Denise Civiletti

From the day I first met the young teacher who greeted my own little girl on her first day of school, Keri has always been larger than life. And so she remains, and will always remain, larger than life.

The man with all the answers last spring has become a man watching a frog slowly cook to death in a pot of water that's being gradually heated to boiling — and doing nothing much to turn down the heat. The best he can come up with is “Hey, I warned you.”

It only takes one infected person — who may be asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic — at a holiday gathering to infect everyone who attends. That scenario made too many Thanksgiving dinners spreader events. And the hospitalizations and deaths data for the month of December tell the rest of the story. Don't become a statistic in the post-Christmas/New Year's surge to come.

Thanksgiving will be different at our house this year — starting with a change of venue, because social distancing won't work at our house, built when "cozy" was good. And that's just the beginning.

After confusing official reports of spiking COVID infection rates in Riverhead, I sought the town-level data. What I got was a bunch of baffle-gab and bullsh*t and a state official essentially telling me to take a hike.

The situation our district finds itself in right now — failed budgets, failed bond votes, upset and angry parents, dejected children — isn’t somebody else’s fault. It’s a direct result of the persistent lack of candor on display at every carefully scripted board meeting — of the board and a series of superintendents being consistently unwilling to give people straight answers to straight questions about subjects that are, in fact, the people’s business.

If your community is important to you, it’s time to recognize the value of the people who work to ensure transparency in its governance, who work to help your community celebrate its successes, cope with its failures or mourn its losses — your local news providers.

Racism lives, in our town and across the country. It’s time we confront the beliefs we hold in our own hearts and start having some serious conversations, however uncomfortable they may be, about how to bring about the change that’s needed to solve the problems we face — together.

Coronavirus has been silently ravaging nursing homes and adult care facilities across New York State, killing residents at an alarming rate — which, until this week, has largely been shielded from the public by state and local officials.

This isn't how our 10th anniversary was supposed to be, but life, news, — and a pandemic — happened.