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.

    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.

--

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

    We’ve all heard of, and possibly heaped scorn upon, stage mothers who push their children into the theater or onto the TV screen. Of course, more recently, stage fathers have been in the news, too, pushing daughters onto the pop charts and tennis courts.  

    The tendency may be hard to control. Parents want to, and should, encourage their kids to do well, but it is sometimes difficult to separate children’s own interests and talents from what their parents wish them to be. Trying to get your children to fulfill your own dreams is an obvious mistake.

    I am pretty sure I wasn’t a stage mother. In fact, I may have erred by neglecting to praise my kids enough — by being engaged with my professional life at their expense. Be that as it may, this is all moot now that I’m a grandmother. Yes. Yes. I plan to be a stage grandmother.

    On Columbus Day, a day off from school, my Amagansett granddaughters, pursuing their own interests, filled me with delight. One of them is learning to play the viola, and she brought it along when they came over for the afternoon. Did she catch on to how thrilled I was while listening to her practice “Jingle Bell Rock”? The other showed off her two-handed prowess at the piano — after only one lesson. They both love to sing. And one, I must admit (if I’m going to be a stage grandmother I might as well go all the way) is quite magical when she dances.

    I sometimes carry on about not having pursued music as a career. There was even a time, in the 1970s, when I entertained the idea of going back to school for a master’s degree in music. Instead, I took voice lessons and courses here and there in theory.

    At a recent piano recital sponsored by Music for Montauk at the Montauk Library, however, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.  (Fortunately, for me and everyone else, I did neither.)

    Konstantin Soukhovetski, a Pianofest alumnus, is, at the age of 30, an astounding pianist. His pyrotechnics in Ravel’s “La Valse,” for example, won a deserved ovation. He also is a graceful interpreter of quieter pieces. One of them, Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor, struck an emotional chord (if you’ll pardon the pun). My husband couldn’t believe I had once been able to play it, let alone at about 12 or 13. I know how young I was because I stopped studying the piano at 14 when more effort and time would have been required to move ahead. I still wish someone had convinced me that I would eventually find the piano more important than hanging around listening to Frank Sinatra with my girlfriends.

    No one has to push either granddaughter toward music now. They are excited about what they are learning.  And it sounds good. Living vicariously, I can’t wait to watch and listen as the beat goes on.

    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.

    There is a fellow who often has his hand out for a ride from Damark’s to the village on Thursday morning at the time I go to work, and perhaps he’s begun dreading the sight of me pulling over to give him a lift, for it gives me a chance to practice my Spanish.

    “Ah! Ahora puedo practicar mi espanol!” I said in opening the passenger side door for him this morning.

    He asked me my name and I asked him his, though it took a while for him to get his across. When he said ‘Roberto,’ I said, cheerily, “No puedo oir!” And when he then printed the letters on my sun-block tube, I said, “No puedo ver. . . . No puedo manejar tampoco!”

    I hope he took that as the joke it was meant to be. I’ve been cautioned in Spanish class not to play too fast and loose with the language, that in doing so I may risk putting my foot in my mouth. Of course I run the same risk in English. But I sweet potato what I sweet potato, as a Japanese character transplanted to California in a T. Coraghessan Boyle novel once said. I yam what I yam.

    At any rate, I told Roberto that I thought it was a fair exchange (intercambio) — to wit, that in return for lifts, he would have to put up with my butchering his native tongue. I hope he doesn’t come to think of me as a bit of a bore, as in Evelyn Waugh’s “The Man Who Liked Dickens.”

    If he does, I may be the one beseeching him as he stands across the street from Sam’s holding a cup of coffee in one hand and sticking his thumb out with the other.

    “I hope I’m not imposing, Roberto, but could I give you a ride to the village?”

    “Are you going to speak Spanish?”

    “No, no, ni una palabra.”

    “You said you wouldn’t speak!”

    “Oh, lo siento. I mean, I’m sorry.”

    “No, no that’s it, that’s it.”

    “To Round Swamp then?”

    Of course I’m imagining all this, but I am determined to one day be insufferable in two languages, maybe even three, not just in one.

