Primaries are good for local democracy in that they get voters thinking about government well before the general election.

If you have been in a car almost anywhere in East Hampton during the past several weeks — and especially if you have been out and about on a bicycle — you will have noticed the abundance of signs that have blossomed on the roadside.

We are represented abroad by a president who regularly engages in schoolyard taunts of the sort that would earn a third grader a trip to the principal’s office.

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.