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Island Notes

Reaching for the sun

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 3

Category:

Island Notes

It is the last day of January and it is snowing softly in mid-afternoon, wreaking far more havoc on the mainland — where multiple crashes are being reported on the highway — than on Block Island — where the distant horizon moves between sharp and fuzzy and back again. It does not promise to be much...
Inflexible spirit

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 27

Category:

Island Notes

The week began with rain shifting from drizzle to downpour and back but with a hard, steady, wind, the blast of winter that roils the sea and keeps the boat in port for two days in a row and even kept the planes on the ground for a part of the time. The wind slammed in from the east and northeast,...
January Road

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 20

Category:

Island Notes

There was an after the storm lull this morning, a moment of near calm, in which the sound of the ocean, a muted surf, rolled up from the beach. When I opened the west-facing front door to let Autumn out I was met with the distant beep-beep of a truck backing up, an early visitor to the dump/...
Without the Sound

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 6

Category:

Island Notes

The rain has abated at last, the drizzle that began yesterday as we approached the big church on Chapel Street to attend a funeral dreaded for the fact of it marking the end of a life cut too short. It proved to be quite beautiful in its celebration, filled with both ritual and simplicity, with the...
The tractor, 25 years later

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 30

Category:

Island Notes

Twenty-five years ago I submitted a handful of short pieces of writing to Peter Wood, then Editor/Publisher of The Block Island Times . The first he used was my recollection of sitting, with my niece from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, on the old cistern cover in the back yard. The neighbor was...
Winter Sun

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 23

Category:

Island Notes

It is, technically, the last day of fall, sunnier and calmer than forecast. On the other side of the year we have an abundance, nay, an embarrassment, of light, come so early and staying so late I wonder how anyone can function more to the north than we. Now, the length of day in Anchorage is three...
From the Lighthouse

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 16

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

It has been too long since I have been to the lighthouse, the grand gothic structure sitting on the bluff high above the ocean. It is never far removed from my life; it is visible from my house, a silhouette on the crest of the land in day, a faint green blink at night. The structure, all two...
On a distant hill

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 9

Category:

Island Notes

It rained through the night, battering the east windows, and the wind howled its winter banshee wail. It sounded cold so it felt cold, but did not make me think beyond reaching in the dark for the comforter that has been waiting, patiently, at the foot of my bed. There was an odd noise, continuing...
Displaced Autumn

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 2

Category:

Island Notes

In the damp, sun-deprived days of late fall and early winter — and in winter's cold — I sometimes walk into my kitchen solely to feel the sun pouring through the south facing windows. Of late, at a certain time of day, that short trip involves stepping over a big golden dog who lies in the pool of...
Postcards from the edge

Martha Ball

Wed, Nov 23

Category:

Island Notes

For the holidays, postcard images from half a century ago, showing Block Island, still the sleepy little town time almost forgot, when a few cars constituted a busy summer day and views were wide and open. The same things were advertised as are today, “...
Surrounded by the Sea

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 18

Category:

Island Notes

We live surrounded by the sea, we hear the sound of it in the dark and feel its dampness on the raw east wind. We smell it when it is filled with sea weed and roiled by a storm passing off to the east, we taste it on our skin when we walk too close to its salty mist. We see more or less of it...
Such great hope

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 11

Category:

Island Notes

The morning dawned bright after a long dark night, the sky and sea spread with the same rose gold, a vibrant and hopeful color reflected in the flat calm surface of the big pond behind my house, emerged in early November from its cover of summer greenery. I wondered at it for a bit, even thought of...
Bells

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 4

Category:

Island Notes

W e are in that time in the fall when first morning sun is still too far to the east to spill through the south-facing kitchen windows and provide that flood of sunlight that is the saving grace of those cold winter days when it is warmer when I come downstairs than it is in early November. By noon...
117 and counting

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 28

Category:

Island Notes

T oday, it is likely more people know — or have some vague familiarity with — the quote “justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream” from the extraordinary speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington DC on a hot summer day more than 50 years ago, than from...
October's Offering

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 21

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

It is one of those October days that is the reminder that comes every year and every year comes as a blessing. These are days — I am sure I have written other Octobers — of miracle and wonder. By week's end we will have slipped into the darkening world of sunrises after 7 a.m. and sunsets before 6...
Storms of Autumn

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 14

Category:

Island Notes

Three years ago, Autumn was a fluffy puppy and I was acutely attuned to the weather, or more precisely, to the possibility of rain that had not fallen for nearly a month. It stayed warm and dry, open door weather deep into October, even as the inevitable darkness strengthened and with it that sense...
Fallen Butterfly

Martha Ball

Sun, Oct 9

Category:

Island Notes

F or a moment it seemed as though Autumn, my sweet golden dog, had finally come to the realization that the vacuum cleaner is not a beast with its own mind and energies, one bound and determined to attack her. At some point in her growing and shedding youth, I merely pushed it to the side of the...
Autumn Gold

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 23

Category:

