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Island Notes

Late Summer

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 16

Category:

Island Notes

Last week I pulled over by the monument along the beach road to watch the long rollers, the unspent energy of a named storm passing far from our shores. Earlier in the day a visitor had asked me about the water breaking out in the ocean, off Clay Head I finally realized, that line of white I see...
One Call

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 9

Category:

Island Notes

The weather has been hot amid humid, and cool and dry, it has been everything and now the forecast is for more rain. There are great swells off the east beach, growing to long waves which surfers were attempting to ride this afternoon. The grass, at least, is as green as it can be this time of year...
Return Autumn Tuesday

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 2

Category:

Island Notes

Autumn was eight in July; her arrival on Block Island was September 22, the first day of fall the year she arrived. So, this summer she was not an adolescent, or a young thing finding her way, she was, or should have been, a settled middle-aged lady, going out to the pasture to visit the horses,...
Long before Henri

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 26

Category:

Island Notes

Twenty some years ago, when the Carolinas were suffering horrific hurricanes, terrible flooding, devastation of pig farm lagoons, which rolled into widespread death of whole flocks of domesticated turkeys, it happened that I was officiating at a wedding with guests from that part of the country. I...
At the Roundabout

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 19

Category:

Island Notes

There was always that night in August, that Friday night, when the growing darkness surrounding the arrival of the Friday Night Boat, could no longer be denied. Summer, which arrived when school closed and seemed to follow at a steady pace for almost two months, was slipping away. I lived here, as...
Green-necked swans

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 12

Category:

Island Notes

Once upon a time green-necked swans lived on Block Island, not a breed, just swans with green dyed necks. Then they were gone, and it was a long time before I noticed their absence. There was a day a few years ago when I was down in the pond lot, the little knoll that is a sort of peninsula behind...
Fallen grass

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 5

Category:

Island Notes

One of the more striking lines I read in a novel was not one of poetry, not a lyrical description of a life or a place or time, the language, itself, unlike most quotable quotes, was not seared on my mind. A farmer came in sputtering about the baler breaking, about the baler always breaking in the...
Weekly Lament

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 29

Category:

Island Notes

The weekly lament of “what can I write about?” was met with one of those topics I dismissed out of hand, then started talking. It began with an open question of what I would have been doing on a day in July in 1967. Nothing of any interest, I lived here, there were no delightful memories beginning...
Evening Illusion

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 22

Category:

Island Notes

We do not do change well on Block Island, or so we are told. I might agree with that assertion, based on based on no more than the fact we have no choice. It is thrust upon us, whether we like it or not, and do not even realize at the time what that change will be, may not realize until decades...
Shifting Fog

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 15

Category:

Island Notes

Last night I went to bed late. The temperature was 64, the breeze damp but cooling from the east, causing me to lower the ocean-facing window to only a few inches. It was blanket-and-light-comforter required sleeping weather. It was late and I took a screen snap of my phone, lest I forget the...
16 cents

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 8

Category:

Island Notes

Some summer days I think I am like a stationary cab driver, offering history of Block Island to visitors who ask leading questions and seemed interested, a reaction that only encourages me. It somehow wraps to the original town center being the literal center of the island for the first two hundred...
Songs we sang

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 2

Category:

Island Notes

When I started school, the building was in our limited perception, new. While my father was in the Class of 1933, the date above the then front steps, the student body moved into the new facility in the fall of that year. Some parents, like my own mother, were not from here but the majority had...
Summer’s start

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 25

Category:

Island Notes

It’s been a funny, grumbly day, thunder rumbling in the distance, sporadic rain, and a breeze that seems to come and go, setting me to opening and closing windows, or more accurately in June, adjusting their degree of openness. It comes and goes, the sky turning a soft pink through a gentle rain as...
Patchwork pastures

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 18

Category:

Island Notes

Many years ago, it one day hit me that there were two paved roads I rarely traveled, the bit of Center Road from Beach to West Side and Corn Neck north of the dump/landfill/transfer station. By chance, I once found myself in sunset traffic at the North End – who knew such a thing existed!? It...
Smudged with humidity

Martha Ball

Thu, Jun 10

Category:

Island Notes

The farrier came today, to see to the feet of the horses out in the lot. I like the fanciful notion that they were getting their “summer shoes” for their summer frolicking. It is summer as we — or I — imagine it to be, regardless of the reality of July and August to the contrary. The fields are...
White stars and pink roses

Martha Ball

Thu, Jun 3

Category:

Island Notes

It was, by any definition, a wash-out of a long weekend. Yes, we needed the rain, and more that is forecast for tomorrow, and it is far too early in the season to be thinking such a thing. Some of the knotweed at the edge of my yard went over in the wind driven rain, more likely an occurrence of a...
White spatterings

Martha Ball

Fri, May 28

Category:

Island Notes

May is running toward its end, the shad bloomed late but beautifully, the lilacs are fading, some of the greenest grasses have already gone to seed. My entryway, with its west-facing door, open as it generally is in all but the worst weather, is seeing the springtime activity that is a new delight...
Another Country

