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Getting up early is always a good idea, but it was especially enjoyable this week after I spent a night in the family house in the village with my daughter and her kids and Sweet Pea, our little, red-haired ARFan dog. 

Gino says the new racket won’t make any difference, that no matter how well-engineered the tool, the flaws of its wielder remain, unchanged.

Having been out of town all last week, I felt as if I needed some updates getting back to the East Coast. Joanie McDonell, who lives just up the beach from me, has been a faithful correspondent since I wrote in mid-spring about how it had been ages since I saw any toads or snakes around.

Twenty-six letters to the editor were published in last week’s Star, on June 13, and as of this writing we were still counting those that will be in this week’s edition; I think it will be 31. 

‘It gets worse,” Mary said as I lay stunned in my recliner after having winced and writhed in sympathetic pain throughout yet another episode of “Outlander.”

‘Driscoll’s.” That was Ad­elia’s one-word answer in a blind taste test of strawberries bought locally on Sunday. By then, I had already had three quarts of them boiling in the preserving kettle. The cliché about commerce is you get what you pay for. This weekend, I learned that lesson yet again. 

Time travel. It’s one of the great, impossible things we sci-fi nerds dream about doing. And I recently figured out how to do it.

The logo of the Eastville Community Historical Society, a longtime nonprofit based in Sag Harbor, has three profiles, one black, one white, and one red.  When the society sponsored musical and dramatic performances at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Sunday, however, 99 percent of the people in the audience were people of color. 

I’ve been looking a little longingly lately at accounts in Newsday of playoff games, in baseball, boys and girls lacrosse, and softball, wondering if the day will come when East Hampton teams will be in them again. Baseball used to be, boys lacrosse used to be, girls lacrosse too, and softball, of course, used to be.

Hook Pond is jammed with carp. The other evening one of the kids and I pulled over near the Dunemere Lane bridge to watch groups of the nearly leg-long fish breaking the surface of the water. 

Some of my friends already know that my daughter and her family are moving this week from a winter rental in Sag Harbor to the Rattray family house here in East Hampton Village, while my husband and I pack up and head, gulp, to Greenport and the North Fork, where a spiffy cottage awaits us at Peconic Landing.

The other day, having almost given up, none of the clothes in the stores having caught my eye, I saw something, a light blue shirt, extra small, with a collar and partly-rolled sleeves, that I thought might look very well on her, her eyes being dark blue and her hair dark brown and as long as I can persuade her to keep it. 

Up with the dogs at my house means stirring before sunrise. Not that I mind as I sit upstairs with my first cup of coffee, looking at the bay and listening for the birds between the dogs’ various post-breakfast snorts and grumbles.

In this digital age in which even someone like me, who thinks of herself as a stickler for grammar and punctuation and has made the English language her lifetime work, uses linguistic shortcuts — IMHO, for example — it seems pretty antiquated to complain about other writers’ prose stylings.

I never claimed excellence in grammar, but there was a time when I boasted of a proclivity for spelling.

Do you ever dream of being in a car that’s heading backward at a great rate of speed as, with one hand on the wheel, you crane your neck around so you can steer correctly while madly pumping the brakes to no avail? 

You don’t? That’s good. I think it’s because I’m fretting too much about the direction this country’s heading in. Happily, I can weather such phantasms; they don’t keep me up long.

A month ago, I wrote in this space about having come within three steps of falling for a nasty scam involving our grandson, who was in jail (so he said, or so said his very own frightened voice on the landline) and needed $3,000 (“Please don’t tell my parents”) for bail.

As you franticly dash around this Memorial Day weekend, or hide out away from the crowd, you might take a moment to reflect on the longest-term visitors to the East End — horseshoe crabs.

Although I have been known to carry on about how wonderful it is to live in a house that has been in the family for generations, and to answer proudly that “it came with the house” when someone asks about the provenance of some object or other, the other side of this seeming attachment to history and old things is, simply put, a deep-seated resistance to change.

“Physically, I’m in decent shape, it’s my mental condition that worries me,” I said to my doubles partner the other day, and she, concurring, said that tennis was indeed “a mental game.”

There are many more dandelions in flower around East Hampton Village this spring than I can remember. This may be in part due to Village Hall’s decision to switch to no-toxin landscaping. But I also like to think it is in part the legacy of Matthew Lester, a young man who died way too soon, who loved nature and in particular, bees.

Shelter Islanders seem to somehow carry with them a sense of place that sets them apart. Have you noticed that?

I’ve finally gotten to the Bible my mother gave me at long last, but as yet have found no salvation in it, perhaps because I’ve not advanced far beyond the psalmist’s prayers to the jealous Old Testament God to smite his enemies.

There’s no eelgrass to speak of anymore. Baymen and researchers have been saying this for some time, but it is nonetheless strange to think about.

From a fishing perspective, it was as quiet a season as I could ever recall.

With slightly warmer days, I have made it back into the woodshop after a long hiatus from sawdust and my tools.

Among American Jews, Passover has emerged as not just the most celebrated holiday, but I would argue that it also evokes the most spiritual meaning and stirs the identity of its participants.

At this time of the year, my yard is awash in yellow flowers. I’ve never known exactly what they are — or if someone once did identify them for me, I’ve forgotten — but they look a bit like hardy buttercups. They create a bright, sunny carpet that covers the entire lawn, on all sides of our old house in East Hampton Village.

As constant readers, those of a certain age at any rate, undoubtedly noticed, when I wrote two weeks ago that I was paying $65 a week to rent a one-room apartment in Alphabet City in 1965, I was wrong.

Readers this week will notice a fresh focus on travel in The Star. Two projects, a culinary tour of Greece with Florence Fabricant in September and a brand-new Travel quarterly are in this week’s issue. How and why we are taking this new tack here is worth explaining.

A funeral service last weekend, and the reception afterward, seemed the embodiment of community.