Island Notes

One poor pair of socks wasn’t quite dry when I brought laundry in some time last week. “Tomorrow,” I thought, knowing I’d likely forget. They are there yet, two socks made of material that cannot fade in the sun or be harmed by rounds of heavy rain. My yard is a jungle. At first I try to tell...
Softer Season

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 16

Category:

Island Notes

Fifteen years it has been since the towers fell. The sky is as beautiful as it was that terrible week, the blue it so often is in September. It is more the norm than not, cyclical, as is so much in nature, this azure that often returns, a repeat of what we could only call “insidious,” as it was cut...
Storm Fatigue

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 9

Category:

Island Notes

Suddenly, after days of ever-changing tropical storm advisories and screaming red banners on the weather sites, shifting from one to three to one to four days in length, even the fear-mongering ratings seekers have surrendered. All warnings and watches have been cancelled, the only tag remaining a...
Hat on a Hydrant

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 2

Category:

Island Notes

There was a gentle breeze this morning, the east wind that blows harsh and heavy in the winter bringing a welcome cooling change in late August. The sun has come around, I realized a few days ago when my house was unseasonably warm, more than it had been, when I came home as afternoon wound to...
Tipping

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 26

Category:

Island Notes

Yesterday, Monday, was not a good day on “my” corner in town. I went out the door of the gallery I tend just after noon, absolutely sure of the time as I was running close to the edge of being two hours parked in the little lot below the church, the green spot named not for the great-great...
Last week, this week

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 19

Category:

Island Notes

It is August hot on Block Island, the weather cycle everyone seems to forget exists. I forgot, until several years ago, going back through August columns, I found a recurring thread of hot, muggy, foggy, damp, doors swollen by the moisture in the air, coming back from the morning beach dripping wet...
Royal Weed

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 12

Category:

Island Notes

Today the sun shone and people thronged to the beach. There are but a few days a year traffic is so crazily busy on the Mansion Road, and the upper and lower lots are almost impassable for all the cars parked in whatever way they can fit. This was one of those days, I realized when part way to Corn...
Day Is Done

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 5

Category:

News, Island Notes

There is but a band of pink above a line of white clouds in the blue sky to the east, a remnant of the sunset, but it is after eight and it is August. The big high speed flies by, seeming to move faster than in full light, as though there is nothing left for it to do but zip back to the mainland...
Summer Weekend

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 29

Category:

Island Notes

The week preceding the fourth Saturday of July, the long-standing date of the Harbor Church Fair and Auction, is always one of conflicting schedules and heated humidity and time racing even faster than its usual summer pace. Friday night I was hot and tired and, knowing I had to be up especially...
Green Light Still Gone

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 22

Category:

Island Notes

It is a lovely night, cool and still; the only sound when I lean out the open window is of crickets in the tall grass. The moon is big and round and white after climbing up from behind layers of clouds in the east. Autumn will surely arise, as she has been doing the past few nights, and rouse me...
Back in the 60s

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 15

Category:

Island Notes

Sunday morning, listening to the latest terrible news, it seemed years since July 4th, then not even a full seven days past. This time the sensationalist headlines did not need padding to scream; it had been a week of bloodshed. I thought in passing it was feeling more and more like the 1960s. A...
On the Other Side

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 8

Category:

Island Notes

We’ve come out on the other side of another Fourth of July holiday, fallen on a Monday by coincidence this year. We became a Fourth of July “destination” long ago. The harbors begin filling with largely white boats jockeying for position days before the holiday. I watch the Salt Pond from the Neck...
Miles to go

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 1

Category:

Island Notes

There are many more miles to go before anyone involved in the Deepwater Wind project sleeps, but major milestones have been reached. A week ago I was watching the progress of Big Max , the cable laying barge, creeping offshore, from the gap south of Clay Head to disappear behind the low...
Solstice

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 24

Category:

News, Island Notes

Today the summer solstice and the full moon coincide, the headlines declare, an event that has not occurred since 1948. Or 1967. Or 1986. It is one of those black holes of Man v. Nature into which I too easily and too often tumble. It is like the calendar, an attempt by man to define...
On the good ship Currituck

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 17

Category:

Island Notes

There is something good about hitting one of those “big” birthdays. When the glimmer of an opportunity to go out on the Currituck , the funky dredge with the familiar profile, that has been clearing our harbor channels for years, hit my peripheral vision, I leapt at it. I was at the dock...
Green leaves and wavy glass

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 10

Category:

Island Notes

The season has peaked. The lilacs have turned brown and sere, their glory gone for another year, and tall grass hiding one side of the ever-narrowing lane behind my house is bending under the weight of seed. It is worse, even, at the gate, the turn off Mansion onto my road, a near tunnel these days...
Words to Remember

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 3

Category:

Opinion, Island Notes

It is Memorial Day on Block Island, a gray Monday, rainy then foggy then hopeful and back to some form of dampness in the air. It is only by the surfaces of the puddles that I can be certain if there is real precipitation falling from the sky or only the heavy mist that feels like rain on the skin...
We are all stakeholders

