Apparently you can go home again.

I grew up in Montauk, but it's been many moons (as specific as I care to get) since I've lived here year round. That changed last Tuesday, when, after turning over our house in Huntington to its new owner, husband and I hunkered down in my childhood home on Surfside Avenue to await our move to new digs in Brooklyn. I expect we'll be here through January, so, in the interim, I thought I'd offer up some observations on the Montauk that doesn't make the New York Times Style sections.

Not a lot of traffic on the main drag in December

By December, Montauk has returned to the basics of small town, rural living. It has Verlyn Klinkenborg written all over it.

Take mail delivery for example. The town post office is five blocks away. We have a small box, despite my efforts to get a "drawer," which is what my family had - Drawer N to be precise - when we lived here. Apparently, only businesses get drawers and there were none available anyway. Probably just as well. "You live in a drawer?" - an observation my friends took great delight in making throughout my childhood - gets old pretty quickly.

Walking to the post office to retrieve the mail from P.O.B. 2772, which is distributed around 1, is a nice break in the day.  When our forwarded mail finally caught up with us, in among it was a yellow slip of paper. Blank. We figured it had some significance and, in our case, the affable postal clerk confirmed we had mail that was too big for our box. The yellow slip of paper can mean other things as well, but they'd run out of the printed ones that list the reasons one might appear in your box. We got one of those yesterday. None of the reasons were checked.

In Montauk parlance: You've got mail. But it won't fit in your PO box.

We waved it at the clerk who retrieved our oversized mail, as well with our regular mail. He eyed the two Netflix envelopes. "Well, at least you've got movies," he commented. "That's good."

Is Montauk the only post office in the U.S. with a flag made out of snow fencing? Just wondering.