As fall sets in and I look back at summer, I must admit I feel a sadness, an angry feeling that something I’ve treasured on the East End has been taken away. The monarchs have all but disappeared.

    Now, I can only recount what I used to witness. Every summer toward the middle of July, the monarchs started drifting into our garden. The Asclepias tuberosa and milkweed, or Asclepias syriaca, flowers, timed perfectly with the monarch’s arrival, were beginning to bloom, filling the air with their pungent, sweet fragrance. The varieties of Asclepias and their nectar feed the butterflies while their leaves nourish the monarchs’ larvae or caterpillars.

    For more than 20 years, my family and I have rejoiced over the replay of the monarchs’ natural ritual of arrival from long-distance winter habitats in Mexico, their renewal in our garden with larvae, then caterpillars, then pupae, and, finally, young butterflies, and then, with the onset of fall, their departure. This southern journey will take them above the Atlantic coastal waters, down into the Southern United States, where they produce another generation, and eventually back down to Mexico, where again they will arrive, renew, and, come spring, depart for yet another journey to the Northeastern U.S.

    This summer this ritual changed markedly. At best, two monarchs graced our garden. The Asclepias came and went with no butterflies sucking their nectar, no caterpillars chewing their leaves, and no glittering monarch pupae decorating leaves anywhere.

    On garden walks, this was the focus of our discussion. We talked about the loss; we mourned the butterflies that didn’t show up as they had for so many years. We addressed what we heard was the cause — some pesticide in the South that had killed their natural sources of food, and therefore had interrupted the butterflies’ renewal process to make the final leg of their journey north.

    To give expression to my grief, I decided to research what we had rumored in our garden this summer. I found an illuminating interview with Orley Taylor, insect ecologist and founder of Monarch Watch, conducted by Richard Coniff, a contributing editor for the online magazine Yale Environment 360.

    “What we’re seeing here in the United States is a very precipitous decline of monarchs that’s coincident with the adoption of Roundup-ready corn and soybeans,” Mr. Taylor said. “The first ones were introduced in 1997, soybeans first, then corn. By 2003, 2004, the adoption rate was approaching 50 percent, and then we really began to see a decline in monarchs. And the reason is that the most productive habitat for monarch butterflies in the Midwest, in the Corn Belt, was the corn and soybean fields [where milkweed, which monarchs feed on, grew]. Before Roundup-ready crops, weed control was accomplished by running a tiller through those fields and chopping up the weeds and turning over the soil, but not affecting the crops. The milkweed survives that sort of tillage to some extent. So there were maybe 20, 30, 40 plants per acre out there, enough so that you could see them, you could photograph them. Now you are really hard pressed to find any corn or soybeans that have milkweed in the fields. I haven’t seen any for years now because of the use of Roundup after they planted these crops. They have effectively eliminated milkweed from almost all the habitat that monarchs used to use.”

    I found the next point about ethanol fascinating, frightening, and maddening. As I read it, I asked: As human beings, do we ever look beyond our noses or our wallets at long-term consequences? Do we ever reach out for more information than what’s immediately offered up? Are we truly more intelligent than other creatures on earth? What kind of system have we produced that allows and rewards the destruction of our collective natural heritage?

    “Ethanol is a big issue too,” Mr. Taylor continued. “We’ve seen a 25.5 million-acre increase in the amount of corn and soybeans since 2006. And that’s been at the expense of nearly 10 million acres of Conservation Reserve Program land, which farmers are paid to set aside for wildlife. The other 15.5 million acres means that farmers had to plant a lot of marginal land — that would be milkweed habitat, pollinator habitat, rangeland, grassland, and so on. So there has been a tremendous change in agriculture to accommodate the production of biofuel.”

    Beyond genetically modified organisms, Roundup, and the loss of milkweed fields, climate change is playing a role in monarchs’ decline. I read that drought and excessive heat last summer also influenced the 80-percent drop in the number of monarchs overwintering in the mountains of Mexico last year. Then, unusually cold spring temperatures delayed the first breeding cycle of the monarchs in the Southern U.S., and that in turn delayed the next generation’s migration northward. This raises the question of whether the monarch has been left with enough time to complete its fourth generation to return to Mexico.

    My sadness at the loss of the beautiful monarchs makes me want to do more. I will talk to our politicians; I will get the word out about what’s happening. What I’d encourage my fellow East Enders and everyone on Long Island to do is raise your voices. Let your concerns be heard. Write your Congressional senators and representatives.

    Also, we need to find out what our local farmers are doing. Already I’ve heard that a number of East End farmers have switched to GMO corn. We need to get out and talk to them about the long-term impact of this decision and to understand from them why and how they’ve been convinced to switch. Then, when all is said and done, each one of us who gardens needs to plant more Asclepias to grace our gardens, with the hope that monarchs will return and will be rewarded for their long journey with plenty of food on the East End.

    Judy Bergsma served for 18 years on the Nature Conservancy’s Long Island board and is now an honorary trustee. She is the founder of MayaBags in southern Belize and lives in New York City and East Hampton.

    This hair-raising Halloween tale is set in a comfortable house on the East End of Long Island that is inhabited by assaultive demons. A huge black garden spider has been spinning a gauzy net on the front porch, but the real evil lies within.

    It started with a musty odor that at first didn’t cause the lady too much concern. A strong sense of smell and denial are her gifts, so she rationalized it away as garden odor. Her husband, who is even better at denial, didn’t smell anything. It ripened when they left the house and closed all the windows. The demons played when left alone. When the innocent couple returned after a day away, even the husband finally had to admit that he smelled the malevolent odor.

    Every house has at least one tragic flaw, and so it was with this seemingly lovely waterfront house. Underneath the heart-of-pine flooring covering the first floor was a crawl space appropriately named for its low ceiling, which forces all who dare enter to crawl — a dark, damp space that attracted vermin like mice and long-legged crickets. And mold.

    The husband and wife loved their home. They worked to keep it pleasant and safe, dealing with each invading evil in its turn.

    The mice could have lived undetected in the crawl space, but like most mice they got greedy and found their way to the kitchen, where they nibbled on fruit and crumbs, which wasn’t the worst of their intrusions. Mice do not obey that silver rule that human mothers teach their children: “Do not soil where you eat!”

