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Island Notes

In the rearview mirror

Martha Ball

Thu, Feb 23

Category:

Island Notes

We call it Presidents’ Day, a Monday in February that recalls George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, two great U.S. presidents with birthdays conveniently falling in the same month. It is a day I will always associate with another generation, with my long deceased father who felt it part of his...
Just a game

Martha Ball

Wed, Feb 15

Category:

Island Notes

I t is the morning after and contrary to last night’s expectation, tomorrow has come, the sun climbing out of the ocean to shine magnificently over the subtle palette that is Block Island in February. Maybe the news has not yet traveled the distance to our mother star, 93 million miles away, a fact...
Calendar sky

Martha Ball

Thu, Feb 9

Category:

Island Notes

The month began with the flat, muted light of a day that will not be bad, but is rarely as good as it could be. The sun that is often an orange ball as it emerges from the ocean slipped quietly up behind a wall of blue, then lighted a bit of the sky with a slice of coral. It was one of those...
Winter rollercoaster

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 26

Category:

Island Notes

The wind is whooshing and rattling, the sky is gray and the sea high. The rain is filled with salt mist. When the sun comes out — and it will, if not tomorrow then some day — there will be no windows washed clean. Earlier, the sea was flying over the east wall of the harbor, great masses of white...
Remains of day

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 26

Category:

Island Notes

On Saturday it snowed, more, it seemed, than had been forecast but far less than I had dreaded, given the lack of panic in the newscasters. It was a weekend, there was no hysteria over school closings and things felt calmer. I worry when they are not in a frenzy. It can be so different just between...
Hurry sunrise

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 12

Category:

Island Notes

It has not felt like winter. There has been no January thaw because there has been no January freeze. There are moments it does look like winter -- early morning before the sun has risen, the land brushed with the night’s chill, the trash in the beach roses exposed as the leaves fall, the fishing...
Green Light

Martha Ball

Thu, Jan 5

Category:

Island Notes

Even in New England the Pats cannot lose this game. It is what I think but I stay glued to the radio. They have a big lead, a huge lead, and there is little time left on the clock. It is not like that Super Bowl a few years ago when they made what should have been the winning play. Then the time...
Winter Solstice

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 29

Category:

Island Notes

he Pesky Pond Troll of Clayhead Swamp knew the solstice was nigh. The change in the air was slower than other years, and he really didn’t mind that one way or t’other. His cave deep under the cliff had its own climate control, as do all true caves, and he had a fine fur coat that protected him when...
Not so long ago

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 29

Category:

Island Notes

Last night it stormed, blasting wind and more rain than I realized until morning, when the old cedar shingles on the south wall of the house were still dark with damp despite the sunny drying breeze. It is an old structure, with a narrow ell and seemingly no rooms made to escape the wrath of the...
Waiting for day

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 15

Category:

Island Notes

T here are nights — afternoons these days — the sun does not set easily or without protest. It flames across the sky, gilding the edges of the clouds with a brilliant molten gold. It throws colors, from deep red to pale violet, up into the heavens, fighting the brightest stars that glow white hot...
In the blue

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 8

Category:

Island Notes

Winter is in the wings, creeping closer while we frolic in the mild. It will come, cold and windy and raw; but the sun, the afternoon sun, has ceased its journey away from us and at this week’s end, the sun will set a minute later than today. The weather will worsen and it will last for months and...
Fade to December

Martha Ball

Sat, Dec 3

Category:

Island Notes

It has been pointed out to me that by the time this paper is printed, November will have faded into the memory of yesterday and then into the far away depository that is yesterday’s yesterday. Now, it is still November, albeit November fading fast. We joke in the summer that we have magnificent...
It was a journey

Martha Ball

Wed, Nov 30

Category:

Island Notes

There are days of pale sand and blue, blue water when the only appropriate response stepping through the gap between the dunes and coming upon a world wide open to the horizon is the rather inarticulate “What a beach!” It is empty, there is no one to hear, but it needs be said aloud. The tide...
Hurricane wind

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 17

Category:

Island Notes

T he middle of the night comes early in November. It is with disbelief I hear the announcer on the radio state “it is thirty-seven minutes after the hour of five o’clock.” Aside from questioning the necessity of the “o’clock,” I am simply astonished that it could be so early and have been dark for...
Sweet November

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 10

Category:

Island Notes

These days of sweet warmth come in November and they seem always to come as a surprise. I expect them; many years ago I dug up now long-neglected flower beds with a golden retriever lying in the freshly turned earth under the warm sun as I worked. Perhaps it is a hope of November more than an...
Worth the walk

