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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.”

    Sitting on the stage Saturday night at the Bridgehampton Community House outside the beautifully rendered set by Peter-Tolin Baker, I was taken back to the New York theater world of the 1970s and the 1980s.

    At a point in time when the city itself was dying, the theater world was thriving. As businesses abandoned the city, theater groups were moving into the spaces they had left behind.

    The “black box” concept was an important tool for theatrical artists. Take a few gallons of black paint and cover the crumbling plaster walls and sagging floors in a vacant office space, hang a couple of pipes across the ceiling for lights, and, voila, you had a theater.

    The experience for both actors and audience was personal and intimate. It was fertile ground for experimentation and produced countless creative works, including “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” by Terrence McNally, which is running at the Bridgehampton Community House through Oct. 26.

    Sitting in the black box, just a few feet from the performance space, the audience finds itself inside a 1980s one-room studio apartment. Normally, a play begins when the lights come up, but “Frankie and Johnny” begins in the dark, in Frankie’s apartment, during the final moments of coital ecstasy. Frankie (Rachel Feldman) is a waitress at the restaurant where Johnny (Seth Hendricks) is a short-order cook. It is their first time ever in bed, with a clearly happy result for both.

    Love-making over, the couple catch their breath, and the lights go on.

    “God, I wish I still smoked,” Frankie says about lighting up after making love. “It used to be so much fun.”

    The two talk about actors and movies and looking out the window into other couples’ bedrooms. The sex may have been good, but it is the post-coital experience that is the problem. Johnny is sure he has met the love of his life. Frankie? Not so sure. She is in turns annoyed, turned off, and freaked out by the ardent Johnny, who keeps pressing the pursuit.

    “This is worse than ‘Looking for Mr. Goodbar,’ ” she complains, perfectly cap­turing her mood and the time period.

    This theater company is called Hamptons International Theater Festival/The Naked Stage. Finally, the Naked Stage is doing a play where people can actually get naked. But this production passes on that score, though it strives for realism everywhere else.

    These are two very challenging roles, which the actors handle well. Having said that, I did feel there were a couple of moments where they were in the lines, not in the moment, which a play like this so requires.

    Sanford Meisner does not have the fame or celebrity status of Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg, yet was as influential on contemporary theater as either of them. All three were members of Group Theater in New York in the 1930s. All three became acting teachers with their own schools. All three sought truthful acting onstage, with each taking a different path to get there.

    Meisner stressed the importance of truthful physical action, with a degree of difficulty. If, for example, after making love, a character makes the bed, then really make the bed. What does the bottom sheet look like after making love? Perhaps the love-making was so active that it came off. Better replace it. Focusing on a real physical action with a degree of difficulty frees the actor from the lines, which will then flow.

    Similarly, when a short-order cook chops peppers, he really chops them. One of the great bits in “Frankie and Johnny” is the omelette made onstage. (Don’t go to this production hungry!) Mr. Hendricks is a bit done in by the tiny chopping board he is provided. I know the space is cramped, but give the poor guy a little more room to chop those peppers.

    None of this should be taken as a knock on two very good actors. That I am ruminating on Sanford Meisner at all is a sign of how valuable this production is. The producers, Joshua Perl, who is also the director, and Peter Zablotsky, have an obvious love for raw theater, and it shows.

    This is a great date show. Instead of going to the movies this weekend, plunk down $20 per ticket (Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., Saturday matinee at 2), and step through the front door into the black box.

    The capitalist Walter O’Malley hijacked the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. This was a stake in many hearts.

    It took a while, but William Shea with the blessing of Robert Moses moved New York and brought the Metropolitans to Queens.

    My aunt fell in love with baseball again.

    This happened a long time ago. In 1962 the New York Mets started their baseball schedule miserably and got worse. They are the first and only major league baseball team to lose 120 games out of 162 in a campaign. This is hard to imagine now in an America that tolerates if not welcomes government spying on its own citizens. Texts between ex-teammates could be data-mined. Phone calls to former coaches tapped. There could be in-game tweets between friends on opposing teams.

    Back in 1962, only information on the next pitch, visually stolen by a runner leading off of second base or a clever coach on the dugout bench, was acceptable to the American crowd. The sign on the fence near first base was not an advertisement for an erectile-dysfunction drug; it was a warning: No Fraternizing. Casey Stengel was the manager in the Mets’ dugout then. A lot of fans and out-of-town sportswriters thought Stengel was a clown.

    Stengel had been discharged by the New York Yankees two years earlier after the mighty Bronx Bombers lost the seventh game of the World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates on Bill Mazeroski’s dagger home run. Stengel felt that there was another reason for his dismissal: He had just turned 70. “I’ll never make that mistake again,” he said.

    Bill Irwin is a clown. David Shiner is a clown. They recently had a show on Broadway called “Old Hats.” My wife and daughter caught the show and told my aunt, who lives in an assisted-living facility, and me all about it. Irwin and Shiner are at the top of their games. I think Stengel was still at the top, too, and was an old hat, when he had to go looking for new employers.

    Irwin, dressed in baggy pants not unlike Honus Wagner’s baseball knickers, finds a way to shrink into them, until he almost disappears under a spotlight, stage front. But he doesn’t and Stengel didn’t vanish either. “There comes a time in every man’s life, and I’ve had plenty of them,” Stengel said. So there he was in 1962 in the old Polo Grounds in Harlem, across the river from Yankee Stadium, managing the newly minted Mets.

    When he surveyed that Mets squad, he famously said, “Can’t anybody play this here game?” (This question was straightened out into “Can’t anybody here play this game?” Which is grammatical, but not Stengelese.) He also then offered the most cogent statement about baseball pitching that has ever been uttered. He told one of his two pitchers named Miller — he didn’t try to tell them apart — “Throw the ball as close to the plate and as far from the bat as possible.”

    Some years before, in Los Angeles, there was a grand civic plan to raze a neighborhood of the working poor and build affordable housing. These homes would be surrounded by parkland, with shops, schools, and playgrounds. It looked so good on paper. The uprooted homeowners were to get first crack at the new residences.

    But then, a planner of the project, Frank Wilkinson, was accused by conservative politicos and real estate players of the city of being a communist. These wheeler-dealers saw no need of such housing on a very valuable cleared site. The F.B.I., spying on Wilkinson, compiled a dossier of more than 100,000 pages. He refused to answer questions of McCarthyites in Congress related to his political past. He was summarily fired and then sent to jail.

    The Angelenos of Chavez Ravine were bought out for a song under the city’s claim of eminent domain. (Although a few resisted accepting the unfair payment, right until city bulldozers crashed down their kitchens.) Their whole neighborhood, perhaps ramshackle, perhaps to these Angelenos a heaven on earth, was now gone.

    The affordable housing never got built.

    In New York, O’Malley had met with Moses with a plan to build a new stadium for his Dodgers over the Atlantic Avenue rail yards in Brooklyn. He wanted Moses to seize the property for his use. Moses suggested Flushing Meadows in Queens. O’Malley balked. Moses said that if O’Malley wanted the Atlantic Avenue site so badly, he should buy it with his own money.

    Moses didn’t always succeed, but he never lost an argument. He was the master planner of the Triborough and Verrazano Narrows Bridges, of the Northern and Southern State Parkways, of the Cross Bronx Expressway, of Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, and much more. With the destruction-construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway another neighborhood died. Moses said, “I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelettes without breaking eggs.”

    The now homeless land in Los Angeles was worth fortunes. So after turning down other sites that the city of Los Angeles had offered him, O’Malley, knowing that the local politicians desperately wanted a major league baseball team, was permitted to buy what had once been the barrio Chavez Ravine for another kind of song. He believed a law of Moses: “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.” Here he built Dodger Stadium. As Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.”

    Mark Jaster is another clown. He performs with Happenstance Theater in Maryland. My wife and I have seen him in several shows, the latest of which is called “Vanitas.” In the performance he says something brilliant: “A clown nose is the smallest mask in the world.”

    Moses often quoted by heart Shakespeare to governors and mayors. “And those that are fools, let them use their talents.”

    My aunt lives near Albany. She watches all the Mets’ games on TV. The Mets are the only major league team, I think, that was looted by the swindler Bernard Madoff. But boy did he fleece them. Right down to their sanitary socks. Their ownership is writing checks in the millions of dollars in deferred payments to former players who did not serve the team well; apparently not enough cash remains in the coffers for top current talent.

    Therefore this season the Mets are a failure, what my daughter calls an epic failure. My aunt endures loss after loss. She knows her baseball: “The bullpen stinks,” she says.

    Today the Mets are playing the Washington Nationals. (I work near the District of Columbia and a co-worker is a Nationals fan.) I say to my friend, “Do a favor for my aunt and root for the Mets today.”

    My friend says, “What if the Nationals lose the pennant by one game?” He is right to worry; the talented men at the pinnacle of the sport are separated sometimes by only luck.

    “Do the right thing,” I say. “Okay,” he replies. “One game only.”

    It’s hot near Washington this afternoon and getting hotter, but there’s light rain starting and a heavy downpour predicted. I’m pushing the lawnmower while a touted young man for the Mets fires his first pitch.

    It’s a perfect strike: near plate, far from bat. But oh. Oh. Oh. I have a glass of water in hand now. I’m inside the house and on the TV the Mets are behind by 13 runs. They lose in a landslide. You could look it up.

    After this baseball touch-bottom ends, I check my e-mail. Another friend has sent this quote from the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, former commissioner of baseball and president of Yale: “Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.” I find a poem for hardball hard times in a file:

The Physics of Baseball

The shortstop, Quantum,

leaps.

Though he is all

star

the ball passes right through him.

There it is

near the base

of the curving wall

that defines his space from ours.

Three men pursue it,

but then the white ball morphs

into the black hole through which our hopes

will disappear on the day summer truly ends, again.

    My aunt has fallen, in the sense of having fallen down. Her doctor thinks she has broken a rib. This makes it hard for her to laugh. When I call her to tell her what I have just written, she says: “All Brooklyn hated O’Malley. I had to go to confession in the middle of the week. I remember Casey Stengel called the fellows who couldn’t field their position ‘plumbers,’ not clowns; but please mention to your friend not to root for the Mets anymore.”

    “The clowns you’re talking about, and you, aren’t bringing good luck to me now.”

    That hurts so much I have to take off my mask to breathe. And then it starts to rain like hell.

    Dan Marsh is a native Long Islander and regular “Guestwords” contributor. He writes from Garrett Park, Md.