Martha Ball

Fri, May 21

Category:

Island Notes

Last Friday saw a big yellow Cat sitting on the beach. It did stir my curiosity — this heavy equipment on tank-like treads, not a kitty on little feet — as no one seemed to be about and no project demanding it was in sight. It was there four hours later and I pulled over, not expecting my curiosity...
A powerful illusion

Martha Ball

Fri, May 14

Category:

Island Notes

Many months ago I heard rumors that what is commonly known as the Capt Willis House, one of the sentries guarding the portal to the Neck, was being demolished. Dumpsters arrived, some activity took place, then attention was focused on the building of a structure in its side yard. It seemed to be a...
The things we don’t see

Martha Ball

Fri, May 7

Category:

Island Notes

Falki was by the gate, as he often is, when I came home from a trip to the harbor. He is an Icelandic horse, sweet tempered but a bit of an escape artist. The youngest of his small “herd,” he was able to slip between posts, gliding beneath the single chain connecting them. A gate replaced the chain...
Sounds of Spring

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 30

Category:

Island Notes

It sounds like spring outside. Not the peepers of the evening nor the birdsong of morning, but construction, some construction, somewhere, floating on the still air. A pounding, it sounded from the yard, then a hammering, then a pounding, again. I remembered the sound of what I still say was a...
Far side of the pond

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 23

Category:

Island Notes

There is a day in the fall when I look west from the Neck Road and see the New Harbor, emptied seemingly overnight, the blue water that had been populated with boats, as many some summer days as there are houses on the land, wide and open. It is wide and blue and empty but for the mooring balls,...
Yellow Time of Year

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 16

Category:

Island Notes

These days I don’t first awaken when morning gilds the sky, or even when the first flush of color spreads up from the ocean; it is earlier, when the east-facing window I see when I open my eyes, takes on definition of its own, a rectangle of pale gray distinguishing itself from the dark wall around...
Go to Meeting Shoes

Martha Ball

Thu, Apr 8

Category:

Island Notes

Once upon a time I had the notion if I wore shoes, shoes with heels, not tall spiky heels, but heels high enough for me to be able to pretend I wasn’t quite as short as I am, at least once a week, I would never be one of those people who said “I used to wear things like that. . .” Then I broke my...
Patchwork pasture

Martha Ball

Thu, Apr 1

Category:

Island Notes

Spring, such as it is in this part of the world, arrived by the calendar, the beginning of last week. Here, it has come and gone, over and again, since then, even in the course of a single afternoon. Saturday, I know, was beautiful, as we older folks flocked to Legion Way at our appointed times,...
Different Perspectives

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 25

Category:

Island Notes

The horizon looks impossibly high today, the world sunny and calm. I go to the door and am met by the sound of spring rolling in, long breakers rushing to the shore, the same lines I watched earlier, a steady march toward the shore that makes me marvel that there is any island left. The atmosphere...
Ready, Not Ready

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 18

Category:

Island Notes

Winters have been following a new pattern, mild through most of the darkening days of fall and into the winter with sporadic rounds of deep but not long-lasting cold. Springs are late in coming. The daffodils around my house are poking up through the ground; some years the earliest are in bloom,...
Slow Dialing

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 11

Category:

Island Notes

A year ago the Town Council was still meeting in the Town Hall. Someone had left glasses months previous, they had been sitting on the little table just inside the Council Chamber, waiting to be claimed for some time. I had been sick for the better part of February last year, really, horribly sick...
March wind

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 4

Category:

Island Notes

I grew up in a house where watching the news was not a requirement, it was a given. Decades later I remarked to a friend that among my earlier memories of television was my father watching “Meet the Press” on Sundays. The response was a reflection of the huge shift in our lives from that time, from...
Blue Sky

Martha Ball

Thu, Feb 25

Category:

Island Notes

The snow started earlier than forecast last Thursday. It was soft, on the border between rain and snow and then turned heavier than we have had in a while. It stopped me for a bit, knowing the storm was expected to last through Friday night and despite it following the track that had been predicted...
February Fog

Martha Ball

Thu, Feb 18

Category:

Island Notes

Among the many things I have had reinforced over the time I have been writing this column is the cyclical nature of our weather. What seems extraordinary likely happened if not last year then within the past several. A while ago, now, someone called me — embodying the definition of “hair on fire...
Another spoke in the wheel of winter

Martha Ball

Thu, Feb 11

Category:

Island Notes

It is early February and the forecasts, if not the realities, are filled with snow and cold. In the fall of 2012, between Superstorm Sandy and the official close of hurricane season, before winter had even arrived, the first “named winter storm, Athena,” blew around us. It annoyed me beyond measure...
The backside of winter

Martha Ball

Thu, Feb 4

Category:

Island Notes

January departed cold and windy, but it did provide us its usual parting gift, a sun rising before 7 a.m. and setting after 5 p.m., the last in a series of winter-turning hurdles. The first is always that early December afternoon when the sunset plateaus out, no longer gnawing at the precious...
Castle in the Air

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 28

Category:

Island Notes

The big pond behind my house is shallow, surprisingly so, and more surprisingly, it rarely freezes. Even these days of deep cold, a significant portion of it is open, moving water, one moment a roiling mass of diamonds catching the scant sun, another the deep blue of a suddenly cloudless sky. The...
From the road

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 21

Category:

Island Notes

Today, the sun shone, and it was not terribly cold, the wind blew. The dog was happily outside, bounding about; when she came back in it was to lie in the sun, following the patch of warmth as it moved across the floor. Then the sun slid behind the clouds and the sunny bright was gone. I noticed...
A Sin Against the Nation

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 14

Category:

Island Notes

On most mornings, the light changes when the sun clears the horizon, and the soft, spreading promise of approaching dawn is realized. The difference is often enough for me to open my eyes and look out at the colors of the wakening sky floating over the ocean. I think, fleetingly, of how the sun has...
To keep Christmas well

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 7

Category:

Island Notes

It is from one of the take-away lines from A Christmas Carol, that Mr. Scrooge learned “to keep Christmas well...” variations of which we repeat every year, wondering why we cannot maintain the magic of the season throughout the cold of winter, the activity of spring, the wilting summer and — for...
Threads across time

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 31

Category:

Island Notes

Advertisements for various Hope-to-be-Hot Items for Christmas usually pass by me. One, with an old, but unmistakable, annoying, but catchy, jingle, for “ch-ch-ch-chia” rang a little bell but wasn’t enough to make me pay attention until I saw it had morphed with a pop icon, Baby Yoda. These things...
Candle in the Window

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 24

Category:

Island Notes

With this dark year coming to a close, the Historical Society launched a last minute effort to brighten our building and our corner, with sponsored battery-operated candles (blockislandhistorical.org for further info). I was reminded, again, of five years ago, when the Historical Society was...
Angel Chimes

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 17

Category:

Island Notes

A few summers ago I was wandering through the stuff amassed for a summer sale at the Harbor Church, feeling quite pleased with myself for having brought a collection of books, relatively new paperbacks I had read and would be happy to find on a sale table. They were all fiction, most set in...
Solstice Countdown

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 10

Category:

Island Notes

It is the time of year when the sun drops the earliest, and darkness lasts the longest. A little more than two months ago, now, I came home from the hospital, a thankfully clean break high in my right humerus held together by what I somehow presumed to be a couple of pins — which I later saw to be...
But that was yesterday

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 3

Category:

Island Notes

Monday night I took Autumn to the door, my west-facing front door that is the only one I use, contrary to tradition. It is to an entry, a rather informal space that is as much a garden shed as anything. The storm door hasn’t opened properly in over ten years, since I came home after a trip away to...
At Boat Time

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 26

Category:

Island Notes

Back in the spring we had hoped by this time the spread of Covid-19 would have been contained and we would be in a holding pattern awaiting a vaccine. We feared the summer, and were haunted by historical reminders that the great pandemic of 1918 had abated in the warm weather only to surge in the...
The east side has the boat

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 19

Category:

Island Notes

The afternoon is crisp, the line of the horizon off to the east sharp and clean, a seam binding the deep blue of the ocean to the paler hue of the sky, the two stitched with tiny, perfect, invisible stitches. Overhead there are no clouds but out over the water there are layers of white and violet...
Autumn Earthquake

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 12

Category:

Island Notes

My dog is big and my house is old. The latter is a constant source of worry, what did some noise signify, every first-time-notice sound, be it an engine offshore or the clattering of metal at the transfer station across the Neck, more than a mile away. There is a spot in my dining room where Autumn...
In living color

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 5

Category:

Island Notes

These days when I walk into my living room half-listening to voices, I glance reflexively at the space where the television used to be. It has moved all of a few feet, from a space between two west-facing windows — where a television has been most of my memory — to a different wall. I am of an age...
The Red Trailer

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 29

Category:

Island Notes

There is a horse trailer in the front field. It arrived nearly a week ago, all shiny and bright red. The three Icelandics who live down here have all been introduced to it, with appropriate fanfare, and it has moved a bit, but not much and never on its own. It still catches my eye when I walked...
One night in October

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 23

Category:

Island Notes

On the long list of things I need to replace is a computer; it is old even by my standards, and keys stopped working over a year ago. It’s a MacBookPro, a plug in keyboard was absurdly expensive then someone suggested I try a generic, an “Amazon Basics” which even by my standards was inexpensive...
Shimmering October blue

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 15

Category:

Island Notes

The boats did not run yesterday. The long spell of good summer weather was, I think, more a blessing than a curse. While it surely lured more people to Block Island, it also kept life outside, windows stayed wide open, air circulated and for all that went terribly wrong the over-riding fear of the...
A lesson in perception

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 8

Category:

Island Notes

Well, drat, someone pointed out the obvious, that I do not need two hands to type, only a keyboard, although I am finding it a tough adjustment using both hands on a plug-in keyboard. Back to the old system of up and down arrows, which predated the computer mouse, which predated touch pads. Both of...

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