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Home » Columnists

Island Notes

Stages of Spring

Martha Ball

Fri, May 20

Category:

Island Notes

Every year I try to take a photograph of the lilac at the corner of the dooryard, and every year I have varying degrees of failure. The wind is always blowing, the sun is never quite right, the blooms are never as lush as they appear to the naked eye. They are, on the other hand, great examples of...
Everyone knows it's Windy

Martha Ball

Fri, May 13

Category:

Island Notes

Yes, it is a line from a song, a very old song, from the 1960s. It was cute and catchy and did not make a whole lot of sense. Unlike some of those tunes there is no “oh, that’s what they were saying” revelation when I read the lyrics. No, it’s just Windy. It’s been windy, the hard, lasting wind...
Hope

Martha Ball

Fri, May 6

Category:

Island Notes

It is Rhode Island Independence Day, a fact I feel obligated to share every May 4. I am greatly chagrined these words will not be printed until well after this date, as I am writing of it only after the fact. It did not fall off my calendar in the usual way of dates forgotten, rather this late-...
Mist over New England

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 29

Category:

Island Notes

I was, as usual, half-listening to the news, and not watching at all. It was almost 7:30 and had been on for quite a while, recycling some bits of local events and human disasters that have become the staple of newscasts, no matter how distant, and a blurb or two about the machinations of Hollywood...
After the Storm

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 22

Category:

Island Notes

Easter Sunday on Block Island was beautiful, sunny, not too warm, with a dip of short-lived clouds in the afternoon before a golden end. Monday, I looked out and saw the egret closer to the house than I’d ever seen it, walking down the lane just beneath my dining room window. It is usually right...
Thanks and celebration

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 15

Category:

Island Notes

A few times I have opened the door from the hall to the open entry and heard a flurry of wings, birds in a nest location scouting or building mode I presumed. It is not an issue, as long as they stay out of my way. And my bookcase when all the doors are open. It is a bit of a haven for them down...
More than a wildflower

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 8

Category:

Island Notes

The building should look familiar, it is the old Odd Fellows Hall, today its anchor business a café of the same name. This piece should have been in March, for Women’s History month but it is rainy and gray in April, it feels like March. When the Ragged Sailor Gallery, the creation of Eileen Lee...
April too soon

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 1

Category:

Island Notes

It has seemed overall a milder winter than many. We had one big snow, but it was cleared quickly and what was left was gone in the fast-arriving rainy mild. The wind has been great, it has felt the last two winters it was even more omnipresent than before if that is possible. So I am somewhat...
Red Roof, Blue Sky

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 25

Category:

Island Notes

One day last summer or early fall someone came into the photography gallery on the corner with an old photo. They’d been sent to me - not to the gallery - as a last-ditch effort in identifying the location in the faded shot. It was taken from somewhere on High Street they thought and following that...
The end of winter

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 18

Category:

Island Notes

It is winter, still, by the calendar. The vernal equinox comes early, in late morning on the twentieth of March, a whole week after we have “sprung ahead” I feel obligated to note. The world makes less and less sense. It is the end of winter, the last of the days we can see what will be hidden by...
Among the Lobster Pots

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 11

Category:

Island Notes

Sunday, it was gray when I left the Harbor Church after worship. By the time I reached the Seaside I had either driven down into the fog or it had deepened: the Surf was clouded by gray. Turning down the Neck Road it was a wall, none of that rolling-in business, just a wall, so dense I pulled over...
April Illusion

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 4

Category:

Island Notes

Thirty years ago there was a snowstorm on the vernal equinox. I remember it well, I was transitioning from a typewriter to a computer with a word processor and misfiled the piece I had written and had to re-write it. Which, because it was all new, I could recall and still do, opening with putting...
Sunday, 6:03 p.m.

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 25

Category:

Island Notes

Sunday, 6:03 p.m. The time of the photo, taken on February 20. Sunsets have their own glory on the east side of the island and in middling-toward-late February it is the aftermath, the light lingering so much after the sky would have been dark in December that is such a balm to the soul. We are...
Climbing temperature

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 18

Category:

Island Notes

Earlier, around mid-morning, I stood washing dishes, looking out over the snow-dappled field. It looked like winter, the good winter of clear, sunny skies and the remnants of a storm. It was not the rare, perfect snow fallen in the calm, a gentle blanket on the land that could last days in sub-...
Hidden in Plain Sight

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 11

Category:

Island Notes

A photo of the west side of Front Street from roughly 1900 shows an iteration of many of the buildings that stand there today, seeming to be neatly aligned, their facades a wall facing the newly constructed harbor, from the National to the Seaside. The street, such as it was, did not move, the...
Many more knew our name

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 4

Category:

Island Notes

Tonight it is mild, the snow turned to fog, billowing off the roads and rising from the land. “Haze” is the condition given on the lazy (pre-loaded, lazy for me) app on my phone. It is disconcerting, out of time and place, although even as I write the words I find myself wondering how far back I’d...
Habit

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 28

Category:

Island Notes

As I have often related, there were wooden cartons on the boat on February Saturdays in the late 1960s. It was the Sprigg Carroll, the little vessel that plied the waters between here and Galilee, carrying everything from mail to groceries and, yes, the kitchen sink. My mother and I were coming...
Ice on the grass