    I was practically speaking in tongues, in fact, when, after six days without it, LIPA restored our power last week. It was so exciting to resume our wonderfully boring lives that, to celebrate, Mary did three loads of laundry, restocked the refrigerator and freezer, cooked a gourmet meal, and ran the dishwasher as I sang “Que nadie sepa mi sufrir” over and over again in the shower.

    The Suffolk County Legislature is getting in on the nationwide campaign to get consumers to take along reusable bags when they go shopping (which is even touted on posters in post offices). A hearing is to be held today on a proposal to impose a five-cent surcharge on every plastic or paper bag distributed by a retailer in the county.

    That plastic bags are an environmental menace is understood; reportedly, only 1 percent of the many billions used in this country every year are recycled. That paper bags have a large carbon footprint because they take a lot of energy to manufacture is a problem, too. Municipalities around the country are trying to do something about all this, including East Hampton and Southampton Villages, which have approved bans on the use of most plastic bags.

    Suffolk’s Legislature has a long history of being first on environmental laws. It started the eventually widespread ban on phosphates in detergents years ago. It was the first county in the nation to ban electronic cigarette sales to minors. More recently, it was the first governmental entity to ban the toxic chemical biphenyl A in baby bottles.

    The legislation under consideration today comes from Vivian Viloria-Fisher, the legislator from the Fifth District. The Citizens Campaign for the Environment, an advocacy organization founded in 1985, is urging passage. A similar law — adopted in Washington, D.C., two years ago — has resulted, according to the group, in the use of 75 percent fewer plastic and paper bags.

    Still, it’s my guess that there is little chance the proposal will be approved, at least in its present form.

    Here’s why: Under the proposed law, if I’m reading the slightly complicated wording correctly, retailers would automatically get to keep one penny of every five-cent surcharge; if the store chooses to offer a carry-out bag credit program to its customers — that is, rewarding them for bringing their own bags — it will get to keep an extra penny. The rest of the money collected would go to the county treasurer to be put in a dedicated stormwater remediation  fund.

    So far, so good. But to make this work, retailers would be required to submit detailed reports on how much money came in and how much was kept. Fines of up to $500 could be levied for violations.

    It’s hard to imagine that this hassle will go over terribly well with the chamber of commerce. A federal ban with an amortization period for manufacturers to get out of the bad bag business altogether might work better, but that seems out of the question.

    Perhaps I’ve had my head in the sand, but the recent attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency by some of the would-be Republican candidates for president, which I probably should have expected, came as a shock: Has the recession really brought us to such a dire extremity that our politicians are campaigning on the premise that business interests are to be protected at any environmental cost? I’ve had an even gloomier reaction to President Obama’s and the State Department’s willingness to allow a 1,700-mile crude oil pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to the Texas coast.

    If ever there was a time for environmental activism, it is now.

The city was killing me. I had lived in five suspended-in-the-sky Brooklyn boxes in five years. And had commuted through Grand Central Station for three of those years, navigating the sweltering shuffle of feet in a kind of fish-feeding frenzy, darting between sharp elbows and swinging suitcases, muttering halfhearted “Sorry”s as I stuffed myself into the subway car before the doors slid shut with that metallic bing bong.

    And then there was my office, tucked into Midtown East. A gray-on-gray cubicled affair, filled with the pallid faces and fluorescent-lighted sighs of my co-workers, whom I loved, but kind of pitied, along with myself. The dull click of everyone’s computers — we were all writers for a trade publication — was the droning buzz of a hive. I just couldn’t shake this nagging feeling: I needed air, light, space, the heady stench of dirt. Slowly, like a sheet slipping from my legs, it dawned on me. Gardening. That was it!

    My great-uncle had bought a house in Amagansett in the 1960s. My family and friends visited periodically, but our country jaunts were basically limited to Indian Wells Beach, the I.G.A., and the occasional bacon run to Brent’s on Sunday morning.

    We had always rented the house during the summer, but this year it was empty and beckoning, its gray shingles and sun-dappled roof singing its siren song. A house by the sea, a house in the forest, a house!

    I gave my two-week notice and started combing through the classifieds of the newspapers in the Hamptons. The general reaction to my decision to flee the teeming streets of N.Y.C. was one of pleasant confusion. “Gardening, really?” they’d exclaim, nodding their heads slowly. “Wow, yeah, I think that sounds great.” They thought I was crazy. Yeah, crazy like a fox.