    They had to go. Glue traps seemed cruel, as the stuck mouse squeals for its life. The husband decided on those blue poison pellets, but the mice seemed to think they were dessert. They ate the pellets and came back for more the next night. Finally the wife agreed to the cruel but effective traps.

    The husband and wife never knew long-legged crickets were multiplying by the hundreds below in that damp, dark space. They remain undetected because they are quiet, harmless, and purposeful. Their mission is to breed.

    The mystery odor was growing more noxious; finally it totally replaced the fresh-smelling air in the house. Low tide was more fragrant. Even the odor of garlic couldn’t kill it. It was time to get help.

    Brad, a sweet, fatherly environmental specialist, came to the house, fearlessly descending into the dank crawl space in his pressed pants and stylish shirt. Husband and wife waited anxiously as Brad inspected the space.

    He finally emerged with news no homeowner wants to hear: “Mold, yes, mold is invading your crawl space, covering the floor joists and feasting on the insulation paper. It seems that your dehumidifier is in a comatose state and probably hasn’t been working for a long time.” He couldn’t say what kind of mold, but mold nevertheless.

    “And by the way, the walls are covered with long-legged camel crickets who like the mold, love damp, dark spaces.”

    The wife asked Brad hopefully, “Do they eat mold?”

    “No such luck,” chuckled Brad.

    A mold is to a house what a malignant tumor is to a body. It is scary, potentially life-threatening, and can be cured if caught early enough, but that involves toxic chemicals, surgery, and a lot of money. Neither the husband nor the wife was coping well with the idea of this cancerous invader slowly digesting their house. They were frightened of what could be seen, but terrified of the invisible: airborne fungal spores possibly spreading all over the house.

    They took the advice of ancient wise men who said, “If it smells bad, it is bad for you!” They could feel this unseen enemy invading their aging lungs with every breath.

    They had seen horror movies where prime real estate is plagued by hostile spirits determined to kill all those who would dare to share their space. While the audience sits in the theater nervously eating buttered popcorn, spirits erode the well-being of the naive homeowners. Husband and wife decided to spare no expense to rid their beloved home of this voracious invader polluting the air they breathe.

    This Halloween neither husband nor wife will buy any scary decorations. No need, since they will have men in white suits slipping in and out of their crawl space like a scene from “Ghostbusters” — only these are mold busters. Until their work is done, beware all ye fools who would trespass on this forbidden ground.

    Geri Chrein has several essays in the book “Stringing Words” by the Windmill Writers group. She lives in North Sea.

    I grew up on an orchard that backed onto a mountain. For birthdays, my friends would use the tops of garbage cans as shields and we’d huck fallen apples at each other. There was a tree fort, a sledding run with a sick jump, and a stream where my action figures liked to hang out.

    Now I live in Manhattan, in a dark one-bedroom apartment with no airflow. This worked well when I was single and used the living room as a default putting green. But with a wife, a baby, and a temporary wall, the short game gave way to a default nursery. My girl is 2 and, to this point at least, she is blissfully unaware that she retreats to a windowless Pod hotel room every night. She has parks and swings out her door, but also cars, old cigarettes, and Wendy’s wrappers. The roosters and cows in the pastoral folds of her books are good for a certain amount of abstraction, but this girl, like my wife and I, needs nature!

    For three off-seasons before she came along, we satisfied our itch by renting a beach house in Amagansett. After the crowded contortions of city weeks, we heard the clatter of dune grass and walked on empty, infinite beaches under an abundance of stars. It felt good to feel so tiny. Paying the heating bills for this house built out of sliding glass doors was inane, but enchantments don’t always make sense.

    Of course, we indulged in plenty of real estate porn over these years, looking at places we either couldn’t afford or that were next to the highway. “You need a place where you can dream,” a broker told us. One December night in the city, where our jobs and logic anchor us, we found it. The listing showed a very small shack covered in pine needles with the euphemism “Fisherman’s Cottage.”

    Its best internal feature was the Pop-a-Plate dispenser screwed into a faux-wood cabinet, but it was right near the bay. Friends reminded me of the rising seas, sending links to those horrifying projections of shrinking coastlines. None of this mattered; we had a vision. On the day our girl was 3 months old, we made an offer and we were ripping out shag carpeting by May.

    To make way for the new stuff, we filled several U-Haul trucks with old walls, ceilings, and floors. Each time I pulled into the landfill, I looked at the hillsides of trash, now softened by grass and dotted with seagulls — take out the venting pipes and you’d have a decent sled run. That’s really not so bad, I thought.

    But as one who writes and teaches about environmental issues, I had to find ways to justify what I was doing: Combined, our two places were still only 1,500 square feet; we took the train when we could; I bike to work; our daughter was building her seashell collection. Still, I couldn’t get around reconciling that in order to enjoy nature, I played a part in disturbing it.

    Just a few weeks after we installed our nice hardwood floors and indulged in our first Home Depot-less days, Hurricane Sandy hit. Safe and dry in the city, we watched stormcasters rolling up their shirtsleeves and introducing haunting terms like “storm surge” and “Category 4.” We scoured the Web for images of our street that made us cringe. The real wrath did not come to us — our house was still where we’d left it — but it had taken in six inches of water that would subside into mold.

    The labor of putting it all back together was less than the dread of having to do it again, when the next superstorm, inevitably, hits. In the weeks that followed, our insurance paid for deft hands to erase all signs of damage, and town trucks came to push wayward sand back onto the beach. It’s as if nothing happened. In the spring, my daughter Big Wheeled up to the water and we watched the sun fading behind Gardiner’s Island as gently as it ever had.

    Now we have to decide whether we join the others on our block who are raising their houses. This is the logical thing to do, but it feels wrong, and it feels wrong because it is not natural. I am not a coal plant, a Keystone Pipeline, or an oceanfront mansion. My contribution to this is modest, but it is also deliberate. For now, I am left to weigh the impact of my indulgence against the joy of my daughter’s discoveries. No one is telling me what I have to do.

    Tim Donahue is a teacher and athlete who writes about education and sports.

    Time, the cliché goes, heals all wounds. But there are some wounds that cannot, and should not, ever be healed. The Holocaust is one of them.

    The Holocaust provides a daunting challenge to artists of all stripes: How do you speak the unspeakable, how do you depict evil in its purist form.