Martha Ball

Sun, Nov 6

Category:

Island Notes

Twenty years ago this weekend we were in the throes of the Halloween Gale, or the No-Name Hurricane, or the Perfect Storm, or some other variation on the nor’easter that would not go away. It was the storm that begat the book, and later the movie, both focused on a pleasure boat that should not...
After Roll Call

Martha Ball

Wed, Nov 2

Category:

Island Notes

The day began pleasant, then as I started out for the dump/landfill/transfer station the rain promised for later began to fall and, as soon, stopped. I do not often go to the dump/landfill/transfer station — unable to keep straight much more than open Wednesday, closed Thursday — and not needing to...
October rain

Martha Ball

Sat, Oct 22

Category:

Island Notes

We are on the edge of the green rain on the radar screen. Never mind that water is sliding down my windows in sheets, on the radar we are on the image captured 15 minutes ago when the storm was nipping the south bluffs and moving on a northward track. The forecast for tonight is “rain showers,” an...
Water and warmth

Martha Ball

Wed, Oct 19

Category:

Island Notes

First fall arrives like the tides surrounding this island. It is akin to water, chill and wet and gray, that rises up over the summer sandy beach, turning it to a cherished memory —only to retreat, and let the extent of its coverage be briefly forgotten. The little plaques on the shelves in...
Dragon mired

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 6

Category:

Island Notes

The roll of the sea, the power of the surf, is usually foretold by the roar that rolls up, following the hollows of the land. Other days it seems it must be calm, it is so perfectly still as I walk toward the beach, surrounded by the clatter of crickets and an occasional birdsong. I am surprised to...
Second springtime

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 29

Category:

Island Notes

There were new green leaves on the forsythia — but forsythia is notoriously unstable — where is grows on the house. There, protected from the winds from the north and east and exposed to the full winter sun, it can flower, briefly, in December. The extent to which invasive species have tangled...
Summer's end

Martha Ball

Wed, Sep 28

Category:

Island Notes

The sun rises late these days. I see it rising from the ocean, molten gold, just after 6:30 a.m. on this day we presume summer will end. The equinox can come a day earlier and I check to be sure I haven’t missed it and find this is the odd year when fall does not begin until the morning of the 23rd...
Dragon rising

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 15

Category:

Island Notes

The storm came and went and when the sky cleared and the surf subsided there was little damage. We were lucky, more than we realized until the following week filled with reports of mainland towns still without power. Rhode Island is, in some ways, even more insular than Block Island. When visitors...
Sudden Sunset

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 8

Category:

Island Notes

It is 7:30 p.m. and it is dark and as much as I have known they were coming, these sudden sunsets, this one, two weeks before the summer actually, technically, ends, catches me by surprise. The weather has been cold and wet, as though summer is truly, irreversibly departed and were I a betting...
August Tuesday

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 1

Category:

Island Notes

We are past the point of denying that the days are getting shorter — tomorrow’s daylight will last two minutes and thirty-four seconds less than today’s — and the light is different, moving toward the south, the shadows lengthening sooner. To seal the deal, a hurricane is brewing. The projected...
Another storm gone

Martha Ball

Wed, Aug 31

Category:

Island Notes

The storm would not be as big as first predicted, that is always a certainty. How much it would weaken and how far to the west it would go were variables. There is usually a point at which I calm down about these things, one year when someone reported that Isabelle was following the track of the ’...
Things forgotten

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 18

Category:

Island Notes

The land is almost as green as it is in May when the days are, incredibly, slightly longer than they are now. The light at day’s end is bright, sharply defining the façade of the Drug Store/Spa/Inn at New Harbor. I am just coming to enjoy the newness of the color yellow on the house on Indian Head...
Sunshine and sea breezes

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 11

Category:

Island Notes

It is really getting silly, this business of the Mansion Road. Last week I expressed annoyance that people seemed not to realize it is not a two-lane road; this week I reached the head of it and found a car with Connecticut plates across, the driver out of his seat, talking to cyclists. Thing is,...
Attitude of August

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 4

Category:

Island Notes

At day’s end the jet streams lingering in the northeastern sky are the color of the sunset, pink against the quickly fading blue sky. It is cool and still and the calls of the birds flittering among the trees in the yard carry easily. It is a gentle sunset, slow and soft, the clouds reversing,...
Mansion Road is not a two-lane highway...

