“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” I said to Mary the other morning. “Nay, nay, thou art more lovely, e’en more pissed off at me. . . .”

    And with reason.

    “Every now and then,” I said later to my son-in-law, “I realize, with the chill of recognition, that Mary does 95 percent of the things around here. I’m trying to work myself back into her good graces, which is why I’m having you haul down to our basement the water-logged three-quarter-inch-thick plywood boards we had our handyman put up over our kitchen window before Hurricane Irene and why you brought over here that moldy four-poster bed frame that’s been in your basement the past three years.”

    “The thing about Jackie,” my late Aunt Ella once said, “is that he’s very adaptable.”

    That can be a blessing and a curse. I’ve lived in a one-room apartment behind a funeral home vent in which, when I went to the bathroom, my feet were almost in the stove. I’ve lived with roaches. I’ve lived with rats (though I was told they were mice). I’ve spent five winters hopping about in a seaweed-insulated house in a kind of hooded sleeping bag with eye holes and mittens. I’m amenable to just about everything — lazy, if you will, more than willing to let others carry my water. In short, a wretch.

    But Mary isn’t into wretches. She’d rather that I pull my own oar.

    Our new mailbox may inspire me to right my tippy boat. My daughter Emily bought it recently, long chagrined by the mailbox-in-a-sling that I had jerry-rigged, using bright green duct tape, after it last was bashed.

    Seeing it all sparkling white on a sturdy stanchion (a handyman had installed it, of course) as I pulled into the driveway the other evening, I wondered for a moment who lived there.

    An upstanding person, I thought. Responsible, self-reliant. . . . Someone who sometimes mistakenly thinks he can make everything all right with a jest rather than a gesture, with words rather than deeds.

    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.

    I have in hand the LIPA newsletter that accompanied this month’s bill, and I want to share some of it with you (especially you who have been without power these last six days, as has been the case with me and, from what I can gather, numerous other working stiffs in Springs).

    Interestingly, the newsletter has as its heading, “LIPA Is Prepared for Hurricane Season, Are You?”

    And so to begin: “LIPA prepares year round for not just hurricanes, but all storms. Our preparations include; numerous storm drills, reviewing and updating storm emergency procedures, enhancing customer communications, and a continuous ‘tree trimming’ program to identify and trim tree limbs in rights of way and along easements that could potentially cause outages during or after a storm.”*

    “Last year, LIPA aggressively implemented a new communication program in order to better inform customers about outages and restoration times. . . .”**

    Well you could have fooled me.

    I asked a neighbor, a Verizon retiree, what the matter was in our neighborhood, and he said a circuit breaker at the corner had “popped” during the storm. Not a big deal, I should think, and yet since 10:20 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, until 4:15 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 2, we had no electricity and no water.

    I have a radical proposal — actually, several. Aside from the obvious priorities, such as hospitals, nursing homes, and public gathering places, fix first the easy things, especially in neighborhoods which have private wells, as most of Springs does, before tending to those who know by the visual evidence — trees draped over power lines, splintered poles, and downed wires — that they’ve been screwed.

    Then, really do trim the trees, with an augmented work force if necessary, in the non-hurricane months.

    Or let them flourish and exfoliate and bury the power lines. Of course, the cost would be sky-high, but would it be so out of sight compared to the costs incurred by periodic emergencies such as this one that cause LIPA to augment its maxed-out work force with crews from far-flung places? Bring the actuaries and climatologists in. Are more and more storms like this in store? If so, then maybe burying the lines would not prove to be so unthinkably onerous in the long run.

    A neighbor with whom I stood on line at Starbucks last Thursday morning, and who was as baffled as I about the lack of attention to the aforementioned circuit breaker, said relatives living in the Outer Banks, where the lines, he said, are buried, had had no outages.

    And remember, “LIPA Is Prepared for. . . .” No, no, I’ll not belabor the point.

_____

    *Mary said she saw many limbs hanging on the lines along Springs-Fireplace Road before the storm hit.)

    **On day five, Mary got through to a LIPA spokesperson, a Mrs. DeVito, she thinks, whom she described as “a very attentive, very empathetic listener deserving of a raise,” but who, in the end, could offer little more than solace.)

    The miracle that is September after Labor Day is upon us, and what might have seemed impossible a few weeks ago is now within the realm of possibility.

    A week ago Friday, I had Ellis, our nearly 20-month-old, in the truck, going along on North Main Street in East Hampton. Noticing that the farmers market in the lot next to Nick and Toni’s was open and that there was a parking spot directly across the street, I pulled over.

    Had this been August, not only would there have been no parking space but the thought of carrying our brawny toddler into a crowded market would have been unappealing. As it was September and a gloriously crisp day, and with drivers seemingly magnanimous about jaywalkers, Ellis and I made it across two lanes of traffic unscathed.

    I don’t know how the morning went for the vendors, but for Ellis and me, the relative absence of other shoppers was a pleasure. I was comfortable letting him down to wander a little while I chatted with several people I knew. Having spotted a stand with cartons of fat, bright-yellow-and-red peaches, Ellis led me by the hand clear to the other end of the rows of stands and pointed out ones he wanted.

    The ease with which you can get through the day at summer’s end, I think, helps social interactions, too. At Bucket’s Deli one lunchtime this week, I fell into conversation with someone who in July might have been too harried to talk. The idea of visiting friends in Sag Harbor no longer fills me with dread about driving over there.

    I notice more tables set up in front of private houses selling this and that. I stopped at one on Middle Highway in East Hampton the other day and, for $10, bought two jars of preserves — blueberry and blackberry — which will help make up for the fact that I didn’t manage to put up any of my own this season.

    All of this can be symbolized by the fact that I can again make a left turn out of The Star office driveway. This simple act opens up a world of possibility. I might just stop by yet another farm stand on my way home.  

    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?

____

    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.

    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.

    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!

-

    Jane Bimson is an advertising sales representative at The Star.