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Min Hefner asked if I’d read the article in The Times’s Sunday Review section about the man who came late in life to tennis and advocated it as an ideal aid in extending one’s life.

The other day, like many recent days, I was in a funk about America. The presidential race — angry, degrading, dumb, bafflingly regressive — was eating at me. Then along came an old friend to make America great again — or, at least a little better.

Leaves are starting to emerge on the trees outside my office window on the second floor of the Star. I get melancholy about this each year because they both cut off my view of the proceedings that go on in front of the East Hampton Library and because they signal that the off-season is coming to an end.

Things lost and found have been on my mind ever since April 17, when my purse disappeared at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater. I told the story of that mystery on this page two weeks ago — and had no intention of revisiting it, until, on Sunday night at 11, we were surprised to hear the phone ring.

Just when I thought I knew it all, I was blessed — yes, blessed — the other night to discover that I have a glaring weakness: I cannot hit, when receiving in the deuce court, a serve curved from the far corner.

Every election season there are one or two celebrities who threaten to move to Canada if their favorite candidate doesn’t get elected. It’s an idle threat because none of them follow through with it. I think they think us real folk will care that they plan to leave the country. But at this point there are far too many celebrities in the world, so to quote my father-in-law, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

Looking at three sparrows the other day at the water’s edge of Northwest Creek, I got to wondering about why exactly it was that anyone spends any time at all watching birds.

Last week, when County Executive Steve Bellone proposed a surcharge on the use of public water to fund projects to remove nitrogen from groundwater — and subsequently the waterways — I was immediately reminded that Suffolk was the first municipality in the nation to ban the sale of household detergents.

A recent visitor to this office remarked on my books. “There’s everything you should read,” he said as I preened.

“You’ve met everyone!” Durell Godfrey exclaimed last Thursday, just after the editorial meeting and moments before the bombshell tossed by TMZ, the celebrity-gossip website, landed in the office: Prince was dead.

The dead whale that fetched up in the bay near our house at some point during the past weekend has drawn considerable attention, as dead whales do.

If you happen to come across a key chain with a medallion from East Hampton’s sesquarcentennial — that is, 350th — anniversary hanging alongside an ordinary brass door key and a Honda Civic ignition key, give me a call. For some reason, among all the items in my little old Coach shoulder bag when it went missing, the key chain’s loss is the most regrettable. It was a symbol of belonging, I guess. (And it’s not like you celebrate sesquarcentennials every day.)

All of a sudden, in synchrony with the weather, the sports scene here has brightened, just when I thought it would be yet another silent spring.

Through no real fault of my own, I recently found myself needing to find a new place to live on the South Fork. It only took me about five weeks to find a rental, which might as well have been the equivalent of five minutes in Hamptons housing time. It was pretty terrifying out there, but I made it.

The animal dynamics in the Rattray household got weird this week when our in-laws’ Chihuahua-mix dogs arrived for a several-day stay. Actually, the lives of our varied house pets are weird enough on any given day, but the addition of these two little darlings put things over the top.

Because I learned to play Monopoly in Atlantic City, and to a lesser degree because I grew up in New Jersey, recent news about the city’s financial crisis and the fight between its mayor and Gov. Chris Christie over what to do about it drew my attention. Bankruptcy looms.

Each morning at the hotel we stayed at in Mexico, a question appears on the daily calendar screen, and, serendipitously, the question the first morning was, “How old is the earth?”

The conversation quickly turned to cats at the East Hampton Library as the winter came to a close.

There are people selling ghosts on eBay, I have heard. Well, actually, I checked, and, yes, this week you can bid on a "ghost in a bottle" from a seller in New Jersey. But that's not the only thing I was surprised about recently on the Web site - you can buy raw coffee beans there and original photographic prints from the heyday of The Village Voice.

In the last few weeks, the old house we live in has been crawling with roofers and repairmen. I guess it’s a case of extreme spring housekeeping, but we are finally facing some of the overdue renovations we’ve ignored for too long: The place needs re-shingling, at least on the south side, as well as new roofing over the flat ceiling of the master bedroom; some of the window trim and soffits have gone soft, and we need to add insulation where the foam that was blown in years ago has gone.

One of the myths I’ve entertained over the years is that athletes are somehow immune when it comes to what can drag you down.

Oh man, that was fun. Though it went by in a flash, as I’ve been telling people since Sunday, it was well worth it. Well worth the 57-mile after-work drive to and from the rehearsal studio in Bohemia. Well worth the hours holed up in the tiny and cluttered studio/writing room at home, learning new songs. And well worth all of Saturday’s downtime as the hours ticked away and the butterflies took flight.

Leo has an Instagram account. He launched it after learning that a pig in Canada had 200,000 followers, and a book deal. Or at least that’s what I’ve been telling people.

Maybe it’s a good thing that interest in the presidential election has been revved up by one candidate who denigrates so many people — targeting them by place of origin, religion, and sex — while another foments revolution (albeit a peaceful one). Everyone I know keeps talking about the primaries.

“Estoy feliz que Mexico no ha construido un muro contra noso­tros!” I said to the taxi driver as we arrived at the Las Brisas hotel outside Zihuatenejo.

It would be going too far to say that my husband and I are cutthroat when it comes to the online challenge called Trivia Today. Intense would be more like it.

East Hampton has 1,000 tons of compost it can’t get rid of. A couple of weeks back, officials sent out a notice announcing the town had a large amount unscreened compost to unload.

From time to time, when someone asks why, given my age, I haven’t retired, I explain that I really enjoy editing what others write. The truth, though, is that the pleasure waxes and wanes. If a story is good enough to require very little editing, my work is easy but not much fun. If a narrative is jammed full of extraneous words and ideas — or if the most compelling information is left for the bitter end — editing can be tough.

A shout-out to one of Representative Lee Zeldin’s assistants, Terri Malloy, who, in paving the way with Connecticut’s passport agency recently, got me out of the doghouse and onto a plane bound for Mexico.

So it is March, and I really need to organize my tax stuff because this year it is going to be a bit complicated. Well, this year it’s going to be really complicated. So I have to go get to it, but it’s Sunday and there are so many things to do on my honey-do list: