The highlight of my summer on the East End last year was exploring Plum Island.

I had always thought visitors were forbidden, and so did Tom Rawinski, the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service botanist I interviewed last winter about deer damage to forests. Like a growing cohort of scientists, he believes that overabundant deer cause more damage to Northeastern forests than does climate change. Since Tom works for the U.S.D.A., which operates the Plum Island research lab, I figured he knew the rules about Plum Island. But having told me that the island has no deer, and thus presents a unique case for what a Northeastern forest should look like, my curiosity was piqued.

So one day last spring I found the Plum Island Animal Disease Center website, which surprisingly lists names and email addresses of key employees. I wrote a short email to the administrative officer to ask if I could interview someone on the staff who might be familiar with the island’s forests. My theory was that someone at the research labs might spend his or her lunch break exploring the outdoors.

I was a bit taken aback when I received a response a week later from the Department of Homeland Security, not the U.S.D.A. employee to whom I had written. He wanted to know why I was asking questions about Plum Island. Uh-oh.

But what did I have to fear? I’m no Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who was arrested in 2008 in Afghanistan carrying notes listing Plum Island as a possible site for a “mass casualty attack.” (She’s now serving an 86-year prison term in Fort Worth, Tex., by the way.) So I calmly wrote back saying I’d be interested in any botanical or conservation surveys done on Plum Island that might address the health of its forests, and in particular would like to interview anyone familiar with the island’s forests. And then I crossed my fingers.

For the next nine days I checked my email regularly, wondering how the department would respond. When they figured out I was a 58-year-old mother of four and member of the Garden Club of East Hampton, wouldn’t they immediately conclude I was safe? On the other hand, perhaps they wouldn’t even bother to answer.

It was a total shock, then, when Tom Dwyer, environmental protection specialist for D.H.S., wrote back extending an invitation to my “colleagues” and me to visit in order to “tour the island and learn about our mission.” Google-stalking Tom, I learned that he is the environmental resources manager for Plum Island, responsible for environmental compliance and waste management, including wastewater and emissions. This was definitely reassuring and intriguing.

Frankly, I was so relieved I wasn’t in hot water that I quickly wrote back to say yes. I also tuned out my husband’s persistent questions about whether I’d return with dreadful germs and require decontamination. After all, Tom Dwyer was on the case!

The next step was to recruit some colleagues. Having spent three months researching deer and forests, I wanted to go to Plum Island with the experts I had interviewed to see firsthand what they had described to me over the phone and in emails. And as Tom Rawinski had triggered this whole episode, he was at the top of my list.

Once assembled, our group included Tom; Mike Scheibel from the Masho­mack Preserve on Shelter Island; Todd Forrest from the New York Botanical Garden; John Rasweiler, a retired medical school professor and researcher of zoonotic diseases; my daughter Anna, who had just earned a master’s degree in environmental science, and other friends from the community.

The D.H.S. and Plum Island staff members who welcomed us to the island were uniformly hospitable. Jason Golden, a public affairs officer, met us at the Plum Island dock next door to the Cross Sound Ferry early in the morning and escorted us throughout the day. Dr. Luis Rodriguez, research leader, who was lively, dedicated, and eloquent, spent over an hour discussing the work done at Plum Island diagnosing and researching foreign animal diseases. Finally, after a brown-bag lunch in a conference room, we headed out with Jason to survey the island.

Plum Island is indeed a remarkable sanctuary for our native flora and fauna. It also hosts many invasive species in what Tom Rawinski dubbed a “free-for-all for plant life.” The fact that the island has no deer means that there is a healthy understory throughout the forested areas of its 834 acres, and I got to see what a healthy understory should look like: a nearly impenetrable riot of varied species of tree saplings, vines, forest shrubs, and herbaceous plants. The forest was cool, shady, and humid throughout.

On a hillside above a large bed of ferns in a depression in the landscape, we found a beautiful specimen of Solomon’s seal, a plant that deer have almost eliminated from wild and unprotected forests on Long Island. We saw osprey, towhees (increasingly rare on the East End), bank swallows, seals, and other wildlife as we toured the island’s beaches and forests, its old lighthouse and derelict military barracks.

But perhaps most remarkable of all, after three or four hours of hiking around the island and through its undergrowth, we found only one innocuous dog tick. No lone star or deer ticks at all.

I’m happy to report I didn’t bring back any dreadful germs or require decontamination. I’m also having fun trying out recipes from the Plum Island Cookbook, available in the gift shop at the main research lab. (Yes, there is even a gift shop!)

But most important, and even sadly, I now know what East Hampton’s forests should look like, and very often don’t, the result of overbrowsing by a deer population that is decimating the forests and destroying the habitat of so many other wild creatures with whom they share space.

Julie Sakellariadis is co-chairwoman of the botanical science committee and chairwoman of strategic planning on the board of the New York Botanical Garden. She has a house in Amagansett.

I could’ve driven the handful of miles to the auto dealer on Old Country Road in Riverhead to buy my new pearl white Honda CRV with the rearview camera and cool-looking dorsal fin-like antenna on its roof, but the thought of returning to a town I called home for 17 years and haven’t visited in six made me smile, so I jumped in my four-door gray Civic, threw on Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” pressed repeat, repeat, repeat, and danced by myself the 85-mile trip west to Levittown, never imagining my sojourn would hurl me back to 1964, when an innocent, very blond-haired boy known as Frankie daydreamed of wearing #7 on his back and owning a 64-count orange-and-green box of perfectly aligned crayons with a built-in sharpener.

The other day, one of those dreams finally came true.