    “The Diary of Anne Frank,” both as a piece of literature and as a theater piece, on view at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, is one answer to that artistic challenge.

    This staged version was written in 1956 by an incredible writing duo, the prolific and gifted Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. They are known for sensitive yet powerful works, particularly for Hollywood, like “The Thin Man” series, and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

    The reason why “Anne Frank” works is because it is not a “plight” play. Plight plays tend to be didactic appeals for the audience’s sympathy.

    Instead, “The Diary of Anne Frank” is a look at an oppressed group trying to live a normal life under impossible conditions. But, as hard as they try, normality is something none of them would ever see again.

    The Bay Street cast is an excellent one put together by the director Joe Minutello, starting with Jessica Mortellaro as Anne. She captures the intelligence as well as the explosive precocity of the character.

    Written between June 14, 1942, and Aug. 1, 1944, by a 13 year-old German-born Jewish girl who had been brought by her parents to Amsterdam after the Nazis took power in 1933, “The Diary of Anne Frank” was first published as a work of nonfiction in its original Dutch in 1947.

    After the Nazis conquered Holland, Otto and Edith Frank-Hollander elected to go into hiding with Anne and her sister, Margot, rather than risk being caught fleeing to Switzerland, one of the few safe harbors left in Europe.

    They moved into an attic over a store. During the day, they could not make a sound, lest the workers below heard them. Cooking, smoking, even flushing a toilet was forbidden.

    The day the family moved into this netherworld, Mr. Frank gave his daughter something she’d always wanted: a diary.

    A brilliant writer, and at the same time a young teenager going through normal growing pains, she gave the world a glimpse into the Franks’ secret world, which they shared with four other Jews in hiding.

    Keith Cornelius is wonderful as the father, the only one who survived the concentration camps the eight attic inhabitants were taken to by the Green Police, under the bidding of the Gestapo. Mr. Cornelius gives us a broken man at the beginning of the play who finds redemption through the words of his dead daughter in the diary given to him by Miep (Chloe Dirksen) and Mr. Kraler (Joe Pallister). Miep and Mr. Kraler were the Dutch citizens who risked everything to hide the eight Jews. Mr. Pallister and Ms. Dirksen make us care without asking us to, which can also be said for the rest of the cast.

    It’s wonderful to see Josh Gladstone onstage with his wife, Kate Mueth, as Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan, a Jewish couple in hiding with their 16-year-old son, Peter Van Daan (Sawyer Avery). They are a talented duo here, finding the humor and then the pathos, again without pushing the issue. The same could be said for Mr. Sawyer.

    Lydia Franco-Hodges (Mrs. Frank), Georgia Warner (Margot Frank), and Terrance Fiore (Mr. Dussel) round out this excellent cast.

    As always, the technical elements of this Bay Street production are superb. The set by Gary Hygom is a wonderful playing space, and the light design blends in with the sound design (not credited), providing a frightening world where every whistle in the street stops the action on the stage, out of palpable terror.

    While the sound design was perfect, the musical underscore seemed to be a comment on a comment, undercutting the power of the simple spoken word. The recorded piano tinkling in a minor key, accompanied by a similar sounding violin, was, and I hate to use this word in connection with such a serious subject, almost schmaltzy. You don’t need to ask the audience to cry, just trust them.

    The postscript, in which the actors walk onstage after the play to tell the audience what happened to the characters, would have been better in the program. After the slightly less than two-hour play, with no intermission, the audience, many of whom were crying, began to applaud, releasing the energy they have built up watching this moving work. Then, whoops, not so fast, time for the postscript.

    Although Scott Schwartz, the new artistic director for Bay Street, was not involved in this production (he told the audience before Saturday night’s performance that this was the first time he had seen it), it is in keeping with his stated goal of expanding the theater’s Literature Live! Series, along with other community outreach programs.

    It was wonderful to see a mix of ages in the large audience, which is the idea.

    Bravo, Bay Street, bravo.

    The 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is a week away. It is here that I draw my reference and contemplate the events that changed my view of the world, along with many others of my generation.

    I was born when Harry Truman (“The Buck Stops Here”) was president. The 1950s, with President Dwight Eisenhower in office, were happy days. My memory is of warm summer nights, playing hide-and-seek with the old neighborhood gang.

    The election of John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 was a big deal in our family. I believe it was my father’s first opportunity to vote, as he was a naturalized citizen who emigrated with his parents from Canada.

    President Kennedy’s famous news conferences perked my interest in what happened outside of my own neighborhood. John F. Kennedy was the first modern-day president who had charisma and inspired me to think and ask questions. I found myself glued to the TV every time he had a news conference.

    Then that awful day — Nov. 22, 1963.

    I was in Mr. Rykinbell’s English class when the school public address system came on with the local public radio station airing the news that the president was shot, and then, moments later, announcing that the president was dead.

    I remember a classmate named Mary beginning to cry, expressing the unbelievable sorrow we all felt at that unbelievable moment. For the next four days, I was glued to the TV set, as many others, including those of my generation, watched the nation mourn his death. The funeral march cadence, the coffin on a wooden wagon drawn by a team of horses, the single black horse with no rider, the sound of the horses’ hooves as the procession marched down Pennsylvania Avenue lined with thousands of people in total silence are forever etched in my memory.

    In the days, weeks, and years after President Kennedy was buried, as I grew up, I listened as the conspiracy theories and mistrust of government became more and more vocal. President Lyndon Johnson took over and later won a convincing 1964 victory over Senator Barry Goldwater, but he seemed overshadowed by the Kennedy mystique. He misjudged public reaction to the Vietnam War and eventually declined to seek another term.

    The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and of Senator Robert F. Kennedy rocked our nation. Richard Nixon, talking law and order, captured the 1968 presidential election. His re-election in 1972, defeating Senator George McGovern, was a convincing victory, but we continued to question our government. We all know about the Watergate mess, President Nixon’s resignation, and the swearing in of Gerald Ford as president. This was almost revolutionary, although not a shot was fired. We owe President Ford gratitude for keeping our political process together and helping our nation move on.

    In the years that followed, President Jimmy Carter just seemed to have difficulty being president. The economy and the Iran hostage crisis led to his defeat when he ran for re-election. Then we elected the first Hollywood actor, President Ronald Reagan. But we owe him gratitude for his efforts in ending the cold war.

