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Island Notes

Tide's Turned

By

Martha Ball

Wed, Feb 20

Category:

Island Notes

Last Friday — when last week’s paper should have arrived on the island but did not due to the building storm – was an anniversary of my mother’s death in 1987. A cousin on the West Coast, writing with an ear to the national weather news recalled: “Yes, I remember how cold it was during her funeral...
Colors in the Waves

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Feb 12

Category:

Island Notes

The ocean meeting the shore is green and angry, and powerful and majestic. There are no boats today, and while the waves crash far out the sea does not look that roiled, only white capped and choppy. Then I look south and from the Mansion Beach can easily see water slamming the east wall of the Old...
Better than Summer?

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Feb 5

Category:

Island Notes

The last Saturday in January was not really better than summer, it was winter and it was cold as befits late January. The snow that fell in still air in the beginning of the week was that most unusual snow, landing in a thick blanket and staying in place overnight, rather than falling into wind and...
Sixteen and Climbing

Tue, Jan 29

Category:

Island Notes

Monday the snow began in mid-afternoon, earlier than expected. It fell softly into the evening, obscuring the view of the harbor, an odd band that was not quite following the weather predictions leaving more along the coast than inland. Later, after evening had turned to night, I told the visiting...
Dunes of December

Wed, Jan 23

Category:

Island Notes

We have altered the shore over time, in great strokes where flowing rivers have been dammed to create lakes, where cities have been built on land too close to the level of the sea and need walled protection; and in smaller script, that becomes dramatic in its own context, here with the construction...
Winter, again

By

Martha Ball

Wed, Jan 16

Category:

Island Notes

The temperature was 46 and rising this morning, the sun was shining but most importantly, the air was still. The sillies on the radio were heralding the January Thaw and I thought of those winters when a third of the Great Pond was frozen in eruptions of milky ice, when a great cloud of black smoke...
It is January

By

Martha Ball

Wed, Jan 9

Category:

Island Notes

It rained, the wind blew and I worried, needlessly, that the power would go out, and more to the point, my phone line and thus my internet connection would fall victim to the weather. It rained, the wind gusted up near 60 miles an hour but, amazingly, my worries were for naught, and the next...
On the edge of the storm

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Jan 1

Category:

Island Notes

The temperature dipped below freezing in the darkest hours of the early morning, but quickly changed, turned with the rising of the sun, which made it seem much milder than the 32-feeling-like-24 — and a half an hour later, the 36-feeling-like-28 — on the weather map. After several unfulfilled...
Remembering Cousin Nicholas

By

Martha Ball

Mon, Dec 24

Category:

Island Notes

This windy and sporadically sunny day, the buoy offshore, usually visible from the window of my dining room — long lost to office work — is playing hide and seek. The ocean is choppy, the broken water aiding and abetting the game and if I did not know of the marker’s presence, I could not see it...
Nose prints

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Dec 18

Category:

Island Notes

After the storms I blithely replied to an inquiry about the salt on my east and south facing windows that I would just wait for the rain. In my own defense, they are awnings and not reachable without a ladder. Years ago I gave up the whole hose exercise; it was a lot more fun but never seemed...
Shadow Puppets

Thu, Dec 13

Category:

Island Notes

The sun is setting at its earliest time of the year, it has hit its nadir of 4:17 and rides along a plateau that will continue until next week, when we blessedly gain one minute, at the cost still of the mornings that will shorten into January before finally throwing off the dour shroud of early...
More boats and trucks

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Dec 4

Category:

Island Notes

We last saw the Pesky Pond Troll of Clay Head Swamp happily ensconced atop one of his favorite things, the Lobster Pot Christmas Tree in Esta’s Park, following with a childlike delight all boats landing and all the big equipment brought in to repair the roads. Generally, on his excursions to town,...
Boats and Trucks and Elephant Seals

By

Martha Ball

Wed, Nov 28

Category:

Island Notes

The Pesky Pond Troll of Clay Head Swamp (aka PPT) scampered down to the beach, such as it was post-storm, to enjoy the morning sun. It was November and a chill wind was blowing but it was still the sun, big and orange and glorious, “just like a shiny orange,” his less than poetic self thought. It...
Green Light Gone

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Nov 20

Category:

Island Notes

It is Veteran’s Day. Observed, which makes me crazy; the Armistice was signed on November 11 at 11 a.m. for a reason. I think of my dad, with his two perforated ear drums and an eye that had been pecked by a rooster when he was a child, who went to five recruitment centers before he found one that...
Winter Storm Athena?!