Debbie, the salesperson I’ve known since 1990, an attractive Suzanne Somers look-alike, was running late, so when I tried to fill my third bag of the dealership’s freshly air-popped movie-theater popcorn, the receptionist squawked, “Looks like we’re out,” and turned off the machine.

Returning to my seat, a huge red bull’s-eye abruptly beckoned me from the south side of Hempstead Turnpike, a road notorious for many an accident, rather many a deadly accident, so I placed my empty popcorn bag with a few unpopped kernels in Debbie’s peace-and-love-sticker-decorated trash pail and skipped through the sparkling Windexed glass doors, continuing my best Mark Sanchez scramble between screeching Camaros, Firebirds, and a very old lopsided Oldsmobile to enter a store filled with more red shirts than the Chinese Army.

Not certain which direction to take, I took Lee Strasberg’s method-acting advice and put myself in the Labyrinth Metal Ball Maze game and started rolling through aisle after aisle after aisle, hoping something, anything, would catch my eye — not even the Mossimo women’s mix-and-match, multicolored, floral-striped string bandeau swim top at “$17.99 one week only” made me stop, knowing my wife would never wear one. But then I saw it, an entire shelf filled with Crayola products: glue, window crayons, colored pencils, sidewalk paint, paintbrushes, and the item I wanted more than anything else in the world, a 64-count box of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener.

The car could wait.

The box on the third shelf from the bottom threw me straight back to Miss Allen’s second-grade class in P.S. 122, where my classmates flaunted their neatly positioned 64-count perfectly aligned rows and columns of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener while I cowered with an eight pack of John’s Bargain Store brand wannabe crayons. I envied them all as they proudly resharpened their maroon, teal, and forest green crayons while I struggled to piece together with clear tape my broken red, blue, and black crayons, praying one day to be the owner of a 64-count Crayola crayon box with the built-in sharpener.

Sitting to my left was Doreen, my first crush really, a girl always with a smile on her face and a pink bow forever in her long brown, Shirley Temple-curly, parted-in-the-middle hair, but she liked my best friend, Dan, the most handsome and most likely pitcher in all of Queens to make the New York Mets starting rotation alongside Seaver and Koosman.

“Would you like some of my crayons, Frankie?” she said with a bigger-than-her-entire-face smile, as she delicately placed three colored crayons with names I couldn’t pronounce on my desk engraved with Bic blue ink.

“I’m trying to invent new colors using only these eight,” I said as I picked up one of hers, took a deep whiff of its scent, and put it back on her desk.

I’ll never forget the aroma of Crayola.

Doreen and I went separate directions after sixth grade. Sadly, she was never to be seen again, while Dan and I played baseball together, he the pitcher and I his catcher, on many championship baseball teams all over Queens and Brooklyn. He had an amazing deuce — curveball, that is — dropping off a table from 12 o’clock straight down to 6 o’clock, mixed in with a fastball untouchable by hundreds of batters.

We continued running the wood courts on our junior high school basketball team — he was always the best player in any sport he participated in. Our friendship grew, as long as we were teammates, until one day at age 15 I ran into him in a candy store after a travel baseball game he surprisingly didn’t attend, and he stunk of airplane model glue. Perhaps it was the brown paper bag filled with a tube of the stuff pushed in his rear pants pocket.

We lost contact after that. He was picked up for armed robbery, spent time in Rikers, and I later learned he passed away from a drug buy gone bad in Brooklyn.

I’ll never forget the stench of model airplane glue.

With no red shirts in sight, I peeled open the box I cradled ever so close, leaned over, and took a whiff, a deep whiff, and savored the moment, like freshly cut grass, the spinning pink cotton candy at the circus, the English Leather cologne you wore on your first date. The aroma of Crayola is a scent you will never, and should never, forget, like the wooden sled Charles Foster Kane longed for, it reminds us all of our youth, when wearing #7 on your back and owning perfectly aligned colored wax crayons with peculiar names meant everything.

With my trip back to 1964 complete, I placed the box back in its rightful spot, smiled, and exited the sliding glass doors of the red bull’s-eye, turning back once with a nod.

And for those who travel to that Goliath store along Hempstead Turnpike and search the third row from the bottom for the opened 64-count orange-and-green box of perfectly aligned rows and columns of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener, feel free to take a deep whiff, but please leave the memories inside. They belong to me.

Frank Vespe is a regular "Guestwords" contributor who lives in Springs.

I was once a member of a women’s Ping-Pong league. I played for about 10 years, say, from when I was 60 to 70. I’d been baby-sitting my 10-year-old grandson and took him to the local pool hall, where I knew they had a couple of Ping-Pong tables. We could bond as we knocked ourselves out.

Four women alongside us, playing like gangbusters, were taking a lesson. “Why the lesson when you play so well?” I asked.

“My league wouldn’t let me play if I didn’t improve,” came a response. “You can join. Here, Sundays, 2 to 5.”

There’s such a thing as a Ping-Pong league? Just two blocks from where I live? Who knew?

Sunday 2 to 5 rolled around and I showed up. I saw about 30 women, some playing, some observing. I observed this: These women were all gay. I wasn’t. I became panicky, but so electrifying was the ping and pong from the tables, I ignored my anxiety. I decided on a reverse “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach.

Most of the players had short hair; wore mannish trousers; no makeup. My M.O., purple nail polish and bright red lipstick, was a definite no-no, so the following week I showed up plain. I was desperate to blend in. It took time. I kept to myself, spoke when spoken to, played fair; went overboard favoring my opponent when there was a score dispute. I suffered in silence.

Down the pike sparks of friendship came my way. Dinner was planned for one Sunday, and Patricia asked would I mind going to a lesbian restaurant?