    Meanwhile, my boyfriend, a day trader (he’s not that “type” really, honest, he’s just excellent at math; he wears Megadeth T-shirts), had managed to convince his company to let him trade remotely.

    We gave away everything we could, packed up the rest in appropriated bodega boxes, stuffed them into my Volvo, and headed east. And then suddenly — well, as suddenly as a storm you see rolling in that spills its sodden belly from the sky — we were living in Amagansett and I was working as a gardener.

    Dressed in jean shorts and a T-shirt, slathered in sunscreen, and padding about in sneakers, I was at “the yard” by 8 a.m., greeted by a team of men, some Hispanic, some surfer-type college kids, some from the Shinnecock Reservation, but all humble and hard-working. The air was cool, the sun low. We’d lug the day’s tools into various vehicles — personally, I was in charge of the black pickup truck with a slipping transmission — and head into the fray.

    Federico and I were almost always together, tending to the yards of seven or eight houses a day, pulling weeds, pruning rosebushes, planting a kaleidoscope of peonies, lantana, impatiens, cosmos, and morning glories. And, of course, staking a slew of hydrangeas whose heavy heads would languish in the mud following any rainstorm.

    Bouncing along in the truck with the wind rustling my hair, the radio spilling out some classic rock, and Federico swilling horchata in his sun hat, I was happy. I savored the dirt beneath my fingernails and my aching back. I fell asleep to the winged roar of insects and awoke to birds. And my boss? El jefe? Kind, gentle, forthcoming, and lanky. He was frazzled but funny, strict but sweet. It was a pleasure working for him.

    Then, at a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard, I fell off my bike. Hard. Road rash covered my entire left thigh, and my back was so thrown out I could hardly walk. I don’t know if it was crouching in the sun or slamming my spine onto gravel, but whatever happened, I couldn’t garden anymore.

    Strange but true (and isn’t that how life always tends to be?), the same week that I tumbled from my bike into a bed-ridden state, The Star offered me a part-time position, elevating me from freelancer to reporter, complete with my own desk. And window! If Midtown East could see me now.

    Here a new chapter has fluttered open its pages and I’ve been just as happy. It’s a different kind of stress; no longer do I fret over overtrimmed bushes or broken-necked tulips. Instead, it’s deadlines, fact-checking, parsing the correct hamlets for the police reports, and convincing a rather ancient Dell to print out my stories for editing.

    I’m not sure what’s next; I’m a bit daunted by the prospect of winter here, to be honest. What I do know is that my seemingly irrational, fly-by-night decision to uproot and upend my life was one of the best decisions I ever made. I only hope I can keep trusting my instincts.

—

    Catherine Tandy is a reporter at The Star.

    The tussle over language and local place names has entered my own house, with my elder daughter announcing this week that she had taken a singing lesson in the Springs. I shuddered. As anyone who grew up here can tell you, it’s Springs, not “the” Springs, but my daughter doesn’t believe me.

    There is no telling where the “the” thing started, but it seems to have been quite some time ago. Back when I was a kid, in the 1970s, hanging out during summers at Indian Wells, the city kids we knew would say they lived in the Springs. To which we, born and bred here, as it were, just snickered.

    Controversy brewed some years ago, as I recall, when a group had signs made welcoming visitors to the hamlet, placing an out of place “The” in front of its name. Though carvings of scallop shells on the signs were quickly lifted by vandals, the signs remain, as does the misnomer.

    Authoritative sources, including Springs’s grade school, the East Hampton Town Code, the United States Census, and the classic, if I say so myself, East Hampton Star calendar all call the place Springs. Still the “the” endures and, who knows, may actually be increasing in use.

    Place names are mutable, sure, especially when many people are relative newcomers. My grandmother, who wrote books on local history and came from a family with 17th-century roots here, for example, left the “S” off Ditch Plain, a tradition we at The Star follow to this day. Do I think we will prevail and the thousands who have made Ditch Plains the Malibu Beach of the East will change their tune? No, I do not. But with Springs, I think there is a chance that tradition will prevail.

    What Springs or anywhere else is called may not seem to matter, but I would argue that it does. If oral tradition can be bent in this way, the qualities that make Springs appealing to its residents may also may be bent. Strong senses of place make for strong communities; change the name and more changes may follow.

