To an old guy like me, the year 1939 doesn’t seem all that long ago, but I came across a book published that year titled “Discovering Long Island” by William... more
Mother’s Day is next week, and I’m thrilled. The hockey pucks don’t live with us right now, so I’ll be getting what most moms want on Mother’s Day: peace and quiet. I’m lucky. Many of my friends’ adult children’s apartment leases have ended, and they’ve moved back home to save a little money until they find a new place. This stinks for my friends, because when grown kids come back, they revert to teenagers. Even the most capable adult children — those with 401Ks and car insurance — backslide. Once home, these “grownups” leave their half-empty cups on every flat ...
30 Apr 2024 by Tracy Grathwohl
“If we look to western Long Island, there are a lot of lessons that should be applied to us — how a lot of mistakes were made regarding water,” environmentalist John Turner was saying. Turner was speaking about far-western Long Island — Brooklyn — and how it blew its underground water supply more than a century ago. Brooklyn then tried to tap into the aquifers under the Pine Barrens of Suffolk County for potable water but was rebuffed. So it needed to look for water from reservoirs built upstate. These days, the 2.6 million residents of Suffolk and Nassau counties ...
by Karl Grossman
It’s tractor season in Sagaponack, the time of year you’ll see the most tractors with the widest array of implements ahead of you on the road. You see the bright orange triangle of the reflective SMV (slow moving vehicle) sign. You, at 40 mph, close in on the contraption; the tractor rolls at about 10 mph. The person operating the tractor has ear protection on. He’s wrapped in coveralls and, as if riding a horse, is hunched slightly forward. He won’t look back until he reaches the speed bump and the crosswalk. You don’t think he sees you, but he ...
by Marilee Foster
By Dianne Moritz What has happened to our beautiful village by the sea? When I vacationed here in the summer of 1984, I thought I had found my paradise. I even wrote and published a piece some months later, titled “Hamptons Dreamland,” raving about the beauty, serenity and charm of the area. My sister, who worked at The Driver’s Seat then, had invited me for the summer. I stayed in one of the three bedrooms in her upstairs apartment on Elm Street, a few houses down from The Hansom House, a funky bar with outside dining and volleyball games in ...
29 Apr 2024 by Dianne Moritz
It was fitting that Suffolk County, with some of the richest soil in the world and still on the New York State’s list of its top agricultural counties (No. 4 based on “farm sales”), was the setting in recent days of a “Docs Equinox” series of documentaries with the theme “Cultivating Connections: Soils, Farms, Food.” Last year, the “Docs Equinox” series focused on drinking water and the aquifer. There were outstanding documentaries and speakers. The documentaries and speakers on April 12-14 this year — again in honor of Earth Day — were most outstanding, too. Indeed, after viewing a documentary ...
22 Apr 2024 by Karl Grossman
Lately, I’ve been sniffing a little shift in the immigration winds. I think it started with the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. Four workers died that night. Four men doing the hard, dangerous work most of us once took pride in and now want to avoid. Four men peacefully struggling to earn their daily bread. Fathers working to feed their children. Brothers sending money home. Churchgoers. A dad who laughed with his young daughter at a water park kind of men. In other words, men with the family values so many Americans cherish. They were ...
by Carlos Sandoval
The solar eclipse, as advertised, was something to see, or partially to see, depending on where one stood. What is less observable yet just as remarkable is the way we apprehend such phenomena, the state of wonder we enter as we stand quasi-mesmerized before things we do not understand, and over which we have no control. Wonder. We feel it at an eclipse and, equally, though not in the same way, when something horrific happens, like the disaster at the bridge in Baltimore. Something occurs beyond rational comprehension. The sky darkens or the water blackens, and we gape, open-mouthed, like ...
19 Apr 2024 by Roger Rosenblatt
Spring gives us all the distraction we need. You can tune out the world news and breathe in the fragrant air. You sense the sweetness and take a deeper breath. What is that? I stand up from my tractor seat to have a better look. Is it a stand of daffodils? An old row of “bolting” collard greens? Really, everywhere you look, there is something in bloom. Maybe the scent originates behind the privet, a grove of something special: great flowers outside an empty mansion. Maybe it is all the dandelions, the hearty ones that dot the headland — simple ...
16 Apr 2024 by Marilee Foster
Jim Marquardt on Jan 18, 2022