    During the evolving presidential history, from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, a former president’s son, the nation had become tired of international conflicts and sensationalized, 24/7 debate about presidential indiscretion. After Sept. 11, he became a modern wartime president against terror. And then, America elected its first black president, Barack Obama.

    I reflect back to when I was a young boy listening and watching President Kennedy at televised press conferences, hearing about his response to the Cuban missile crisis, the race to the moon, and many more amazing or difficult events. I witnessed his assassination and funeral on radio and TV.

    Now it is 50 years later. My hotel controller’s organization has a conference in Dallas and I have never been there. My partner, Joyce, obtains information and makes plans for our visit to Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum at the Texas School Book Depository on Saturday afternoon after my conference is over.

    Joyce and I and a close friend arrive at the site of the tragic event. It is difficult to express the emotions I feel. We see the X markings on the paved street, representing the shots that hit the president. A docent tells us the first X marks the shot that hit him in the throat and the second X is the site of the fatal shot. I keep staring at the Xs — the feeling is profound.

    We leave the Dealey Plaza area and enter the Sixth Floor Museum in the Texas School Book Depository Building. It is a gallery of photos and news clippings from J.F.K.’s beginnings to his assassination and the aftermath. And, of course, the corner window where Lee Harvey Oswald perched over boxes with rifle in hand waiting for the president. The section is walled off in glass, preventing anyone from going too close. There is a seventh floor that welcomes visitors to a gallery with more pictures of President Kennedy and recent photos of other presidents and famous people.

    As Joyce and I walk around, we discover an area that is not part of the photo gallery, but a room with no visible indication that this is an entrance to another space. We enter. There are four chairs on a raised platform with a long, black, floor-to-ceiling curtain behind them and a small number of chairs theater style in front of the platform. To the left, at the corner of the room, is an exposed window.

    I walk over to it and look out. To my astonishment I can see the X markings on the street. I realize that I am standing directly above the window in which Lee Harvey Oswald stood on Nov. 22, 1963, from which he fired those shots that changed the course of history. It is hard to put into words the emotions you have when you are a virtual witness to such an overwhelming historical event.

    I sign the visitors guest book and leave a message. I hope that some day my grandchildren will visit, come across what I have written, and experience and understand what their Papa felt about that horrible day as a young boy and as an adult 50 years later.

    Gary Hodgins lives in Montauk where he is the controller of Gurney’s Inn.

    We call it a yacht club. Our fleet consists of a two-person kayak with yellow paddles, a white Sunfish with a purple, pink, and turquoise sail, and a royal blue tender with a two-horsepower engine that my husband found on eBay. Last summer my son shipped his paddleboard from Florida and he gave the kids rides as he paddled in North Sea Harbor. This year we added another kayak, bright orange, to the private navy at our idyllic summer rental on Towd Point in North Sea.

    I promote our yacht club of bay-worthy craft to my children and their families as an incentive to visit. It is a rare chance to have all three of my grandchildren together at the same time. My son has a daughter, Lucy, 6, and my daughter has a son, Cullen, also 6, and Cormac, a year and a half. They live in Florida and California, so I don’t get to see them very often. The grandchildren see one another once a year, but the older ones bond as if they had had a play date the week before.

    “Cullen, I need you. Come play mermaids with me,” Lucy says.

    “Okay, then we can play Lego.”

    They play for hours chasing hermit and fiddler crabs. I provide nets to scoop up fish and seaweed.

    Kid-size life jackets are lined up along the fence in yellow, red, and blue. The older kids can swim, but it’s better to take precautions. We take turns going out in all the boating vehicles, and kayak over to the island preserve just across North Sea Harbor. The kids call it Crab Island. We search for bird and animal prints, and periwinkles, oysters, mussels, scallops, and clams. We navigate the waterways of the nature preserve and feel like adventurers on the African Queen, with birdcalls as background music. White herons, cormorants, osprey, and cantankerous seagulls all shout to be heard. Swans parade in a leisurely flotilla while cygnets follow in a row.

    The kids play on the anchored Sunfish, pretending to be pirates, and Cullen shimmies up to the top of the 15-foot mast and balances precariously, holding on with one hand like a three-pointed star until I yell, “Cullen, wrap your arms and legs around that flagpole and get down, please! No showing off.”

    Blessed with superb weather, hot and dry and perfect for the beach and swimming, we enjoy our natural playground. We swim outside the backdoor, and the kids love a $15 inflatable pool where we have dive races. They are awarded points just like at the Olympics: “And now, Lucy Pateman, from the United Kingdom.”

    We sit and watch the boat traffic in and out of Conscience Point Marina and observe speedboats getting stuck on the sandbar. Being on the water is soothing, calming, and hypnotic. I get a voyeuristic pleasure looking at big and small houses by boat in North Sea Harbor and Davis Creek. Smells can be fishy or fresh depending on the tide, and I can actually hear the weather — the wind, the thunder, and the Paolo Soleri bell by the front door, pealing its chimes in rhythm with the breeze.

    We eat well, with fruits and vegetables from local farm stands. I make strawberry-rhubarb crisp and baked macaroni for the little ones, and swordfish and chicken thighs on the grill, marinated in fresh ginger, orange juice, and brown sugar. And my famous turkey meatloaf with spinach, covered with crisp bacon — always a crowd-pleaser.

    “Hey Lucy, let’s be dinosaurs,” says Cullen, sitting at the table.

    “Okay. We are carnivores.”

    Cullen waves his chop in the air and roars as he and Lucy devour the meat. I enjoy seeing them pretending to be prehistoric creatures, ripping into grilled baby lamb chops, getting some protein into their skinny little bodies.

    My son-in-law’s family invites us to a down-and-dirty crabfest at their house, conveniently located in Southampton Village. The live crustaceans run amok around the kitchen floor, and the kids squeal with delight as they chase the creatures before they are thrown into the boiling cauldron. The kids are amazed at how the crabs turn from blue to pinkish red when cooked. They eat the crabs along with sourdough bread, corn, green beans, and sliced tomato salad. We eat outside on a long table covered with newspaper that makes for easy cleanup after the crabs are demolished.

    The kid-size red table with blue chairs I bought at a yard sale is well used for outdoor meals and arts-and-crafts projects. Cullen and Lucy do amazing drawings of the marine life they are learning about. I took them to a friend’s art exhibit, after which they put price tags on their own artwork.