“I don’t mind,” I said. “Do they have food?”

They knew! They didn’t tell me they knew, but they did, obviously just by the look of me. Now I could breathe again! I could be me! When Bev asked if I ever slow-danced with another woman, I simply took it as girl talk. Sexy. No offense taken.

“Not since high school,” I said.

After I assumed my place as one-of-the-gang-almost, I exemplified team spirit like there was no tomorrow. I hosted the end-of-season parties in the big loft I lived in (which I don’t anymore due to financial upset). I returned my hard-won trophies (after removing my name and accomplishment, which were merely taped to the underside) so they could be recirculated, saving the league a couple of dollars as they (we) were also in financial upset, and anyway I had nowhere to display them in my new closet of an apartment.

Another time at a “regular” restaurant I overheard a nasty crack about the lesbians from the next table and gave the bastard hell. Nobody’s going to talk about my gang like that.

One of the women pulled me away. “Hinda, we always get that. Ignore it.”

At about the same time I was outed as a straight woman the league moved to Chinatown. With the outsider pressure off, my game soared. So did my reputation. None of my friends or relatives ever actually saw me play, but the buzz was over the top: “You play Ping-Pong?” “Chinatown?” “You must be good.” I loved to tell it. I was on fire over there.

Then I wasn’t. The fire went out. My back went bad. I took time out to heal and eventually did, but I was never good as new. It wasn’t easy for me to stoop over and pick up the ball. I feared some might think I couldn’t handle it because of my age. I didn’t mind being an old lady, but I did mind being seen as one.

When I recovered, I emailed the league announcing my wish to return. A bill for membership arrived. While I usually pay when due, here I paid no attention. I got several follow-up emails instructing me to pay up, yet I resisted. Why? I had the money. A final email brought the firing squad: “We’ve dropped you from the roster for nonpayment.”

I tried to explain myself. You know me, you know I’m good for the money. But no. The treasurer was adamant. Bye!

As is my habit, I gave thought to my behavior. Maybe I just didn’t want to play anymore. Some things have a life of their own and then it’s over. Ten years was enough. Maybe my back would cave in from a bad reach and then I’d be good for nothing. Still, I didn’t quit the league. They quit me.

I stewed over the banishment. It definitely outweighed the crime — too harsh after all I’d done (the parties, the trophies, let alone persevering through the not belonging segment of the early years).

How long could I stew? I got a couple of emails from some of the women offering condolences, which touched my heart. I faced up to my portion of the blame, which I could now see was just about 95 percent (the other 5 percent was on them because I knew I would pay eventually, why didn’t they?). So I caused my own downfall; fired myself, so to speak.

During my run, I got to know these women as no different from myself. I was an outsider because I didn’t allow myself to be known. I don’t know if it was my own bigotry or my own innocence that caused me to be scared of a group of women who were only out on Sundays 2 to 5 to play Ping-Pong. The afternoon was not about me, or about gender identification. It was only about keeping your eye on the ball.

Hinda Gonchor lives in East Hampton and New York City. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Self magazine, and other publications.

The sign with upside-down letters hangs like an alien landmark on the corner of Shinnecock Road and Foster Avenue, and I know something’s up. When I reach the top of the Ponquogue Bridge I can see a helicopter on the right side of the parking lot and a tented area on the left. At the beach pavilion, people are clumped together on the deck.

“What’s going on?”

“They’re filming a New York State lottery commercial. See that sports car by the tent? Some guy’s gonna drive it across the bridge.”

“How cool.”

I am surprised that this scenic vista in Hampton Bays isn’t used more often in advertisements and movies. I’m the last one over the bridge before the copter with the film crew lifts off like a giant dragonfly.

Three months later my husband calls me from where he’s watching TV. “Hey Dee, check this out.” Pointing to the screen, he asks, “Isn’t that the Ponquogue Bridge?”

Cruising in a Jaguar XKE across the bridge a regular-looking guy, somewhere on the far side of 40 with a sense of wind in his cropped hair, muses the question, “What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about money?” The camera scans the pewter bay and the ocean, a silver screen lit with golden rays.

Since I rarely buy lottery tickets the chance of my becoming an instant millionaire seems slim, but the good news is, as grand as it would be, I don’t need a cashier’s check with a series of zeros to feel like a million bucks.

Throughout my life I have felt rich because of my ability to enjoy others’ good fortune. The next best thing to driving a dream machine of a car, or owning a house with a fabulous view, or taking a trip of a lifetime is to have friends or relatives who do. Rich by association.

This feeling extends beyond possessions. Because my friend Irene Tully is on the board of every museum on the East End, I feel more cultured. Knowing Irene’s husband, Bill, a lobster fisherman, gave me more cred as a local when I was a suburban transplant 45 years ago. Interesting by association. Vicarious pleasure is my winning ticket, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the real thing.

Having coffee with Irene recently, I mentioned that I had perused Isa’s Consignment Shop in Hampton Bays for the first time and was impressed at the quality of the merchandise: Searle coats, designer dresses, high-end bags and shoes. She asked if I had bought anything.

I bragged about the broadcloth white shirt with French cuffs I purchased for $25 and confessed that I was lusting after an Hermes scarf that lured me to the back of the tightly packed shop, where it hung with a few others on hooks behind the owner’s desk. Even from a distance their colorful designs called to me; I sensed Hermes. To me an Hermes scarf is more than a cut of silk. It’s classic elegance with an air of Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy, idols of my youth.

I admitted that I have always wanted one but could never justify the price for an accessory, even $250 for a secondhand one. Shoes, pocketbooks, or jewelry, yes, but a 35-inch square of material, no. But as each birthday nears, I think, “This will be the year I’ll treat myself.”

Irene, who appreciates my love of finer things, chirped, “I have one. It’s been a decorative piece in my drawer for years. I never wear it; you can have it.”

The next day she delivered the silken treasure. The gift had outgrown its signature orange box with brown trim, but I was giddy with delight. The scarf was appropriately called Les Clefs, or The Keys, designed in 1965 with a royal blue border and 47 golden keys. When I wore it for the first time with jeans, my new crisp white shirt, and a blue cashmere cardigan, two friends commented on how great I looked. I have arrived. I now own an iconic fashion statement.

At our annual Labor Day champagne breakfast on the beach I posed the question, “What makes you feel like a million dollars?” I prompted my friends, sitting in a semicircle in our beach chairs, the ones low to the sand, to think outside the family and the things we know really matter. I was pushing for something material like my scarf, but except for flying in first class, they listed simple things that make them happy: coming home from anywhere, eating ice cream from the container, slipping into bed under a down quilt, having a good hair day when it counts, laughing until you are doubled over, reading a book you can’t put down.

I am not alone, however, in thinking that a piece of clothing can make one feel rich. On my return lap on the bridge the other day I walked with Barbara, a woman who lives down the road. She asked when I was going to have another yard sale since she loved the things she bought at my last one, especially a black fox headband. She told me that she wore it to work during this winter’s polar vortex and her co-workers wanted to know if she had won the lottery.

“No,” she said, but she felt like a million dollars.

Denise Gray Meehan is working on a book of essays called “Bridge Walker.”

Late in the fall of 2008, Dorothy King told my wife, Carol, and me how to access East Hampton Star archive microfilm through interlibrary loan. This tip greatly aided our research on Jud Banister, a former East Hampton Village mayor and great-uncle of Carol’s. By early spring I had logged 100 hours or more on Amherst College’s microfilm reader when the analogy struck me.

Over a decade earlier, when I was with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, my brother-in-law spent a long, ultimately unsuccessful day panning for gold near our home in Alaska. He found one small flake the previous day at a nearby state historic site. His gold fascination had surely been stimulated by stories of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure on Gardiner’s Island he’d heard during his summertime visits to Jud’s Three Mile Harbor camp in the 1950s.

I was relieved that I had to go to work, knowing I didn’t have the patience to search for those small flakes hours on end. Now, 15 years later, through eyes strained from having spent hours scanning microfilm, I realized I was doing the same thing — searching for those precious nuggets mentioning Jud, other family members, and friends during his lifetime in East Hampton. The rewards were worth the effort, thanks to the helping hand from Dorothy, or Dotty, as she was known by her many friends.

A series of emails followed, with Dorothy, who ran the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection for more than 30 years, providing more family stories of Jud, Aunt Hat, and her own family. By now my microfilm scanning antennae were attuned to more names, including that of Dorothy’s father, Clarence, especially his time in the East Hampton Fire Department, and her Aunt Mayme and Uncle Joe Burns, whom she lived with on McGuirk Street. Others with stories of Jud surfaced as nuggets, with historical names such as Barnes and Mulford, thanks to contacts from Mary Lou Barnes Mayo and David Mulford. As with Dorothy they all had tales about Jud when they were merely kids in the late 1930s and ’40s.

Dorothy lived for much of her youth with her aunt and uncle after the tragic death of her father when she was only 7 — a little girl old enough to have known love, admiration, and respect for him, but young enough to absorb a lifetime of memories that would crowd out some from those youthful years.

She told of how the Burnses’ McGuirk Street home had a backyard adjoining that of another aunt on Cooper Lane. “There was a path from my house to her house,” she wrote. “Sometimes I would go in the backdoor and out the front door on my way to school. I crossed the street, walked up ‘Uncle Jud’s’ driveway and crossed his cow pasture to Conklin Terrace, and walked on to school. Sometimes I went this way three times a day. I never heard Aunt Hat or Uncle Jud complain about the school kids using the cow lot for a shortcut.”

She said that Jud was a good friend of Mayme and Joe Burns. “They liked to play six-handed pinochle. As Aunt Hat did not play cards they needed another player. I was always thrilled when I was asked to play with them. Much fun.”

More followed in subsequent emails, including one that seemed typical for Jud. “Did I mention that Uncle Jud loaned his car to my brother when he got married? Gas rationing also, I think at that time our car was a pickup truck.”

Dorothy hosted Carol and me at her house on Gerard Drive in Springs the following spring and introduced us to Mary Eckey, her cousin, and Betty Cobb, a friend, both of whom, as young girls like Dorothy, knew Jud. Mary Lou Barnes Mayo also joined us as we shared a great afternoon reminiscing about Jud and the East Hampton of their youth. An unexpected connection that likely explains why Jud came to East Hampton emerged from that fun day of stories enhanced by coffee, tea, and pastries.

We had always credited Carol’s grandmother Edith Banister, Jud’s older sister, with having convinced him that a good life was possible for an ambitious young man in turn-of-the-20th-century East Hampton. We explained that Edith came in 1901 as a graduate of the Potsdam Normal School to take a position in the six-year-old public school here. Betty mentioned that her aunt, Mrs. Stephen J. Lynch, the former Effa Silver, was a Potsdam Normal School graduate of a year earlier, having given her commencement oration on “The Influence of Women.” Star archives list her as a new teacher that fall, 1900, a year before Edith. We now believe Edith was encouraged to come to here by Effa, launching the Banister ties to East Hampton.

