother contain the connective tissue to Carol’s family, as Ede first married Jeremiah Miller Huntting, Florence’s cousin.

    When the “Oh my God” passage hit me, Florence’s character had been well set. She had a personality that Everett strongly admired, with good reason. He was relating an encounter with a new resident of the Hampton Waters subdivision near Springy Banks, an area historically important to the native Indians. He told about childhood family picnics on what he and many assumed was public land. He concluded by relating, “My grandmother had camped there with her friends in the early 1900s . . . a group of women in their late twenties with children already entering their teens, smoking cigarettes and digging clams and singing around fires in an attempt to regain the girlhoods abruptly ended when they had married a decade or so earlier at sixteen and seventeen.” As soon as I finished the sentence I knew I had seen pictures of these women.

    Eleven photos of women camping, including annotations identifying Ede in most, were in Carol’s family documents. The young lady who went on to become principal of the Hamilton School in Mount Vernon, N.Y., who lived and loved the city life, was smiling and enjoying the company of her female companions on the west shore of Three Mile Harbor in the early 1900s. Carol never knew her as anything other than a city-loving lady who retained a great fondness for East Hampton, and yet she was in every camping photo.

    Tents with taut guy ropes draped with swimming suits say, “This is camping.” So does cooking gear, a big wooden picnic table under a large shade tree overflowing with cups, plates, glasses, and, oh my, that looks like a wine flask, and a pie with just two slices left. Some pictures with husbands and bench swings set up reveal a little help from their friends. But photos of women in below-the-knee bathing suits in ankle-deep water, or climbing aboard for a boat ride, or doing a cheerleader pose for the camera with the harbor in the background, these reveal a camaraderie built from the bonds of camping.

    A small dog with a black left eye patch belonged to one camper but loved them all. Full-length dresses, ties and hats, and really big hats were the dress code of the day if the women weren’t swimming or clamming. Six women — rarely a seventh or eighth, and sometimes one or two men — were in most photos. A studio picture taken at another time has eight camping club members smiling and posing for the photographer. Who were these women? We know Ede was one, Florence Edwards another, but the rest remain a mystery.

    Ede, the only married teacher, began her final year at the Union School on Newtown Lane in September 1909, giving her time and attention, once again, to the sixth grade. She assigned grades to 42 pupils during the February 1910 reporting period. Students included Bennetts, Fields, Fithians, Goulds, Hunttings, Hedges, Kings, Lesters, Mulfords, Parsons, and Pharaohs among the longtime East Hampton families, and many newer but established names like Collum, Grimshaw, Loris, and Ross, names that played important roles in East Hampton’s history.

    As the school year ended, the June 1910 federal census found Ede, her daughter, Beryle Huntting, and the entire Banister clan boarding at the Christian Schenck house on the corner of Main Street and Newtown Lane. The family included Jud, his wife, Harriet, his sister Stella, brother, Howard, mother, Lucy, and grandmother Wealthy Burrows. The 1910-11 East Hampton-Southampton Register’s September 1910 survey listed Jerry Huntting, Ede’s husband and Beryle’s father, as a clerk in New York City, no longer an East Hampton resident. By summer’s end, probably sooner, Ede had no husband and Beryle no father at home.

    “The camping club, consisting of seven young women of East Hampton, returned yesterday from its annual week’s outing at Springy Banks. The ladies report that they enjoyed themselves immensely, crabbing, fishing, boating, and entertaining picnic parties of friends, and all have acquired a fine coat of tan and enormous appetites.” The Star’s final August 1910 edition closed the loop on Everett’s story, the 11 family pictures adding flesh to the paper’s description and spirit to the camping trip’s worth to the young women at that time in their lives.

    A failed marriage, a very large family in one house, a new teaching job in New Jersey come fall, and leaving her only child and special friends behind was the emotional milieu Ede carried into her final trip with the camping club. A summer’s end trip with friends provided the ingredients to put a smile on Ede’s face in those photos. Everett’s reminiscence provided the context for the other women in the camping club images. Precious images to our family.

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    Steve Rideout comes to East Hampton a couple of times every off-season to research family history. He lives in Shutesbury, Mass.