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Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner standing by a cross-like iron object hung on the wall of their Springs house as photographed by Hans Namuth was on my mind one morning last week as I walked west along the bay shore.

I spent a sleepless night earlier this week trying to remember where I’d left a certain bright-purple file folder that I used to drag out every November, as party season approached. It was our party-planning folder, containing guests’ names and menus from celebrations in years gone by. In the morning, rather to my surprise, I actually managed to find said folder, in a bundle in a box among other folders containing favorite recipes.

If everyone who’s said they’ll come comes today there will be 21 in our house, of all ages, an infusion of spirit that ought to see Mary, me, and O’en, the house’s everyday occupants, through most of the winter.

This whole scallop thing has me puzzled. There aren’t enough to go around as far as a commercial take goes, but I have had my best year ever diving for them with a mask and snorkel. This has given me a chance to mess with them in the kitchen in a way I would not if I had anted up for a pound or two.

In the old days, when we were seemingly among the few families who ate in a manner that is today called “locavore” — frequently eating things like eel, duck, and venison, as well as rose hips, wild grapes, and, of course, beach plums — we were not infrequently on the receiving end of gifts from hunters who had taken more than they could personally consume.

I would love to think I’m a lover of the natural world, but it’s hard to be a naturalist when twice in recent months tick larvae have rendered me so infernally itchy, and for so long, that I’ve thought more than once of paving everything over — our lawn, our garden, our bosky woods.

On my list of favorite things, right up there with shoulder rubs, Netflix comedy specials, and strawberries in June, is Christmas.

We went recently to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, and afterward I said I could imagine his wife, Edith, saying, “Not one more polar bear rug, water buffalo head, or hippopotamus foot inkwell, Teddy, not one more.”

An attentive group seemed surprisingly not bored on Tuesday when my daughter and I spoke about The East Hampton Star, and our magazine, East, at a gathering of a group called “Women in Conversation” at Peconic Landing, the retirement community in Greenport.

Reports of the scallops’ demise are premature, at least that was true in certain East Hampton Town harbors and select locations in Southampton Town.

I did not make it to Woodstock. I mean, I did not make it to Woodstock last weekend, not the music and art fair in August 1969, though it’s true that I didn’t make that Woodstock either.

Tuesday morning before voting I took advantage of a daylight low tide to pull a mooring from the bay. Fair weather in the month of November is difficult to come by. Though there were matters to take care of at the office, the tide and wind were to turn later in the week.