Dorothy, Mary, Betty, Carol, and I always tried to share a meal during our subsequent visits. I still recall smiling as I saw Dorothy, long coat and floppy hat protecting a warm smile and heart, walking across the Reutershan parking lot to meet the rest of us at John Papas Cafe. We gathered at the big round table in the back, enjoying both lunch and one another’s company. Combining several hundred years of memories, we were grateful that we were never made to feel we should leave before our stories were done and we had the good sense to make a discreet exit on our own.

Dorothy was helpful to us in so many ways, and I was happy to convey several Star news notes not only about the Burns family, but also many about her father’s time and influence with the Fire Department. At the time of his death, Clarence had been re-elected as first assistant engineer, the second in command to Chief Steve Marley. Earlier he had replaced Jud as the captain of Hook and Ladder Company 1 when Jud became chief in 1930. I told Dorothy that his record made a strong case that he might have succeeded Marley as chief had he lived.

“I was amazed at all the info you have about my father in the Fire Department,” she said. As she pointed out, her brother was a charter member of the Springs Fire Department, and his two sons also joined. Fire Department service is in the King family DNA.

We last visited Dorothy at her Gerard Drive home in late October 2013. Though the visit was brief, we thanked her for the pictures she had found of Jud taken in Florida a month before he died. She had earlier passed on family notes from the time he first arrived to stay with them, and finally found the pictures that she gave us. Carol instantly recognized Jud, in his high-waisted, high-water pants, enjoying some Florida warmth in March with friends. They are important memorabilia for us.

Mary Eckey and Betty Cobb remain good friends whom we cherish spending time with during our spring and fall visits. We may not have met them if not for Dorothy. A July 21, 2014, email from Mary apprised us of Dorothy’s passing a couple of days earlier. The Star published a fitting tribute obituary that week that made us appreciate even more the friend we had known. Her niece Deanna Tikkanen sent us a thoughtful note including the Star obituary and enclosed the note repeating the story of Jud’s loaning his car to her parents on their wedding day to drive from church.

Dorothy King was special to family and a treasure to the community. And thanks to her tip on Star archives through interlibrary loan and her willingness to share her memories and bountiful information, we truly realize what a gem she was to us.

Steve Rideout, a regular “Guestwords” contributor, lives in Shutesbury, Mass.

Kris Talmage cleans my house and food-shops for me. Every Monday, 8 a.m. sharp, she is here, scanning my face for signs of deterioration and warning me to take care of myself or else, that she’s a tough Bonacker and I’d better not mess with her. I respond that I am a stubborn old Jew, a match for tough Bonackers. She snorts disbelief and then smiles hugely when I tell her I’d just been to Louse Point to see the winter sunrise.

“It was gold dust,” I tell her, “in a frame of deep black clouds.”

“Back in the ’70s,” she tells me, “a friend and I rented a house on Louse Point Road for the winter. We’d get up at dawn and go crabbing in the bay or for a walk through the marshes and grass on the inlet side and dig for clams and mussels. There were tons of them. Louse Point is as beautiful as any place in the world can be and it’s within five minutes of where I grew up.”

Kris Talmage wants passionately to protect Louse Point.

Cile Downs, a founder of the Accabonac Protection Committee, shares this passion and is a marvelous advocate. Ask her anything — about the shellfish, the water table, the farming heft of the soil, or the status of Louse Point’s osprey marriages — and you get a fascinating, informative answer. Cile Downs and Kris Talmage should be active allies.

Instead, there’s a deep divide between them, the East Hampton divide.

Ms. Talmage is vexed by Ms. Downs’s letter to The East Hampton Star in August in which she wrote, “I am so puzzled that there is controversy about formula stores — big boxes, cut-rate outlets, whatever you call them — here in our town. As a customer who goes once in a while up to Riverhead for one of these things, and is glad to travel that far, because heaven forbid it should be any closer to here, I am quite satisfied with the arrangement we have.”

“And as I look at the poor, godforsaken wreck that Riverhead is now, how grateful I am that we never developed a terrible strip like theirs to gradually bleed the life out of our pleasant town.”

Ms. Talmage is not glad to travel that far, even though prices for food, clothing, and other basics are much lower in Riverhead than on the South Fork. “Riverhead shopping usually winds up costing me more,” she says. “I work a long week. I have a daughter and granddaughter to take care of. The travel costs, the lost income from the time it takes, the unforeseen trip to return a purchase that doesn’t work. It all adds up. I have a different life than Cile Downs has. I want a Walmart, here in East Hampton.”

My liberal reflexes kick in. Walmart wipes out local businesses. Walmart workers are so underpaid that in 2013 it cost U.S. taxpayers $6.2 billion in public assistance payments for them, according to Americans for Tax Fairness. (Walmart’s recently announced intention to pay a $9-an-hour minimum is still far below a living wage.) And yes, Walmart stores, “big boxes” indeed, are not aesthetic triumphs. Maybe in my heart of hearts I don’t want a Walmart either.

But fear and loathing of Walmart, however justified, does not tell us how people who struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck are to get by in one of the country’s most expensive municipalities. Ms. Downs’s go to Riverhead admonition is not an answer.

Perhaps there is no answer. Or are we so wedded to our “pleasant town” brand we don’t look hard enough? Why not negotiate for a modified Walmart, Target, or the like? Maybe with East Hampton’s prestige and some determination from our town government, we can work out an attractive, affordable store that gives decent wages and benefits to its employees.

If it’s vulgarity that dismays us, why do we indulge the summer Montauk partying scene? Or the looming threat of Gurney’s conversion from a community resource to a corporate retreat? Or the disappearance of Sweet 16 birthday parties from Guild Hall? And is the Riverhead strip of malls truly more obnoxious than our Main Street, with its prices way beyond the reach of most of our year-round residents? According to Ms. Talmage, “No way can you claim that Main Street maintains the flavor of old East Hampton. It’s useless to me.”