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 21

Category:

Island Notes

It is January and the weather is reflecting the calendar and mirroring years past, days of intense cold sandwiched between mild, horrid wind exacerbating the cold, giving the weather people their beloved wind-chill factor drama. They seem, the Channel 10 folk —and I’ve no reason to believe the rest...
Winter Visitors

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 14

Category:

Island Notes

We didn’t have a lot when I was little, not many of us did. And we lived out here, in the middle of nowhere, it seems in retrospect. So, my mother used what we had to entertain me, in those early years of clear memory, when school started with the first grade and my only sibling was a convenient,...
The age of speed

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 7

Category:

Island Notes

It was cold yesterday morning, 19 when I first checked the temperature, but sunny and bright for the first time in many, many days. Today, it seemed colder and I was surprised to see a reading of 52 — which until I die will be, in Salty Brine’s voice, a “warm” temperature for a winter’s day. A bit...
Joyful Gaits

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 31

Category:

Island Notes

Thirty years ago Peter Wood, BI Times co-owner and editor ran a little piece I had submitted, about my sitting with my niece on the cover of the old cistern, listening to the engine of the tractor the neighbor was running up and down the slope of his sister’s bank lot, a sometime sheep...
A living Christmas Carol

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 24

Category:

Island Notes

The world and the nation have changed radically in the last several decades, gradually pulling Block Island into the vortex spinning forward. Much of the technology we take for granted has evolved during my lifetime, from the first spacecraft to orbit the earth to the moon landing that today’s...
The Escape

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 17

Category:

Island Notes

Autumn stood in the yard in the snow, on high alert looking south to the wide open field. There might be geese out the field, although she saw no geese. There might be deer but, again, she saw no deer. Still, she sensed something was there, that elusive something that lurked around the edges of the...
General Store

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 10

Category:

Island Notes

There are two framed posters, made from Providence Journal photographs, dated only 1930, on the wall in the town hall. I wonder, increasingly, if we should affix to their backs details of the buildings shown. The photo shown with this column is of one of the buildings on the wall, one...
Pumpkins on the steps

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 2

Category:

Island Notes

The Thanksgiving weekend weather is always a wild card. I remember horrid trips on the Manitou going to visit relatives in the years the Manitou was new and ran in about any kind of weather; 35 years ago, now, standing on a stoop in Mansfield, smoking because no one wanted it in the house — I can’t...
Remembering When

Martha Ball

Tue, Nov 23

Category:

Island Notes

Remembering When...
Low Sunshine

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 18

Category:

Island Notes

A few nights ago a text came through while I was talking on the phone. “A car pole accident on Mansion Road tonight?” The reply to my “No idea” was: “On the BIBB from Jeff Wright” So I got up and walked around and there were flashing yellow lights up the road. I made out the form of the big white...
Nightscape

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 11

Category:

Island Notes

Long past are the early evenings when leaving the house for an hour or two, the thought of turning on the hall light is far from my mind. Daylight Saving Time ended last Sunday morning, a week into November. It has been the way things are for a while, but it was this year that that extra week made...
Into November

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 4

Category:

Island Notes

Eight years ago, when the damage - and repair – surrounding Sandy was new. It has been a year since Superstorm Sandy wreaked her havoc along the eastern seaboard. This day could not be more different from that one. Yes, I spent the summer telling visitors who asked it those pictures of devastation...
October Storms

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 29

Category:

Island Notes

The high wind advisory that was supposed to end at two this afternoon was bumped up to three. It seemed on target, the wind was letting up in mid-afternoon when I finally decided to brave the storm, or what was left of it. A long night of intermittent pounding rain and howling wind had faded into a...
October Red and Blue

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 21

Category:

Island Notes

Until we hit that day in early December when the setting of the sun stops its race back toward noon and sets a spell, realigning its center of gravity before creeping back toward five, every day I think of how unbalanced the natural world is. In my perfect world, length of the orbit of the earth...
Roll Call Pivot

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 14

Category:

Island Notes

October brings our last holiday weekend of the season. It has been a tough summer for seasonal resorts, help has been lacking, especially in restaurants, closures seemed to come earlier this year while visitors continued to arrive and the question “what’s a good place for lunch?” became a less...
October Dreaming

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 8

Category:

Island Notes

The phone rang late last night, someone who knows I do not sleep early calling to talk about the baseball game I had missed, or had decided I did not want to Go Back There, to the land I had no idea I would so completely vacate a few years after 2004 — except for the year of the Marathon bombing,...
Landmarks

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 30

Category:

Island Notes

My topic this week was Landmarks of our Lives, not milestones or turning points but literal landmarks, one caught at the edge of a photo of the sky the other night. It was Cozy Cottage, the first house on the Neck Road north of Beach Avenue. It has been there my whole life, long ago, white then,...
Seasons Changing

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 23

Category:

Island Notes

Most of us, I think, grew up with the convenience — and myth — of the seasons shifting on the 21st of a given month. I do not remember when I learned this was not always the case but I know I was still in school. This year I needed hear only once that the autumnal equinox fell on the 22nd of...
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...

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