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Island Notes

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...
Porches and bird’s nests

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 1

Category:

Island Notes

Ed. Note: Our columnist Martha Ball broke her arm this week. She’s fine — it was set at South County Hospital. But she is out of commission for a while, so we grabbed a column that describes an August in 2014. Another note: this week’s photo was taken by Chris Blane. While I have never...
Knife in the Road

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 24

Category:

Island Notes

The first time I noticed the knife in the street near Rebecca, it was bright and shiny, the white of new plastic in the sun. Another year I might have picked it up but this year we are all more hesitant to touch things we would not — or I would not — have given a second thought in the past. Instead...
Seven years

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 17

Category:

Island Notes

Fall comes next week, officially, astronomically. It used to come sometime in the week after Labor Day, then to the holiday and earlier as schools opened sooner and sooner. Oddly, September seems to be our first and last gasp of a normal summer, people still on the streets as the days turn crisp...
Lost a pedal?

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 10

Category:

Island Notes

This morning I heard a rumbling while I was still lolling around, discussing the upcoming day with my dog. It happens, sometimes the town road crew early to work, over the past weekend, engine noise punctuated by the slamming of little motorboats out on the ocean. This sound was coming up the road...
Now, it is lace

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 3

Category:

Island Notes

The day did not begin well. This morning, I closed the door behind me, leaving Autumn, my drizzle damp dog, in the house and looked over through the misty rain to see the windows of my car wide open. “That’s impossible” I thought, remembering looking at the forecast the night before and thinking...
August Sky

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 27

Category:

Island Notes

Late this morning it seemed time was standing still. It took longer than I care to admit for me to realize it was the clock, or more accurately, the clock battery, that was the problem, and I had managed to lose almost three hours of a precious summer day out of town. The days are markedly shorter...
Reckoning

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 20

Category:

Island Notes

Last night I came home to find kindness on my doorstep, summer’s bounty in a basket of cherry tomatoes, topped by a gift of a bag of those homemade cookies filled with enough oats and raisins that they seem they have to be healthy, despite being cookies. I opened the door to let the dog out and...
Isaias

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 6

Category:

Island Notes

The yellow flag was flying at the Town Beach when I went out in the early afternoon on Tuesday. The much heralded storm had already been downgraded, the predicted westward shift of its path holding steady. The hurricanes of my childhood had familiar names, the still gold standard of 1954 was Carol...
A kinder time...

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 30

Category:

Island Notes

There are few certainties to life on Block Island and today with the news of Merrill Slate’s passing there is one less. We all knew it was coming, we had watched him decline with age and the loss of his wife, but a decline temporarily halted, maybe even reversed a bit, by reconciliation with the...
Eastport to Block Island

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 23

Category:

Island Notes

The past weekend was another Perfect Storm, fueled by the start of the first real heat wave of the summer, prompting people to want to get away, to the beaches, to the water, to Block Island. It was simply too hot, and there were too many people both from within the state and beyond our borders,...
The Column About The Airport

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 16

Category:

Island Notes

This morning I was reminded by Bob Champagne Willis, Block Island Historical Society President, via a photo of a medallion, that it is not only 2020, that this day, July 15, marks, without fanfare, the seventieth anniversary of the ceremonial opening of our State Airport. The fact the airport was...
Amber Waves

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 9

Category:

Island Notes

When the media exploded with the removal of characters long associated with certain products, one was the hot cereal, Cream of Wheat. I had bought some over the winter, when it was on sale, thought fleetingly that the box looked different, before I emptied its contents into a glass canister and...
Waves Rising

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 2

Category:

Island Notes

Every year I refer to “the egret” in the pond behind my house, but always wonder if there is more then one. There used to be a heron, great and blue — or blue-gray — that nested at the edge of the swamp, just to the north, over the wall, in a bayberry bush grown so tall it seemed a tree. It once...
Ice Plant Remains

Martha Ball

Thu, Jun 25

Category:

Island Notes

We used to start school the Monday after Labor Day. It was long one of those impossible memories, but underscored by another, of the first year we started on the Friday after the holiday, a half day. That and more memories came rushing back when I heard the announcement that all schools in Rhode...
Down the beaten path

Martha Ball

Thu, Jun 18

Category:

Island Notes

It is almost summer and, much as some believe they can wish away the uncertainty that has engulfed us for so long, the reality is we have yet to see the back side of the hurricane. It is all speculation, from educated guesses to wildly uninformed declarations. “But you don’t have COVID out here” we...
Arcs of June

Martha Ball

Thu, Jun 11

Category:

Island Notes

Every year, around this time, when the grass is tall and heavy laden with seed, we get a big rain; this year was no exception. We experienced a summer squall Saturday night. It had been foggy in the morning, then it seemed to clear to sunny warm. Some serious system on the radar mappings looked to...
Calendar Maple

Martha Ball

Thu, Jun 4

Category:

Island Notes

Several years ago I first noticed a volunteer maple tree, seeded I guessed, from the older tree at the corner of the front yard. It was in the tall grass, perhaps three feet high but the time I even realized it was there, at the time partly in the shadow of a gnarly, dying olive. It seemed, in the...
Slow Waves

Martha Ball

Thu, May 28

Category:

Island Notes

Spring arrives in slow waves and we watch them crest and crash on the shore, then recede to become part of the wide ocean. Yellow daffodils and forsythia and creamy shad have all gone by, the first to withering stems, the others to greenery. Some trees flower only to be consumed by a day of searing...
Roadblock Reminder