Let’s man up to our hypocrisy and see what we can accomplish. We glorify the Bonackers’ baymen traditions and work ethic. We chuckle affectionately at their accent and pithy expressions and produce plays and photo arrays celebrating their nobility. But when it comes to their need, and that of so many others here to put food on their tables and clothes on their backs, even one of our leading environmentalists tells them to get in their vehicles and take a ride, at least an hour each way and often twice that, through gas-guzzling traffic to a place she detests.

“East Hampton,” says Kris Talmage, “is an environment of both natural beauty and interaction between people. You don’t have to like everybody, but you do have to care about them.”

“Kris Talmage” is a pseudonym. Richard Rosenthal is a retired town employee and the author of “The Dandelion War,” a satire on inequality in the Hamptons.

I’m single. There, I’ve said it, the dreaded S word. The D label fits, but it’s irrelevant.

Not many years ago, in the ’60s, marriage itself was on the brink of obsolescence for some people. Free love, sex, and rock ’n’ roll ruled the day for the young and restless like me. Boys and girls, girls and girls, boys and boys, threesomes and groups cohabitated, guiltless and smug.

Nowadays, it seems that everyone has marriage in mind. There are countless websites devoted to folks eager to find a soul mate, prime-time sitcoms are touting the virtues of married life, and reality hookup shows are super-hits. I find this odd when at least 50 percent of marriages end up in divorce court.

Anyway, “Three’s Company” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” are ancient history. Even numbers are in, along with babies, snugglies, and “Modern Family.” Vast numbers of couples are cocooning with their mates of choice, cuddling up, and rooting for a “Bachelor” or “Bachelorette” to pop the question.

For couples, everything’s rosy, comfy cozy. A new dialect has even sprung forth from the mouths of those in bonded bliss. I call it couple-talk. Familiar phrases are uttered, but laden with hidden meanings, or I.O.W.s (“in other words”).

Here are a few examples:

“Can you join us for drinks? Bring so-and-so.” I.O.W.: Solo, you’re a threat.

“Come visit for the weekend.” I.O.W.: With a partner you get the guest room; alone — the sofa.

“Can you be a sixth at dinner?” I.O.W.: We know you’d hate to be a fifth wheel.

“We both [fill in the blank].” I.O.W.: Together we share much more than a name and address.

“Did you hear he’s single?” I.O.W.: Perhaps you two will hit it off.

“Any plans to marry?” I.O.W.: When can we put you on our A-list?

“We’ve heard all about you.” I.O.W.: You’re smart, attractive, witty, so what’s your problem?

“So how was your trip?” I.O.W.: Did you meet a man?

“I know a great guy.” I.O.W.: Please, let me play matchmaker.

“We met through Match.com.” I.O.W.: Try it, you might get lucky.

“She’s single, too.” I.O.W.: Sure glad I’m not her.

“I’ve vetted this guy for you.” I.O.W.: He’s definite partner material.

“My neighbor has a friend.” I.O.W.: It’s time you get serious.

“We’ve heard ballroom dancing is fun.” I.O.W.: You’ve got to keep looking.

“Have you tried a bereavement group?” I.O.W.: We’ve reached the desperation point.

“You’re not getting any younger.” I.O.W.: You need reality therapy.

“My husband . . .” or “My family [fill in the blank].” I.O.W.: Since you’re not part of this homey clan, we’ve got to distance ourselves.

“So how come you’re still single?” I.O.W.: What’s the ghastly skeleton hiding in your closet?

Frankly, all this we-ness nauseates me. Oh, I have nothing against couples. Some of my best friends are still connubial. But I don’t care a bit for couple-talk. Should I tie the knot again someday, I won’t indulge in this lousy lingua.

Yes, I’m single. Did I mention I’m the one you wanted to fix up with your tennis partner’s brother-in-law?

Dianne Moritz’s latest children’s book, “1, 2, 3 . . . by the Sea,” published by Kane Miller, was named a Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature Best Book of 2014. A contributor of “Guestwords” for many years, she lives in North Sea.

Even if her life depended on it, my wife cannot tell a joke. In all other ways, she’s brilliant. (Beautiful too.) In fact, the way she ruins a joke is in and of itself amusing and (if I may say so) adorable.

She starts off with the premise of the joke (what professional comics call the setup), then she starts to crack up. You can see by the quirky look on her face that she’s thinking of the punch line (what comics call the payoff). Anticipation clouds her story line. Then she starts laughing, giggling, and breaking up . . . until she can continue telling the joke no longer.

This is beguiling to me, and to anyone who’s ever seen her do this — funnier than the joke if told successfully by someone who knows how to tell a joke. Me, for instance.

I say me because early in our marriage she told me I was “pretty funny,” but that I could improve if I studied stand-up comedy and practiced being funny. I found a workshop where a professional comedian taught how to tell a joke and how to write original material. The group (made up of actors and lawyers) had an assignment: At the conclusion of 12 weeks in the workshop, each of us had to deliver five minutes of our own material in front of 200 people in a stand-up comedy club. I did this well enough that the workshop leader said I was good and should continue improving. I said, “I’m keeping my day job.”

I learned that standing in front of 200 people expecting you to make them laugh is a terrifying experience, daunting in the extreme. The comics say, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” I confess to feeling flop sweat when I went onstage. But I developed confidence slowly and inserted humorous remarks, and even jokes, into my university lectures and book-publicity television interviews.