    We make sand castles at the beach, where my husband constructs a sand airplane. With a 10-foot wingspan, a wooden propeller, and a stick throttle, it provides an hour of creative play.

    We read books that my kids had loved. “Crictor,” about a boa constrictor, “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “Petali and Gurigoo, or How the Birds Got Their Colors,” and “Anansi the Spider” are read and reread as the almost-40-year-old pages separate from their spines.

    “GrandJo, be careful, the pages are falling out,” Lucy says. Both Cullen and Lucy point out the crayon marks on one page. I tell them their mother or father did the scribble. They think it very funny that one of their parents had drawn in a book, something strictly forbidden.

    We sit around a fire pit made up of flat stones piled one on top of another and watch the flames create images of dragons and ghosts under the stars. Bars of Hershey chocolate, marshmallows, and graham crackers are the magic ingredients for making s’mores, everyone’s favorite. We use two big forked prongs and put two marshmallows on each. Roast according to taste — some like them charred, others gently warmed by the fire.

    I’ve been doing a Christmas card every year, using a photo of my grandchildren. As they’re together only once a year, I plan ahead. Last year each kid got a special outfit — blue-and-white-striped T-shirts and orange shorts. They put them on and were hams for the camera, smiling and hugging each other and waving the American flags I gave them. The photos turned out great.

    A week after the families had arrived safely home, my son sent a thank-you present. It was a dozen plastic highball glasses. He cut each logo out by hand and sent them to the glass manufacturer. My son, a lawyer, not an art director, designed the logo in a circle around a pennant of a Union Jack morphing into an English flag, a red cross on a white field, in honor of my British-born husband.

    When friends come to dinner, I show off my perfect gift — beautiful, practical glasses with a “Towd Point Yacht Club Southampton NY” design. “My son designed them,” I say. The glasses are empty now but will soon be filled with assorted juices, iced tea with fresh mint, and beer for the adults.

    Hurricane Sandy hit Towd Point hard. Eight inches of water flowed through the cottage when North Sea Harbor met Davis Creek. I wonder how the family will like the new kitchen, new decks without splinters, and the new queen-size bed when they come this summer?

    Joanne Pateman regularly contributes “Guestwords” to The Star.

At age 87, with stage four breast cancer and a survival prognosis of three months, Rheba recaptured her revolutionary soul.

“I’m going to try marijuana for the pain,” she told me on the phone from her continuing-care retirement community in Seattle. “Some of my old colleagues are shocked. It’s legal here, but they think the only thing that works are M.D.-written prescriptions.”

“The last time we discussed it,” I reminded her, “you called marijuana ‘habit-forming and evil.’”

“I know I did, Dick, and I’m ashamed. I did some research and found I was wrong. My M.D. knew nothing about it, so I got it from James, an emergency room nurse. I’ll be taking it in prescribed dosages as liquid drops. If it works, I’ll ask him to hold a workshop for the retirees here.”

“I’ll push my walker all the way from East Hampton to Seattle to see that one,” I told her.

“We haven’t the time, my dear,” she said. “I’d love to see you again, but we haven’t the time.”

Rheba is Rheba Fradkin De Tornyay, dean emeritus at the University of Washington School of Nursing, past president of the American Academy of Nursing, first female trustee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and my high school sweetheart. We met 71 years ago in Petaluma, Calif., now an exurb of San Francisco, then a grimy small town claiming to be “America’s egg basket.”

We were 16. Our Jewish worlds could not have been farther apart. I was a descendant of German Jews who in the 1850s journeyed by sea around the tip of South America to San Francisco, a precocious city exploding with commercial possibilities. Their offspring tended to be prosperous and conservative. During the Great Depression, my parents voted for Hoover against Roosevelt and with the “drys” against the repeal of Prohibition.

Rheba’s family came from Ukraine in 1920 and acquired eight acres in a budding community of atheist, Marxist chicken farmers. They chose to settle in Petaluma because of its proximity to the Valley of the Moon, which was also the title of a novel written by Jack London, their American socialist hero.

Chicken farming suited them. They needn’t become capitalist bosses and exploit workers. A small family could handle the work, and the predawn to early afternoon workday allowed them daytime to hang out and parse, usually vociferously, their various shades of Marxism.

Rheba and I met precisely because of our different backgrounds. The Petaluma community contained a founder population of Infantile Tay-Sachs, a horrific genetic mutation. If both parents carry it, one in four pregnancies will produce a Tay-Sachs child who will go deaf, blind, and be unable to swallow during its first year and die before it is 5. Marriage within the community was discouraged. The Petaluma Jewish Center called the San Francisco B’nai B’rith and in so many words said, “Send us some of your boys.”

So it was on a summer Friday in 1942 that I along with 30 or so other male teenagers were bused to Petaluma for a weekend of baseball, bowling, Ping-Pong, and on Sunday night a dance in a high school gym, where Rheba and I met, two wallflowers avoiding the dance floor, while others, more suave and nimble, jitterbugged to the drums, saxophone, piano, and trumpet of a very energetic four-piece band.

She was tall, with rosy skin, earnest eyes, no makeup, and wearing a pleated skirt. I wore corduroy trousers and a red sweater tied around my neck and hanging down my back. As we started to talk, the trumpeter went into a Harry James routine — loud, long, harsh high notes. So, we went outside, down a path between a cluster of trees, and found ourselves walking in the valley of the moon. And, truly, it was the valley of the moon, the biggest, roundest, richest orange moon I have seen before or since. Google has found the date for me, July 27, 1942.

We chatted. We both enjoyed our high school history classes. I said I was glad our Navy had beaten the Japanese at Midway Island. She agreed and said, “But isn’t it horrible our government is interning Japanese-Americans?” I said it was sad, but necessary. She stopped walking, turned to confront me, face flushed, and said it was unjust. German-American Nazi sympathizers in Petaluma weren’t being hauled off to live in tents on racetracks.

I replied that it was an “exigency of war.” I actually said those words, as if I were H.V. Kaltenborn, the news commentator who was on the air 15 minutes every afternoon. She scoffed, I went into a slow burn, we kept walking, farther apart and not speaking.