    As far as the elder daughter is concerned, Dad is wrong no matter what argument he makes on the subject. “When they change the sign,” she said, “then I’ll change what I call it.”

    This year, with both of my boys now at the John M. Marshall Elementary School, one in kindergarten and one in the second grade, the back-to-school feeling I get every year — part of the meta schedule I carry around from my childhood, teen, and college years — is mixed with the sense of a milestone gained. Both kids in full days at the big kids’ school! Yippee!

    Getting ready was sort of fun. It was fun to go shopping with the younger one for a new red backpack. It was fun to go shopping with the older one for some new school pants. It was even sort of fun, in a checking things off the list, taking care of business way, to get the boys new lunch boxes. What I do not expect to be fun — what I am steeling myself for — is the actual lunch packing.

    I am a non-cook, and many aspects of food preparation give me anxiety and fears of failure. One of those things I dread is lunch. Not my lunch (crackers). Their lunch. Their lunch, which must be packed. The whole mix of hunger, pickiness, pitfalls, and plastic containers churns around in my anxious, fearful non-cook world.

    Here’s how it works: I am afraid that my children will not eat the lunches I pack, that they will be hungry, that they will then be miserable and misbehaving at school, and that it will all be my fault because I don’t know how to offer the right food, food they will actually eat, to fuel them. That’s it in a nutshell, only no nuts in the lunch boxes because there are children with serious nut allergies in each of my kids’ classes.

    My thoughts reach back to my own experience with lunch at J.M.M.E.S., which I also attended. Since I have a memory of the milk table, where you could buy a little container of (Schwenck’s Dairy?) milk for 10 cents, and also a memory of the worn red plastic lunch tokens with edges in a petal pattern like stylized flowers, I know I must have sometimes bought my lunch.

    But I also know that sometimes my mom packed it. For the record, I will say here that my mom is a nifty cook, not at all uneasy with food or bad with food, practical but also enthusiastic in the kitchen. Plus, she makes the very best black bean soup! Still, I wonder if my mom might have once had a non-cook streak, now totally smudged out by years of her own good cooking. I wonder this because as a single working mom in the generally haphazard 1970s, her lunch-packing record was . . . uneven.

    I remember the sweet cozy triumph of the special notes in my lunch bag from the Lunch Fairy, a protectress, a magical presence in my corner of the J.M.M.E.S. lunchroom, then still tripling as the gym and auditorium, though now we have a beautiful cafeteria. Wisely, my mother sent her love with me to school in a tangible form, knowing I would take comfort in that. And look, I remember. It worked!

    Yet I also remember the Soggy Unwrapped Cream Cheese & Jelly Sandwich Incident. That was the time when I discovered the sandwich — cream cheese and jelly on an untoasted English muffin — huddled at the bottom of my lunch bag and fled the lunchroom in grossed-out distress. On my way out (where was I going?), the sandwich, heavy from the weight of its unwrapped sogginess, fell out the bottom of my sodden brown paper lunch bag and onto the floor, mortifying me completely.

    Recently, I had a full-out laugh-a-rama with my mom and my kids about the incident, during which I regaled the boys with all the incredible details. They couldn’t believe that the jelly was totally soaked through the bread. Gross. No way! They couldn’t believe that the sandwich was unwrapped. Unwrapped? No way! They couldn’t believe that the sandwich was the only thing in the lunch bag. That was it? No way! Well, that’s how I remember it.

    Later, it struck me that at this point in my life, as a mother and lunch packer, I can totally understand how circumstances might have lined up to place that poor unfortunate lone cream cheese and jelly sandwich in my lunch bag that day, creating the legendary lunch incident that would be remembered and rehashed for years to come. A lot goes into the lunch-packing racket. Communication, time, supplies, skill, the will to pack. It’s not easy to pull it off day after day after day.

    As a domesticated non-cook, I really feel how risky this lunch-packing thing can be. I might not put enough food in the box; I might put in embarrassing things, or things that get yucky when they’ve been sitting in a lunch box, only I don’t know that. I might think the salami and raisin bread sandwich is okay, when actually it is not okay. I might think the slightly overripe banana is fine, when actually it is an obvious sign of my lack of good judgment in all food-related matters. I might be running late, neglect to cut the crusts off the bad sandwich, and then fail to master the mechanics of proper wrapping procedure on top of it all. Every packed lunch box could be a lunch incident waiting to happen. Do I dare pack my children’s lunches? Who knows what will scar them?