This confident joke-telling was not always well received and occasionally unwelcome or even intrusive. Once I was scolded by Gloria Steinem. We were having breakfast with her, her then-boyfriend, and another couple. Full of the confidence gained in my workshop, I ventured to tell a joke at what I thought was an appropriate moment. It wasn’t a bad joke; it wasn’t completely inappropriate. But after hearing it, Gloria pointed out that men were inclined to “take control” of a gathering by telling a joke. She added, “Very few women do this.”

I became embarrassed when I realized she was not only chastising me: It was an indictment of all men . . . for being domineering or control freaks. Or for being men.

I realized she was right, up to a point. Jokes have been staples of locker-room jocks, “male chauvinist pigs,” and other specimens of raw masculinity. And I was being categorized. But what about my feminine side? The part of me that learns when not to tell a joke? I was called to task for taking control, and I learned from the experience that there is a time for being quiet. Thank you, Gloria!

What brings up these memories is the regular gathering of a group of us who meet to tell jokes, Jewish jokes, because we’re all members of a small synagogue in Sag Harbor, Adas Israel. Winters on the East End can be cold, dreary, isolating, and a time for chasing the blues. Especially true during the holiday season. Sure, we have Hanukkah. But there’s more to being Jewish than holiday celebrations, some of which can increase one’s sense of distance from others.

On a recent Tuesday, a dozen of us gathered at Judy and Mike’s home, a cozy and inviting place well stocked with plenty of latkes and lox and nibbles and wine. The only ticket for admission was that each of us had to bring a joke — and tell it to the group. Many of the women who dutifully brought their jokes had decided to read them. (Although the group is technically a “Jewish Humor Havorah,” some of the jokes were more humorous than Jewish, and this was okay with everyone.)

Virtually every woman who told a joke that evening exemplified what Gloria had said about control and male dominance. That is, they read or spoke their jokes with some measure of tentativeness and timidity. We discussed this phenomenon and decided that (along with comediennes like Sarah Silverman, Joan Rivers, and a very few others) feminism had made female humorists possible and popular. And much of the content of old-fashioned humor itself was premised on very unlikely scenarios — “salty,” male-oriented, or sex-related — or harked back to social values long gone.

But, together with warm camaraderie and kind friends, we chased the winter blues away on a cold night in December. And planned to reconvene the next time.

Stephen Rosen, a regular Star contributor, lives in New York and East Hampton.

We knew, Alice and I, a bit about Ninevah Beach — that it was founded as a community for well-to-do African-American vacationers, especially families escaping New York City for the summer.

It is special, more upscale by reputation than similar black enclaves such as Val Verde Park, Calif., in the Los Angeles area, Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Idlewild, Mich., Highland Beach, Md., and Atlantic Beach, S.C.

It was therefore with curiosity and pleasure that we accepted an invitation from a couple of successful African-American friends to visit their home perched above the shore at Ninevah Beach. They purchased it in the 1960s.

Ninevah Beach (about 80 homes) is the smallest of the three places founded as all-black communities in Sag Harbor, the other two being Azurest (the original community, 100 homes, founded in the 1940s) and Sag Harbor Hills (300 homes, founded in 1950 along with Ninevah Beach).

The spelling of the name is unorthodox. Nineveh, as it is usually spelled, in the Book of Jonah was a city in Mesopotamia, i.e., modern-day Iraq, that God picked out for destruction because the people were sinners. God instructed Jonah the Prophet to give the people of Nineveh a red-alert warning that destruction was imminent.

Jonah worried about his reputation as a prophet. Should God change his mind, Jonah would take a big hit as a forecaster. So Jonah decided to skip the assignment and get away on a boat headed in the opposite direction from Nineveh.

That’s when God, according to the Book of Jonah, got really pissed (my words).

He created a fearsome storm. The sailors decided Jonah was bad luck, and they chucked him over the side. Then God, determined to get the mission completed, persuaded a “big fish” (a k a whale) to swallow Jonah up, swim to Nineveh, and vomit him up on the local beach.

The outcome was successful, from God’s perspective. The Ninevites got the message and, mirabile dictu, they repented, and God was merciful and changed his mind about destroying the city. Apparently just one penitent Ninevite was enough to save all the others.

Jonah’s rep, you could say, actually did take a big hit in Nineveh. The threatened destruction did not happen. But if the story is fully told, Jonah’s worries about God’s mercy were spot-on. The story redounds to his soothsaying credibility. But he is the only source of this self-immortalizing tale. It may be the world’s first Big Fish Story.

But back to the original question. How does the story of Nineveh relate to the place called Ninevah? I haven’t yet found a definitive answer, but here are some ideas:

The beach is a likely place for a whale to have deposited a human being.

Maybe a whale was found beached there.

Maybe the original founders wanted to identify with a city that was penitent, a place from which God turned away his wrath.

Was the idea to remind people that as long as they had one penitent person in their midst, God would bless the entire community?

Whatever the penitence of the black and Indian whalers who founded the old St. David A.M.E. Zion Church in nearby Eastville, the church has for 173 years been locked up or leased to other congregations.

The founder of Ninevah was apparently Cottrell Elias Cooper, nicknamed Cotchie (the spelling is definitive, since it was given to me by Carole Cooper, his daughter). Cotchie evidently needed cash after World War II. He went to a member of the Comus Club, a group of successful black men, to get people to put up money to buy the properties in Sag Harbor.

The developments were sold off at retail prices, parcel by parcel, to well-off African-Americans — in Brooklyn, Queens, or other areas within commuting distance of Manhattan — who had been buying since the Depression.

The news in recent years is that the original notion of an all-black community has been changing. In a word, maybe one-third of residents there are no longer black. That wasn’t the idea.