When we got back to the dance, her face softened. She asked me when I would be going into the service. I told her I would enlist next year when I graduated from high school. She wrote her address on a paper napkin and asked me to write to her. I shrugged, trying to be cool, and said I’d try.

I went home and woke up at dawn the next morning wanting to be with her again. I left my parents a note, drove my 1929 Graham-Paige to Petaluma, and found her house. It was 7 a.m. Her mother opened the door, said, “You must be Dick,” and smiled me toward the kitchen. She had black hair and high cheekbones.

Rheba was standing over an iron pan of glorious-smelling bacon strips and fried eggs with yolks the color of ripe peaches. (No dietary laws for atheist Marxists.) Butter that her mother churned, bread she baked, and jam she made from wild berries the family picked waited in unmatched bowls on a round table, where Rheba’s father sat, a short man bent over a ledger. He had leathery skin from too much sun. Rheba put down a spatula, took my hand, and led me to the table.

We dated regularly and in the way of the time didn’t kiss until the night before I reported for duty. She wrote me every day for the two and a half years I was away — newsy, upbeat reports about the home front’s commitment to the war and her frequent and friendly visits with my parents.

I wrote her when I could, about the older men in my squad who took me under their wing and our growing closeness with German civilians, with whom we shared a sense of war’s futility. And we argued, especially when I wrote her that the United Mine Workers had no right to strike when we were at war, and she responded curtly that the right to strike was what the war was all about.

We assumed we’d marry, but there was to be more separation than we could manage. I went to college in England, on the G.I. Bill of Rights. She entered nursing school at a hospital in San Francisco, where she went to war with the hospital authorities. She gave unauthorized morphine to a patient who was dying painfully. She was severely reprimanded. She then tried to organize the nurses into a union. The hospital locked her in her room for three days. When freed, she wrote the head of the state nursing board that nurses’ long working hours were barbaric and a threat to patient safety.

Weeks later, she found the official seated beside her at an annual dinner attended by nursing students. “I asked to be next to you,” the official said, putting her hand on Rheba’s. “You have a great future in nursing, but change your ways or there’s nothing we can do for you.”

Within 20 years, Rheba was dean of the School of Nursing at UCLA, 10 years later, in the ’70s, dean at the University of Washington. I moved in the opposite direction — a department store buyer in the ’50s, a reporter in the ’60s, a street vendor of handbags and belts my then-wife and I made in the ’70s and ’80s. By the ’80s, Rheba was in the middle of a long and happy marriage to Rudy De Tornyay that lasted 55 years until his death in 2008. I was in the middle of my fourth marriage, which, like my first three, was to end in divorce.

The few meetings Rheba and I had were brief and belligerent. In the ’70s, she called me a hippie. “You have weird friends,” she said, “and a big, scraggly beard.” In the ’80s, she remarked how she loved staying in five-star hotels when she traveled with other R.W. Johnson Foundation trustees to inspect their programs in poor urban neighborhoods. It was gross, she conceded, to eat a chic breakfast and then go off to observe the poor, but she felt she’d earned it. I told her I choked on pillow chocolates and got asthma from cellophane-wrapped fruit. She harrumphed. I then boasted I must be the only Oxford graduate ever to earn a living selling in the street. She departed. We were through.

For the next 25 years, we were. But on my 81st birthday, I woke up wanting to be with her, just as I had 64 years before. I forgot we had become disappointed sweethearts with conflicting lifestyles. All I remembered was how I had counted on her during the war. When my best friend was killed, when I cowered in a ditch as a German ME 262 strafed me, when I had to challenge my company’s first sergeant to a fight for calling me a kike, when I awoke from nights spent amid corpses and desperate children, I knew that day or the next there would be a letter from Rheba and, if only briefly, I would feel whole again.

Entering my ninth decade, with friends dying and my body losing force, I knew the letters would still come, if I let them. We could never be incompatible. We were a Baroque concerto — a rush of beats and melodies bouncing every which way, but cohesive and beautiful.

I found her on the Internet. Soon we were exchanging e-mails much as we had exchanged v-mails during the war. She had become a member of the medical establishment, devoted to its dictums; I the radical, eager to savage them. She was appalled I entrusted my back to a chiropractor and that I preferred dandelion drops to prescription medicine to ward off edema and support my declining kidney function. Worst of all, I hoped to find a cannabis prescription to control my asthma. She had never heard a respected doctor or academic discussing marijuana, even as a palliative. She would never use it.

Or so it had seemed.

Her cancer pain unremitting, Rheba started taking her cannabis drops. Six pain-free weeks later, she placed Canny, her potted cannabis plant, on a table before her and introduced James to a rapt audience of over 400 retirement home residents, almost its entire population. “The response was so favorable,” she told me afterward, “that James plans to open a dispensary in the neighborhood.”

She was thrilled. I was proud of her. “I’m not going to die in an opiate stupor,” she added, “I’m going to be alive until I’m not.”

“I hear the government is funding research on the benefits of LSD for terminal cancer patients,” I replied. “How about it?”

--

Richard Rosenthal is the author of “The Dandelion War,” a humorous novel about class warfare in the Hamptons.

    There are strangers lounging around by my pool! A couple, a married couple, strangers, the man, apparently heterosexual, cavorting around in a sarong!

    They are smiling, drinking rosé wine, and sweltering in July’s 90-degree-plus heat.

    What are they doing in my gorgeous — if, as my pool guy refers to it, peanut — pool? (It’s tiny. But chic.)

    Oh, wait a sec. The pool is theirs. As is the house.

    My house has been sold.

    I bought the house at the corner of Bayberry Lane and Central Avenue in the spring of 1982. A block from the ocean. I timed it more than once, astounded: a four-minute walk. Beach Hampton, as some old-timers and some real estate agents refer to the region. I have always lovingly called it “the Dunes.”

    Prior to discovering this magnificent mile or two of the world, I was a Jersey Shore kind of kid. Pre-Snooki and her crazy crowd, but smack in the middle of Bruce Springsteen’s performing at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. I had relatives in Bradley Beach and then Deal — a step up. This was the early ’70s. But in the late ’ 70s, a boss of mine asked me if I was interested in sharing a rental cottage in Amagansett, alternate weekends.

    “Where’s Amagansett?” I asked. “Rhode Island?”