Thu, Aug 4

Category:

Island Notes

...just saying. Not that anyone who thinks it is a two-lane road reads this column. But maybe this will catch the eye of those who do not — although I think, in truth, the culprits do not pick up the Block Island Times unless it is the give-a-way summer monthly. Granted, there are plenty...
Harry Potter moon

Martha Ball

Wed, Jul 27

Category:

Island Notes

There is a point in the spring when I realize I am not obsessing over weather, hopping from site to site, pouring over the predictions of the cold that might come, the wind that might blow, and, especially, the combination of the two, the dreaded wind chill factor. There is nothing I can do about...
Rolling Wind

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 14

Category:

Island Notes

Usually, I trust the numbers on the weather sites but I do not believe it was only 83.7 degrees today, with humidity 10 points lower. Why trust the water company numbers when the thermometer on my car, sitting, baking, in the sun, was close to 90? It was one of those days when it was warm in town...
Ghosts of coffee hours past, part II

Martha Ball

Wed, Jul 13

Category:

Island Notes

I left off last week on the verge of realizing, last spring, that the Harbor Church was in coffee-maker crisis. For the uninitiated, it need be understood, this treatise is about things that should be simple: not ornate samovars or complicated cappuccino machines, just plain 40-cup percolators. The...
Ghosts of coffee hours past, part I

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 7

Category:

Island Notes

It began with Tercentenary Punch. It will end there. Roll Call at the Harbor Baptist Church is widely known as a harvest dinner. It has been a touchstone of the calendar for over a century. Today, still, there is the calling of the roll of members, not as it was in the beginning as a part of a day...
The First Full Day of Summer

Martha Ball

Wed, Jun 29

Category:

Island Notes

The solstice came on a fair wind, the softest of breezes from the southwest. The first full day of summer brought rain and sun and rain, again. The temperature wavered between cool and warm, comfortable and on the edge of humid. It was never truly hot and the pavement did not billow steam as it can...
Red Moon for New England

Martha Ball

Sat, Jun 18

Category:

Island Notes

The moon is a great silver disc — showing just a bit of a face — hanging in the eastern sky. I think it looks slightly misshapen but I think it is less a very sharp eye and more the knowledge that it was technically full a few hours ago, during the daylight of early afternoon, that makes it so...
Mute lightning

Martha Ball

Thu, Jun 2

Category:

Island Notes

This morning I saw a snapper ambling up the lane, moving, as they do, with an odd rolling gait. It wasn’t a large turtle, but it had a huge head, stretching out over the shorn grass. They appear every now and then, and I wonder where they are headed — it is a fair distance to a pond that will last...
Groundhog Retreat

Martha

Thu, May 19

Category:

Island Notes

The sun is shining. It poured last night, it rained this morning, there is more rain forecast for later today and for tomorrow and the day following as well. The ground was dry, the roads were dusty, the little vernal ponds almost summer dry. We needed the rain, we tell each other. All these days...
Independence Day

Martha Ball

Thu, May 5

Category:

Island Notes

It is May Fourth and it is my duty to remind all that this date is Rhode Island Independence Day. The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, the smallest state with the longest name, was also the first of the colonies to declare independence from the crown as well as the last to ratify...
Next Week It Will Be May

Martha Ball

Tue, May 3

Category:

Island Notes

It wasn’t before there were houses, simply before there were so many, 1970 when we were closer than we realized to the encroaching world. There were a few places where fields were burned in late winter and grew brightly green in the spring. The walls around them were clearer than even the most...
Nod to Nature

Martha Ball

Thu, Apr 28

Category:

Island Notes

At the top of the seventh the Red Sox are ahead. A lot can go wrong between now and the end of the game. They are not doing as badly as I imagined, they’ve won 5 games and have lost 11. Amazingly, they are not at the bottom, the rock bottom, of the standings, inched out by the Mets who stand at 5-...
Muskrats & Mallards

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 22

Category:

Island Notes

My mother put on the Today show school mornings; we did not have to leave the house until the local news and weather brief that came on at 8:25 had concluded. One day in April 1961 they were broadcasting not from New York but from South Carolina. A re-enactment of the firing on Fort Sumter had...
You can't go wrong when . . .

Martha

Thu, Apr 14

Category:

Island Notes

You head for the steeple. Sage advice, it was, from my cousin the mariner, he still so belonging to the world of deepwater he will not park close to the supermarket door. He acknowledges only that his wife has gently questioned the rationale of this “anchoring out” hold-over from his sea-faring...

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