The major explanatory factor is the real estate marketplace. Older black people have been returning to the South, where their pensions last longer. Their children may not be able to afford to keep up the taxes or the maintenance on the properties. Or they just prefer to have the cash from the sale of the property and use it to vacation somewhere cheaper.

Another theory — not incompatible with the economic explanation — is that younger people feel no need for an all-black community because in a country that has elected a black president, in a state that has had a black governor, it is not necessary any longer to huddle together for self-preservation.

Nonblacks buy in a place like Ninevah because they have black friends there or because properties there are better and cheaper than can be found elsewhere. One estimate is that as many as one-fourth of the homes in Ninevah Beach have been up for sale at the same time.

As in the case of many New York City co-operatives, relatives of families who already live in the community can buy for a lower price than an outsider. The premium for outsiders may not be very high, but it is there — many sellers prefer a buyer with a connection to the place.

Famous black people who have lived in the all-black Sag Harbor communities include Johnny Cochran, the late attorney; Earl Graves, head of a media conglomerate and founder of Black Enterprise magazine; the singer Lena Horne; the poet Langston Hughes; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; B. Smith, who owned restaurants of that name in Washington, D.C., and on Long Wharf for many years; Susan L. Taylor, once editor of Essence magazine, and Colson Whitehead, who wrote in his book “Sag Harbor” about the changing culture and music in the 1980s.

John Tepper Marlin, Ph.D., is an economist and the president of Boissevain Books. He lives in Springs.

It’s that time of year, folks, the holidays are over. We spent too much, ate too much, and drank too much. The season of toomuchness has gutted us and is gone. Time now to buckle down and stop having so much fun. Resolutions, anyone?

I’ll tell you from the get-go, I don’t do resolutions. Don’t do them because I can’t keep them. The word itself puts me off. Resolve. It has that written-in-stone kind of ring to it, no leeway, no wiggle room. And if you happen to slip-slide — full disclosure, I’m a slip-slider — you’ve botched it. Who wants to be a slip-slider and a botcher? Not I, thank you very much.

So I’m cutting myself some slack again, and instead of resolving, I’m intending — a more user-friendly, easygoing word, don’t you think?

I am going to create an intention, as they say in yoga practice. I’m going to get that good karma going and find peace in my heart. I’m going to aspire to, and let my intention guide me without fear of failing. My downward dog looks more like dog down? No biggie. Those yogis of yore had the right idea, sitting on a mountain, ohming the day away. I’m into that.

No worries about being judged either. Who needs that gavel coming down when you fall by the wayside, an image of Judge Judy playing in your head? Don’t let that lace doily around her neck fool you; the girlfriend is one tough cookie.

“Hmm,” I can hear her say, with that thinly veiled look of disgust. “Weren’t you in my courtroom last year for the same offence? ‘Resolutions unresolved?’ ” (She thinks she’s so cute!)

“Yes, but . . .”

“Answer the question.” BANG, goes the gavel.

“I was.”

“And the year before, and the year before!” Now the disgust is not veiled at all.

“But I . . .”

BANG! BANG! BANG! The woman is heartless. Would it kill her to crack a smile once in a blue moon? She’d look a whole lot better, if you ask me.

I’m winning you over. I can feel it. You too want a more loose-goosey approach to setting goals. But still you want proof. You’re a tough crowd, let me tell you. But I’m dedicated to the cause.

So let’s say, one fine morning, in a state of delirium — this cold weather can wreak havoc on the brain — you tell your one-and-only that you resolve to make dinner that night. Of course you meant it when you said it — one of the hazards of resolving — but as the day moves on you realize that you botched it big-time. (See above for botching reference.) Shop and chop and serve it too? Good Lord, what were you thinking?

There may be a way out, and, lucky you, you’ve come to the right one for advice. Here’s what you do: One-and-only comes home chomping at the bit for the dinner you resolved to make. Finally, a home-cooked meal. (Don’t look at me, you’re the one who put your foot, or rather your resolve, in your mouth.) And the dinner plates are as empty as a Kardashian head. (Yeah right, they’re light-in-the-loft. Meanwhile, they’re walking around in Manolo Blahniks, and you’re in Amagansett buying Bass.)

“I thought you were making dinner tonight,” one-and-only says.

"Well, I intended to,” you say. Big smile. “But I made reservations instead!”

Maybe you’ll get a pass, maybe you won’t, but it’s worth a try.

Who has the time and energy for resolving anyway? You have to stay focused, commit. Bor-ring! I for one have important work to do.

What? You think that checking email 40 times a day — I get mail, therefore I am — isn’t work? Random House may have put in a bid for my new novel. This very minute, Haruki Murakami might be firing off a howdy-do from The New York Times. He wants to review the book. Why not? Hope high, I say.

Do you for one minute think that logging on and staying on Facebook isn’t living by the sweat of my Botoxed brow? Resolving may mean forgoing Facebook. Are you kidding me? Well, I’d have to, if I spent all my get-up-and-go on silly resolutions. My friends! Their selfies! Their videos of their cats dancing, their dogs passing wind on YouTube. What they do with their pets when they think no one is looking. Arrgh! You want me to waive that? I’ll miss their missives on prayer, persistence, and vegan food. Their exhortations to rid my life of toxic relationships. Could Facebook be one of them? Nah.

So there you have it, peeps, my story of rising from the ashes of resolutions. Failures be gone. Switch it up, take the Intend Challenge and see what a winner feels like.

Rita Plush is the author of “Lily Steps Out,” a novel, “Alterations,” a collection of stories, and a forthcoming novel, “Feminine Products.” She lives part time in East Hampton.