Martha Ball

Thu, May 21

Category:

Island Notes

We have learned, or had confirmed, these past, endless weeks, that all the talk of going back in time inspired by old photographs is the stuff of fantasy. I am old enough that I remember when all winter we had one boat from Galilee, one boat that landed at noon and left at two or two-thirty. As I...
Stamina and perseverance

Martha Ball

Thu, May 14

Category:

Island Notes

There was a time when Canada Geese had about them a mystique. They were the birds in a Joni Mitchell song, those “in chevron flight, flapping and racing on before the snow.” We watched them fly in formation, rising up to leave us, honking as they passed over the open pastures, their long necks clad...
You Don’t Know What You’ve Got

Martha Ball

Thu, May 7

Category:

Island Notes

“They paved paradise Put up a parking lot With a pink hotel, a boutique And a swinging hot spot Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘Til it’s gone” T he lyric of ”Big Yellow Taxi” was the written reaction of Canadian singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell to various vistas...
Dooryard

Martha Ball

Fri, May 1

Category:

Island Notes

In the interests of full disclosure I have never been a student of poetry, and, I admit envying poets all that white space that us writers of prose must fill with words. Nonetheless, even I had some vague knowledge of “When Lilacs Last on the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the long poem Walt Whitman penned the...
The George W. Danielson

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 24

Category:

Island Notes

“What was the first ferry to bring folks?” someone asked and I realized I would have to look that up, and is so often the case with everything Block Island, how to define such a thing? Would it have been the first recorded excursion, a group rowed into the landing, before there was a proper harbor...
Kitchen Tools

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 17

Category:

Island Notes

Somewhere, I sort of stopped cooking beyond the most basic of dishes. On some level I realized what was happening, but how far it had gone hit me squarely the other night when it took four, yes, four, implements to open a bottle of olive oil. A knife to cut the foil, then there were two jar openers...
Certainties in an uncertain world

Martha Ball

Thu, Apr 9

Category:

Island Notes

I t feels the calendar revolves even more than usual around the sunny, hopeful, days, the dramatic spring tides, the great moon filling the sky, all pushing aside the inevitable gray April rains that mirror a national mood. Monday was glorious and I left the door open, tired of Autumn's let-me-go-...
Rolling spring

Martha Ball

Thu, Apr 2

Category:

Island Notes

W hen I came inside yesterday afternoon the sparse forsythia scraping my window, the same that seems unable to recover from having been cut to the ground a few years ago, that refuses to do more than send ever taller shoots upward, glowed. Its yellow blossoms were like so many little suns on the...
Everlasting

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 26

Category:

Island Notes

I t is March and it is 43, the sky is cloudy and gray, the wind is blowing from the east, the sound of it rising and falling, blocking out birdsong and the dull thunder of the white-capped ocean. I do hear the dog, moving between the yard and the front lot, barking at whatever she has decided it is...
Our little island

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 19

Category:

Island Notes

W e live on an island. It is not the Block Island of 1918, already sliding from the Glory Days of early tourism. A war was winding down while another trend was emerging: transportation was starting to shift away from the rail and steamers that had fed the great hotels all along the New England...
Information and voting

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 12

Category:

Island Notes

In the fall of 1986, it was becoming more difficult for my mother to ascribe to “arthritis” the visible impact of the terminal bone cancer that had been diagnosed in January 1981. She told us, my brother and me, at the outset that she would not be making it public, she didn't want people asking her...
A noontime phenomenon

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 5

Category:

Island Notes

M y father was a roofer. It seems odd, now, that back in the 1950's and 60's, when work was so scarce, there would be any specialization of labor and, in retrospect, I suppose when push came to shove there was none of the “I don't paint” sort of talk one hears today. Still it is roofs I remember...
Februarymarch

Martha Ball

Thu, Feb 27

Category:

Island Notes

I t's one of those years again, one of those divisible by four years wherein February has an extra day, and still remains the shortest month. Except, of course, for those years which are also evenly divisible by 100 unless — wait for it — they they are evenly divisible by 400. And while George...
Behind the Barn

Martha Ball

Thu, Feb 20

Category:

Island Notes

W hen the area around the old barn foundation was opened up in preparation for the arrival of the Icelandic horses two years ago I had cautions, hidden stones and steps in one field, an old cistern behind the barn. Strangely, only recently has it struck me that it was never known as more than The...
A New Purpose

Martha Ball

Thu, Feb 13

Category:

Island Notes

H ow long has it been since the Champlin's case began? Sometime near the start, the end of 2003 or the start of 2004, I answered my landline, my phone of choice as I tried to keep the minutes on my town-issued cell down. It was a friend in North Kingstown, who told me to go to the Town Hall and “...
Threads of Gold

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 30

Category:

Island Notes

Ed. Note: Martha is out sick this week. We found this column that was published 20 years ago on Jan. 29, 2000: T he sun was a reluctant player on the first day in eight the temperature crept above freezing. Statistically, they tell us, the week just beginning, the last in January, is the...
Humble and Ambitious

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 23

Category:

Island Notes

There are, all around us, bits and pieces of other eras, scraps of history quite literally along the roadsides we travel every day. In particular, cement steps have long fascinated me; they belong, in large part, to the time Block Island first opened her doors and said “welcome” to the outside...

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