    Fear and anxiety central! It is almost certain that my children will remember that I never was much of a cook, but will they emerge unscathed? With the help of my friend Courtney Garneau, a mother of three and an excellent cook who can definitely cope with the whole food thing, I have come up with this lunch-packing ideal: The Non-Cook No Trash Lunch.

    I am bravely attempting! The “no trash” part is optimism reflecting the hope that my boys will not toss their lunches, getting rid of the evidence in abject disgust. The “non-cook” part is to remind myself that you don’t have to be a great cook or a food person to pack a respectable lunch. Do you? Is packing lunch cooking?

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    Evan Harris is the author of “The Quit.” Her articles about being a non-cook have appeared in Edible East End, and you can visit her online at pickygrouchynon-cook.com.

    My daughter, Katie, went back to school on Aug. 30, her senior year at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Speaking to some of her high school friends’ parents the other day, we cannot believe how fast the college years flew by. It seems like they just graduated from East Hampton High School! Where did the time go?  

    After returning from her semester abroad in South Africa on June 20, she worked for Stacy Myers and the Cornell Cooperative Extension at the Marine Museum camp for the summer. Most of her friends have either left the South Fork and are living in California or Florida, or are living in the city and commuting out east on the weekends, so we got to spend a good bit of time together this summer, during the week, when she wasn’t giving swimming lessons and baby-sitting at night for the Welshes or the Lindenbaums in Montauk. 

    Our usual routine would be to walk over to Navy Road after dinner with the dog and walk the beach. She would always bring her camera, and she got some great sunset photos, many of which she posted on Facebook. We had a wonderful mother-daughter night with her good friend Shannon, Shannon’s sister Devon, and their mother, Joanne. We went to Cittanuova for dinner and then to the movies to see “The Help.”

    We also had many family dinners at my brother’s house with walks around his neighborhood after dinner. My brother was watching his neighbor’s black Lab, Nate, while his neighbor Andy and his fiancée, Flo, were in France, preparing to get married. My brother was leaving to go to France for the wedding when Nate started to fail. He spent a few days at the vet, where they rehydrated him and made him comfortable enough to come home. 

    Kate volunteered to stay at my brother’s house with Nate and Reece, my brother’s Chesapeake Bay retriever. She would take them for a walk before she went to work, someone came at lunch to let them out, and she got back to them in the afternoon.

    We were taking the dogs for a walk one night and decided to see if Nate could make it down to the beach, his favorite spot in Montauk. He loved to swim in the ocean and fetch one of those plastic bumpers. He made it down to the beach and into the water and had some sticks in his mouth, very happy to be there.

    I asked Kate to go home and get her camera to take some photos of Nate on the beach to send to Andy and Flo in France to ease their minds over his sudden decline in health. She did and they got them and felt much better about him, seeing him on the beach.

    We walked there again the next night, but the following day Nate was weaker and hardly ate a thing. Kate brought the dogs over to our house and they played in the pond. It was easy for Nate as he didn’t have too far to go, and he swam in the calm pond water, retrieving his bumper. I made some chicken livers for him and shared some chicken from Herb’s Market.

    Kate kept in touch with the vet and took Nate in when he stopped eating. They put him to sleep the next day. We were all so sad. He was 12 years old. He’d had a wonderful life and wagged his tail in appreciation right up until the end.

    Katie did a great job of taking care of him, and Andy and Flo were so grateful for all that she did in keeping him comfortable. A big grown-up call for her.

    I guess it’s time for “the bird to fly the coop.” She’s applying for a Fulbright scholarship and is busy with classes, rugby, and her baby-sitting duties in Fairfield.

    I checked my Facebook account this morning before work and she’s posted sunrise and sunset photos from her beach house in Fairfield. Have a great senior year, Katie B. We’ll be up soon to see you play rugby. Enjoy every moment, and don’t forget to study!

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    Jane Bimson is an advertising sales representative at The Star.