Martha Ball

Fri, May 27

Category:

Island Notes

This coming Saturday, May 28, the newly refurbished 1876 Captain Noah Dodge House, more commonly known since the 1950s as the Doctor’s House, will be open to the public for two hours, from 2 to 4 p.m. It stands as more than a mere renovation of an historic building. The word “murmuration” seems...
Amazon on the Neck

Martha Ball

Fri, May 20

Category:

Island Notes

Nature in May is dauntless. Spring has waited too long, it is not going to be off-put by cool days and cooler nights. The maple outside the kitchen window, grown from a wind-tossed seed, has unfurled new leaves, red-tinged green. “Amazon on the Neck,” I think, and wonder how many places there are...
Foundations in the brush

Martha Ball

Fri, May 13

Category:

Island Notes

The sun is shining. There are Canada geese to the east, sitting in the beaten grass of the pond lot behind my house. Their goslings have grown, already the size of small ducks, their baby feathers a fluffy gold, backlit by the new morning spreading across the land. I have not yet seen them down the...
Bridges to nowhere

Martha Ball

Fri, May 6

Category:

Island Notes

Last week we had a Primary in Rhode Island. Block Island almost running out of ballots, having an additional batch sent over on the last boat — which the Captain held until the packet arrived — was a story that got picked up by the national press. It was, in some cases, turned a bit on its side, a...
Ambling Muskrat

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 29

Category:

Island Notes

There is snow in northern Rhode Island, they are saying — in the dead spaces between the swooning over a Presidential candidate who made a whistle-stop in Rhode Island yesterday and confusion about “usual” polling places being closed, and insistence “no one has said anything” when it has been a...
Green Haze

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 22

Category:

Island Notes

Viewing the forecast, so often at odds with the world beyond my door, was my objective, but I am easily distracted today by an “Active Advisory Special Statement” issued by the National Weather Service, mirroring a “No Beach Fires” announcement issued by the local Fire Department. It would be a...
Green Haze

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 22

Category:

Island Notes

Viewing the forecast, so often at odds with the world beyond my door, was my objective, but I am easily distracted today by an “Active Advisory Special Statement” issued by the National Weather Service, mirroring a “No Beach Fires” announcement issued by the local Fire Department. It would be a...
Wet road

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 15

Category:

Island Notes

Here is a great swath of green lying along the coast all the way from South Carolina to Maine and beyond into Canada. I think statistics, the disproportionate percentage of the population of this nation living within fifty miles of the coast, the idle musings of someone living with exceedingly slow...
Dragons Passing

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 8

Category:

Island Notes

The first Sunday in April began a wild, beautiful, broken day. There was a snow squall in the morning, a cloud of white disbelief roiling beyond my window, the not-uncommon flurry but nonetheless evoking a but-it's-after-Easter! protest. These flurries are always a wonder, no matter how many ways...
Morning Broken

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 1

Category:

Island Notes

Last night I wondered that it was so dark before realizing it was almost seven o’clock in the evening and remembering it was March, yet. Later, there was a great wind and, again, I was reminded: March. The sun is moving to the north, spring is real. Easter morning I woke early, even before the dawn...
“He's a Farmer”

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 18

Category:

Island Notes

It was mild last week and the sweet night music of peepers rose from the low places in the early evenings. They were singing everywhere, all over the island, in other New England states and down the coast. Reports of them was widespread and joy-filled. Dawn came late, a line of deep rose, hovering...
There was Land

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 11

Category:

Island Notes

March 2010 — These days of high tides and high surfs make the last stretch of Corn Neck Road, the southern end, out beyond the protection of the dunes, feel like a bridge the water is so near. We have two roads that tempt the sea, this short stretch where the telephone poles bend,...
No Good Wind

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 26

Category:

Island Notes

There is no good wind in winter, there are only those days without wind that come as gifts, spreading over the land with the ever-earlier morning sun. They are to be met with gladness and thanksgiving; Sunday, a week after remarkable and unusual below-zero temperatures, was one, a "where-is-my-coat...
Breath of the Sea

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 19

Category:

Island Notes

Sunday, I got out my heaviest wool sweater, scratchy and brown, and officially gave in to winter. It was a from-the-ground-up process, starting with the bulky Baffins, the big blue boots have sat in my bedroom since spring, never making it to the box in the closet — as if they could on their own...
For A Song

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 12

Category:

Island Notes

The last Sunday in January came the sad news of the passing of Eugene Rankin, southern gentleman, accomplished pianist, teacher, beloved neighbor and friend. He was 93. Seven years ago this March, I wrote to my brother, idle musings on an approaching storm, then, because my heart could not contain...
Buddy

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 5

Category:

Island Notes

Last week, long-time mayor of Providence, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, passed away, seemingly unexpectedly. In truth, he had been seriously ill and we had all known it, all of us who listened to WPRO radio, who gave even passing notice to politics, the blood sport of Rhode Island. Everyone in the state...

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