Troubling locally is that new Covid-19 cases seem to be popping up all over, even in parts of the East End that had been stable more or less from the beginning of the pandemic.

Construction and landscaping have been a backdrop here for a long time, but over the past few years it has become ceaseless and everywhere.

“Anne of Green Gables” is the book that influenced me most in my life — not Tolstoy or Nabokov or Bruce Chatwin.