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The America we live in today did not begin in 1776; it grew out of Anglo-European colonization in which the exclusion of the land’s indigenous people was from the start routine.

True confession: I am a flower thief. I know it’s wrong. I have no moral compass when it comes to flowers.

A February break doing nothing much at all can get you thinking . . .

A shovel brigade was summoned to East Hampton High last Saturday to clear snow from the track, the turf field, and from the baseball field and tennis courts, too, for the new sports season.

Covid-19 test diagnoses have fallen to nearly none in East Hampton Town in the last week. Where two or more positive cases were found in each hamlet or village a day, now the figure might be zero for days at a time. I am closely aware of the figures, preparing the semi-daily reports The Star sends out by email.

My children do not speak like native eastern Long Islanders, or even like citizens of the old New York. Their pronunciation is the same as that of my Amagansett nieces and nephews: that is, generic mass-entertainment pronunciation. I don’t know if the received Netflix pronunciation is a Californian inflection or a Midwest thing, but they will persist in pronouncing orange (which to me is are-inge) as ore-inge; and avenue (aven-nyew to me) as aven-noo; pure (pyure) as pyer, and coupon (kyew-pon) as coop-on.

What to do with a troubled dog? Or should that be trouble-ing? A family pet who isn’t much of a pet or all that family-friendly?

In an ordinary year on the day of my birthday, I told Mary, who brought me coffee and the crossword in bed this morning, she would have already claimed two palapas for us on Las Brisas’s half-moon Pacific beach in Mexico.

In East Hampton, if you had a street named for you before the 20th century, odds were that you were an enslaver.

Peak movie-going, for me, came in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when — a tangle-haired child of that unruly era — I was handed a 10-dollar bill and left to my own devices for entire weekends at a go.

Memories of “Go for 0, Tampa Bay!” and thoughts on the vagaries of N.F.L. fandom.

The other day, when Brett, one of the pros at East Hampton Indoor Tennis, noted that Jon Diat, The Star’s fishing writer, and I, its sportswriter, were among the few who wore masks when playing there, I said we did so because “we’re tyrannized by our wives.”