Opinion

One of the ways that a human being can be traumatized is to have their reality doubted, and now more than 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden are being told at least once a day that what they’ve seen and done is a fiction.

We have to admit that we were more than a little puzzled at news last week that large oysters are considered too big to market. This seems like a missed opportunity for shellfish growers and restaurants alike.

Even James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was in favor of a popular vote, and here we are more than 200 years later with the albatross still about our necks.

The bad-luck schooner Alice May Davenport spent the two weeks following Thanksgiving up on the sand near Smith Point.

In the spirit of New Year’s accounting, and things we want to remember, I present you here with 10 flashbacks from lockdown — a collage of moving images, in impressionistic order.

No one wants their loved ones to die of Covid-19 in a hospital hallway. But many places in the United States are at that point right now, or near to it, as virus cases soar.

A brief snowfall triggers memories of Vermont and an uncle’s life there as a potter.

Offer me coffee and I feel special. A chance to shine, to be heard. Inevitably, all eyes turn to me when I announce, “No thanks, never had a cup in my life.”

Presumably I have returned to work now, and am thus to some extent re-engaged in East Hampton’s life, and am feeling once again at least somewhat useful.

A revealing trip through an old Dominy weather diary.

We, the Rattray family, have a tendency to get lost in time, to misplace ourselves in its flow.

The creation of a geographic entity — a village in this case — out of opposition to offshore wind power would seem the stuff of some far fringe of society. Only it isn’t.

So of all people, Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday made the obvious concession that there was no evidence of voting fraud that could change the outcome of the November election.

Fallen leaves. Is there anything in the world less satisfying to deal with?

A last-gasp effort by the Trump administration to mess with the 2020 census to undercount as many as 10.5 million people living in the United States with proper documents appears to have run into immovable opposition from the Supreme Court.

After Edmund Spenser

After eight months of social distance, I think isolation is getting to me.

Leafing back through five months’ worth of “Shipwreck Roses,” I chuckle at myself as I realize exactly how much of my brain space is filled by thoughts of handsome movie actors.

The bane of many drivers’ daily travels between East Hampton Village and Sag Harbor, the dread state Route 114, will get a makeover next fall.

Tired. So tired . . . I want to lay my head down. So heavy. 

It’s 1947, a hot, late-summer afternoon in Bethesda, Md., where I’m in first grade at Bradley Elementary (named for Omar, the World War II general). I’ve walked my bike home on the path through the woods, past the spot where we kids hunt and eat wild strawberries at recess. Too weak to pedal. I’ve made it home by holding on to the handlebars and lying across the seat. A few steps. A few more. Another.

This has been a sobering month so far for anyone who hoped that New York had seen the last of the coronavirus.

Somebody once believed that gathering in offices was a grand idea. Now, post-pandemic, we may never go back.

Every year about this time, I would go through the same litany of worries. That gosh-darned turkey gave me no end of heartburn. But this year is something else entirely.

We’ve made cardboard cutouts of family members so that Mary and I can be infused with the familial glow that has been so much a part of this holiday over the years.

The Biden administration is already shaping up to be something different.

Southampton's Dr. George Schenck returned to his practice Thanksgiving week in 1918 after being ill with influenza for nearly a month. A 25-year-old whose parents lived in North Sea died at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. 

The unknown previous owner of my secondhand copy of “How to Marry a Multimillionaire: The Ultimate Guide to High Net Worth Dating” (2005) left penciled-in checkmarks next to the self-help points she found most salient and helpful.

For a second-home seasonal resort economy such as ours, the winter months can be one of scarcity in terms of putting food on the table.

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.

My favorite state park might be the only one in existence with more parking lots than greenways.