    “That’s Narragansett,” he answered. “Amagansett is in the Hamptons. Close to the tip of Long Island.”

    I took a rainy April Saturday drive to investigate, and never left.

    It was a small house, steps to the ocean — two bedrooms, teensy kitchen, with a private backyard, a small Weber grill, a cement patio, and those seductive dunes.

    It seduced me, all right. This every other weekend, mid-June to Labor Day rental, $1,750 my share, which I shared with a friend, set me back $875 then. I think one night at the Maidstone costs $875 today.

    After that idyllic summer, I stayed. And then strayed. With a group of friends, I rented a fall-winter house in Wainscott. But summer after summer, I drifted back to the dunes. The same house twice more. Something else on Beach Avenue, when it was called Beach Road. And one summer, on Treasure Island Drive in a house with a name: Shakubuku.

    But in 1982, I bought. An upstanding rectangle of a house on a third of an acre.

    “It looks like a sauna,” a friend said the day I showed it off. The house had horizontal blond wood paneling. Two stories of it, 30-foot ceilings in the “great room,” which was the living room, dining area, and kitchen. A master bedroom below, a loft area and two guest bedrooms above, with two small baths, one on each floor.

    No real closet space. No attic. No basement. A washer-dryer in a closet. Hot water heater in the crawl space.

    A dream house. I paid $190,000 for it.

    It has not only been the best investment I have ever made — I sold it last month, after 31 years of living there, for more than 15 times what I paid (you do the math; I hate that overused expression) — but more than that. It was the most peaceful, most inspiring, most social, most dramatic, most renovated, most lovely, most entertaining, most beautiful place I have ever lived in. By far.

    I have fallen in love in the house. Fallen out of love in the house. And fallen in love for good in the house. With a man who wound up not only living there with me, but oversaw the pool construction, the total redo (down to the rafters, with heat, finally, a year-round place), and decorated it in a style that people have called “Zen cathedral.” Skylights in the four corners, windows everywhere else, framing the blue, the puffy white clouds, the rushing storm clouds, the sunsets, and the moon. The black velvet pincushions of stars. Sliding glass doors in three places. Light that forever moves and changes and stuns.

    The house has held me as I licked my wounds between jobs. The house has allowed me five-day weekends during a couple of stints of freelance work. The house has inspired an avid interest in drawing. The house has withstood hurricanes wherein I had to X the windows with masking tape. Nearby Central Avenue has been flooded at times, canoes drifting by. Sandy was a scare, but nothing more inconvenient than lost power for a week, same as in my downtown New York apartment. Irene, Andrew, He and She, this and that, here and there, only added to the romance of candle-lit dinners off the grill.

    My friends are crestfallen. It was their favorite house — the pool they loved to lounge by under bright skies and wide-open sunshine, whereas the back deck, flagstoned and shrouded by enormous Russian olive trees and bayberry bushes, was shaded and cool for lunches.

    Early on, I had a Thanksgiving party for 20-odd stranded souls. My friend Tony, an occasional drag queen, showed up in a blond wig and a cobalt blue sequined gown with his own musical accompaniment. For weeks, I let the wayward sequins peppering the sisal carpeting remain as a sweet reminder.

    There were parties on the deck, lobsters and lanterns at the ocean.

    A neighbor and close friend’s daughter died in a car accident one July Fourth weekend. Then, the friend himself died. A baby was born to another neighbor and close friend just this past March.

    Neighboring houses dusted themselves off and rose to grander heights. The neighborhood, still a stomping ground in the summer for frat-boy-turned-finance-guy sharing, groups of young people and noise and parties, sometimes disturbed me, but I always reminded myself of when I first discovered Amagansett. Those drop-dead dunes. The easy life, the breezy life, the sound of the unrelenting ocean waves, always there, in, out, calming to listen to at night, as lulling as a pleasant dream. I think about how I was when I first showed up at 27 years old, my music always too loud, the guests a little too rowdy, the hours a little too late into the early morning. We never wanted to say goodnight in Amagansett when we were young.

    I had never realized the time would come when I would have to say goodbye to Amagansett. But now that I’m older, that time has come.

    Other people, strangers, laughing, frolicking around in sarongs, marveling at their good fortune, being a four-minute walk to the Atlantic, have at it.

    I’ll be a renter again now.

    And guess where I’ll be renting?

    Hy Abady is the author of “Back in The Star Again: True Stories From the East End.”

    Call it an occupational hazard. Booksellers are prone to fits of romantic distraction. Perhaps it’s even a job requirement. How else would anyone ever get into this business in the first place?

    One warm spring afternoon, early on, I was called to an estate sale at the home of a former literature professor; let’s call her Maude. Those handling the sale thought I’d be interested in her collection. She’d made frequent research trips to England and Ireland, bringing home boxes of rare finds. I’d been to Ireland myself once, on a dare of sorts. I love the literature, and the lure of its rugged coast held sway with me for years.

    That afternoon bargain-hunters snooped into every corner of the professor’s home. Waterford, linens, porcelain, carpets, antique furniture lay about the “great room” of what was her summer country house. In the driveway, Maude’s cherry-red Mustang convertible, parked at a racy angle, waited for the highest bidder. She loved to drive through town, her children said, her red hair flying in the breeze. No mild-mannered scholar she, but a fiery Maude!

    Absorbed in the professor’s volumes of Yeats, Heaney, Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, and more, I hardly noticed the commotion of scavengers carrying out urns, folk art, odd lamps until their activity grew from a vague annoyance to an irritation. I looked up from her books and noticed something far across the room on the mantel of a large brick fireplace. A strange metal object, coal black, stood sentry over the disarray. Its rough-hewn dignity drew me: a central vertical shaft topped by a ring from which four equal arms emanated. Someone inquired about it. The professor’s daughter said it was an old Celtic cross her mother brought from Ireland. “It’s been on the mantel forever,” she said.

    I put aside a book on Celtic mythology. From my corner of the scholar’s library, the piece appeared primitive, solemn. Its four arms reached out like points from a star, I thought hazily. On this warm afternoon, the library air was stuffy. The interested customer examined the piece further. “Can I hold it?” she asked. Turning the piece slowly, she exchanged a few words with the daughter, then replaced the cross on the mantel. There it stood sentinel over the miscellaneous objects of a learned life.

