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Columnists
Island Notes
Dump Days
Martha Ball
Fri, Jun 24
Category:
Island Notes
On a Sunday at mid-day, any Sunday, any time of year, it is odd to find the Neck Road so empty one can stop and take a photo without pulling over, without waiting for at least one vehicle to pass. Even in winter it is dump day. It was back when the dump was a casual operation, when refuse was less...
Patterns
Martha Ball
Fri, Jun 17
Category:
Island Notes
My peonies were late to open this year. It has been a cool spring but other people on the island had them in glorious bloom while I had the single plant by the door graced by multiple buds that seemed so tightly clenched I could only think “white knuckle.” There were three plants from sometime in...
On the Way to Summer
Martha Ball
Fri, Jun 10
Category:
Columnists
,
Island Notes
Yesterday I went out to check on the dog’s whereabouts, thinking it is coming to that time of year when I have to pay her better mind. She’d been under the big maple at the corner of the yard but seemed to have vanished from that nice, shaded spot. As my eyes adjusted to the bright sun I realized...
Back to the Hill
Martha Ball
Fri, Jun 3
Category:
Island Notes
It is always the same this time of year. The “summer” beach roses are in their fullest glory, some days in bright sun, others in fog, the grasses that have not yet been cut have gone to seed, but are still young and pliant and run before the breeze. The lilacs have truly faded while the blue flag...
Saucy Swallows
Martha Ball
Fri, May 27
Category:
Island Notes
Today, I have no words. A little over 23 years ago I was at a friend’s house. We told each other we would not watch the memorial service about to be broadcast, live, from Columbine, Colorado, site of a horrific school shooting. There was nothing to be gained, nothing to be changed by our wallowing...
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...
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Island Buzz
This weeks Nature Conservancy Schedule
Posted By
The Block Island Times
6/29
Check out this weeks Nature Conservancy Schedule at https:// www.natureblockisland.org
New Listing! Mansion Beach
Posted By
Ballard Hall Sales Group
6/26
Extraordinary opportunity to own property on Mansion Road on Block Island! Located in very close proximity to Mansion Beach...
TimberTech by AZEK
Posted By
Riverhead Building Supply
6/23
Riverhead Building Supply offers TimberTech by AZEK Building Products. Click here for the latest collections and styles...
Highland Farm has new plants arriving daily!
Posted By
Highland Farm Inc.
6/23
Planting season is upon us, and Highland Farm has the best selection of plants for Block Island! We have new plants arriving...
Spring 2022 Update
Posted By
Highland Farm Inc.
6/15
Hello all! We are now open for the season, call today to get your orders in! A rriving daily; New inventory of Trees and...
Holiday Haven on Center Road
Posted By
Ballard Hall Sales Group
6/10
The opportunity to own a property like "Holiday Haven" does not happen very often. Built in 1884 by legendary Island...
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