    I imagined that cross forged in a dimly lit blacksmith’s shop in some small village in the west of Ireland. The blacksmith, likely a devout believer, had worked his best efforts into that rustic icon. Perhaps he prayed over it as he fashioned the metal with his thick but skilled hands. The strangeness of its design seemed to verify its authenticity, its uniqueness. A cross galvanized by wild paganism yet schooled in Catholic symbolism. Perhaps the blacksmith’s father, and his father before him, had hammered out a humble, pious existence in the green and sea-swept region. This strange design a family trademark linking ancestors in a secret language with the divine. Each spoke of the cross’s rays a favorite saint, or branches of the clan. I could practically smell the peat smoke and taste the metallic salt spray in the air.

    But I was in the Hamptons, land of fast cars and faster deals, a place now so steeped in its own extravagance if I didn’t already live here, I never would have come. I moved toward that fireplace, one big enough for a child to walk into. Here was my chance! The spiky cross on its mantel was rusty with age. Rejected for some reason by the previous buyer, the relic of a dead scholar lay heavy in my hand. I imagined presenting it to a friend, fond of rusty bits and recently reconnecting with her own Irish roots. The cross might serve as inspiration.

    The late professor thought it important enough to lug home in her suitcase. Was it her personal Holy Grail? A gift from her beloved? Had she struck up an acquaintance with that old blacksmith at the local pub? Had he recited some lines of verse and charmed her in that way the Irish do? I noticed a series of holes at regular intervals along the arms of the cross. Ornamental details, I concluded. The blacksmith’s personal signature.

    “How much do you want for that?” I heard myself ask the scholar’s daughter. “Twenty-five,” came the reply. “It’s an unusual design,” she added. “My mother treasured it. It’s always had a place on the mantel.”

    She couldn’t tell me how old it was, nor from what stone altar in what small parish church it might have been rescued. No telling what sacred mysteries were forged into its shaft, or what might escape through those little decorative holes if conditions allowed. I paid for it and tucked it into my box alongside a facsimile Book of Kells. Was this my own Holy Grail? The afternoon sun shone brilliantly on my drive home.

    Sorting through my purchases the next day, I presented the object wrapped in newsprint. I’d hinted I’d found something extraordinary at the sale. “What’s this?” my friend asked, unwrapping it, a strange look on her face.

    “It’s a Celtic cross,” I said proudly. “Brought over from Ireland,” I added. “Isn’t it interesting? We didn’t know where it came from exactly, but it’s a piece from the auld sod.”

    She, the more logical and scientific, inspected the piece. Somehow it seemed duller in the bookshop light. Off its mantel perch it appeared smaller, less significant. There was a very long silence.

    “I think it came from an old stove,” she said flatly. “It looks like a gas burner. How much did you pay for this?”

    Maryann Calendrille co-owns Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor with Kathryn Szoka. They will appear at Fridays at Five at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton on Aug. 23 with their book “Sag Harbor Is: A Literary Celebration,” edited by Ms. Calendrille and featuring photographs by Ms. Szoka.

    You read all the handouts with pictures of celebrities and society couples, the benefits and political fund-raisers (most recently one for the Clinton Foundation punctuated the summer season) at Tom Colicchio’s new restaurant, Topping Rose House. And then there are the normal covens of notoriety, the Artists and Writers Softball Game, Nick and Toni’s, and the bastions of old-line privilege like the Maidstone Club.

    What you tend not to read about are watering holes like the 7-Eleven in Southampton, which, as one case in point, has its own crowd of regulars who get the same special greeting afforded by the maitre d’hotel at more auspicious establishments. It’s not hard to get a table at the 7-Eleven in Southampton, or a 7-Eleven anywhere, simply because there usually aren’t any.

    So cognoscenti driving along 27 on a crowded weekend are increasingly finding the 7-Eleven to be the perfect stopping-off place, if you’re looking for a three-pack of chocolate-chip or oatmeal cookies, some unripened bananas, or one of the very ripe hot dogs that have been turning on its grill for hours. As mouthwatering as these specialites de la maison may seem, they’re nothing compared to the friendly service and convivial companionship that’s to be found at this unheralded gem of a convenience store.

    You don’t have to be Bill Clinton to get a hot dog at the 7-Eleven (though in the days when he was a fast-food lover, Bill was almost a computer printout of the customer 7-Eleven was marketing to), and where the 7-Eleven beats redoubts like Nick and Toni’s and the Palm is the fact that its casual atmosphere is free from social pressure (though of course if you’re feeling ambitious you can always drive down to Aquebogue and attend an outlier like the Modern Snack Bar, where you don’t have to have the trappings to get a great piece of duck with all the fixin’s). You can collect your Diet Coke, root beer, or Sprite from the 7-Eleven’s amply stocked refrigerated section and find friendly conversation with the small coterie of men and women who cluster outside with their takeout coffee, not having to worry about who you are talking to or who you’ll be seen with.

    There is no power-breakfasting inside or outside 7-Elevens. It’s probably not something that’s stated in any of the documents accompanying the franchise, but it’s a de facto state of affairs that’s almost guaranteed.

    The same cannot be said of establishments like Bridgehampton’s Candy Kitchen, once a user-friendly hangout for locals and even the most anonymous of tourists, which now has the same lack of pretension as the Fountain Coffee Room at the Beverley Hills Hotel.

    The 7-Eleven is a home away from home for those who are tired of being vetted for talent or appearance. It’s almost like Marx’s vision of the classless society — though it’s definitely not the dictatorship of the proletariat since it’s owned by a Japanese conglomerate, Seven & i Holdings, the fifth-largest retailer in the world. However, as a polity it’s the closet thing to working anarchy. Whatever you may think of the food, you don’t have to worry about your position on the food chain.

    Sure, you can hang out at the 10 Items and Under line at King Kullen, another gathering spot that’s off the beaten track for those seeking a change of pace after a weekend of frantic social climbing, but there’s a reason why 7-Eleven is called a convenience store. It’s convenient. It’s open 24 hours a day and it’s everywhere. Erewhon was the name of Samuel Butler’s elusive utopia. It’s almost “nowhere” backward, but the 7-Eleven is an example of a utopia that sets the bar low enough to exist.

    Francis Levy is a Wainscott resident and the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.” He blogs at TheScreamingPope.com and on The Huffington Post.