By

Martha Ball

Wed, Nov 14

Category:

Island Notes

It was a week between trips to the Mansion Beach, the first the morning after the storm that brutalized the shore from Cape May to Block Island, the southern counterpart of the Eastport-to-Block-Island marine forecasts of my childhood. We always heard the one from Eastport, it was not until I went...
Big white boat

By

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 8

Category:

Island Notes

It is Wednesday and the sun is making slow progress pushing its way through the lingering masses of gray clouds. The Manitou made an early run, appearing at the dock like some dreadful ghost of bad crossings past, and left empty, cautiously making its way out the channel, past the green...
Faint Etchings

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Oct 30

Category:

Island Notes

We continue to work our way through October, this month alternately filled with glorious warming sunshine and soul sucking gray. It has been lengthened by an hour with the moving of “fall back” into November, the only calendar segment that needs more hours. There are increasingly few things that...
Pink sky at night

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Oct 23

Category:

Island Notes

The sun climbed up out of the ocean slowly, later than it has since March, and only then was it so late for those few stunning days after the clocks change, before the approaching spring again beats back the night. Prior to that it was the end of January, that singular day of particular parameters...
Green and Gray

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Oct 16

Category:

Island Notes

Tomorrow is forecast to be cooler than today, but I am hopeful it will seem warmer; the little box in which the day sits, waiting to be released, shows a bright sun unencumbered by clouds. It is welcome, this promise of sun, after two days of raw gray, the October that battles with the crisp golden...
Cloudy and humid ovenight

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Oct 9

Category:

Island Notes

Last night the moon shone brightly, illuminating the land with its colorless light. Tonight the fog has blurred the landscape, leaving silver ponds between the darkened hills all beneath a paler sky. The forecast leads with cloudy and humid overnight, not so bad for early October. The fog has been...
Fractured sunlight

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Oct 2

Category:

Island Notes

It is Wednesday, the weekday the landfill/transfer station, aka dump, is always open (as Thursday is one of the days it is always closed, my certainty in the world of shifting schedules to which our little seasonal town is subject). It can be confusing, I am so accustomed to turning left at the...
Wind like winter

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Sep 25

Category:

Island Notes

Autumn comes late this year, on the morning of Saturday, the 22, the date that will be printed on this issue of the paper; yes, look carefully, even on Block Island the weekly comes out on Friday imprinted with Saturday’s date. The sun will rise and set at the unthinkable times of 6:34 and 6:42;...
Without jet trails

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Sep 18

Category:

Island Notes

The day is not done when I leave town at five, the sun is far from the horizon when I pull out of the parking lot of the little grocery store. It means missing the stretch of Corn Neck where one seems to be riding over the ocean, but it is a bit shorter going up past the Police Station and it fits...
Moon shadows

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Sep 11

Category:

Island Notes

The sun shines and the heavens rumble, the radio chatter is of violent rains and street flooding. Here, it goes from sunny to gray, to the sound of rain on the leaves outside my window to the whoosh of an afternoon breeze. Labor Day has come and gone, not lost to a storm or a storm threat as has...
Summer Passage

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Sep 4

Category:

Island Notes

Lest there be any misunderstanding, no, I do not have a new dog. Hours earlier during my first and likely last evening of the summer spent on the beach, as the sun set and the moon rose, as the lights of the harbor brightened and the planes flew over head, as the moon lay on the water and gentle...
Bridgegate in the Summertime

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Aug 28

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...
From the sky

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Aug 21

Category:

Island Notes

Cloudy skies turning over to rain hasten the sundown. It is nearly dark at eight, which makes me think of December, four short months away, when the sun will be setting three and a half hours earlier, unfathomable in mid-August. There are no geese flying over in the near dusk, the Canada geese, so...
August alchemy

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Aug 14

Category:

Island Notes

A plane roars by, seemingly outside my window, and I think of open windows and the sounds of summer they gift us, airborne engines as well as chirping birds. It’s a nice moment, before I remember that, of course, there is more air traffic in the summer. As there are more people, strangers, among us...
Royal weed

By

Martha Ball

Mon, Aug 6

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, when 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...
Crumbling relic

By

Martha Ball

Mon, Jul 30

Category:

Island Notes

Unusual in any season, unheard of in summer, I went away for part of the day, an absurd luxury of the summer boat schedule and the happy coincidence of friends going off to do errands the one day of the week I could tag along. Returning in mid-afternoon, it was impossible not to be struck by the...
White boats on blue water

By

Martha Ball

Wed, Jul 25

Category:

Island Notes

That the New Harbor would be filled with boats was always a presumption; it was a fallen galaxy that would float just above the surface of the Great Salt Pond. It was wonderful, a gift of summer, never taken for granted in the way we use that expression — unseen, unnoticed — but very much taken for...
Country roads

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Jul 17

Category:

Island Notes

It seems that it has rained often, rained at day’s end. So when the sound rolled across the field, despite the fact there was no appearance of rain, I went outside, remembering stepping out into a sun shower last year. There was no rain in the muted, shadowless afternoon, just a harmony of nature,...
Night air

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Jul 7

Category:

Island Notes

T he screen of my little computer changes as the day progresses, then darkens to night with a crescent moon hanging. It took me a few days to realize it wasn’t random but day and night, that there was a pattern: a balloon crossing a sunlit sky, and hours later, a blacker than dark blue airplane...
Finding fireflies

By

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 29

Category:

Island Notes

It is summer, I know — but not because I load up all my errands on a long list, including returning two dvds (which I have neither watched, with the sunlight lingering past nine, nor returned, because there was a truck with Connecticut plates “parked” in a tiny space in front of the library, its...
Prelude Redux

By

Martha Ball

Sun, Jun 24

Category:

Island Notes

A year ago to the day (now 11 fast years ago) my cousins left after burying the ashes of their father, my beloved Uncle Cash, whose voice I still miss when weather is approaching. Among the more precious things they took with them to their lives in California and Colorado and Washington state was a...
It's an Aviary

Sun, Jun 17

Category:

Island Notes

On a scrap of paper next to my keyboard are the words “Leonard Cohen makes my pain go away.” Yes, it’s a trifle melodramatic but at the moment I saw those words written in a comment below a YouTube clip of Cohen, the aged poet and songwriter who continues to amaze, they struck a nerve. Or a chord...
Season of White

Sun, Jun 10

Category:

Island Notes

Another week and I look to the horizon, clear and sharp, deeply blue below a pale cloud-spattered dome. It has been raining in Providence, “torrential” they are saying, while we have enjoyed a day moving back and forth between pure sunshine and the muted shadows of an overcast sky. The rain is...
Still Harbor

By

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 1

Category:

Island Notes

The voice of a bird awakened me, not the sweet birdsong that rises like a carefully conducted orchestra at first light, rather an annoying shriek, harsh and loud and filled with a tone of annoyance. I opened my eyes and saw a winged creature fluttering about the room, banging against the glass of...
The First Weekend of Summer

By

Martha Ball

Mon, May 28

Category:

Island Notes

“Cloudy in the Capital City” they have been saying all day. On Block Island it has been beautiful, not in the way of a bleak winter morning when the sun can barely creep over the horizon to scoot low across the southern sky; or a raging fall storm, all power and glory and crashing white water. Any...
Bell, Surf & Peepers

By

Martha Ball

Sun, May 20

Category:

Island Notes

May comes in a sudden flash. One day the greening land is verdant, the long days are filled with golden light. Grass is cut and the sweet smell of it fills the air. The sun rises early, the daylight precedes it, vanquishing the night, leaving a white moon hanging in a pre-dawn blue sky. Mist lifts...
Global 33

By

Martha Ball

Sun, May 13

Category:

Island Notes

They used to call the highway approaching downtown Providence, Rhode Island — alternatively shining and … not — Barrel Country. The road was always lined with barrels painted orange and white, delineating places where construction and repair were taking place, endless tasks that seemed to have no...
Like March

Sun, May 6

Category:

Island Notes

It is almost 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, also was the first of the colonies to declare independence from the crown as well as the last to...
A room full of looms attracts visitors from near and far to Block Island

By

Martha Ball

Fri, May 4

Category:

Island Notes

The Gazebo Room of the Manisses Hotel is emptied of its usual complement of dining tables draped in elegant linen and now accommodates eleven floor looms, all made of smooth wood framed by metal components, the same fundamentals that have been used for millennia. They are a far cry from either the...
On This Calm & Silvery Bay

Mon, Apr 30

Category:

Island Notes

Somewhere in my house there is a piece of paper, an unintended consequence of a photograph inset in an article about Block Island, something that will show the Harbor Church when the tower, and only the tower, was solid green. It was the one section of the roof the contractor did not re-shingle in...
Three Days Later

Thu, Apr 19

Category:

Island Notes

The weekend brought the weather for which we hope, the April Sunday afternoon of our imaginings and somewhat distorted memories. I have not gone to the beach so much this year as others and not so often north around and beyond Jerry’s Point; the tide has been high, the rocks uncovered, or both. But...
High Tide and Green Grass

By

Martha Ball

Wed, Apr 11

Category:

Island Notes

The title of this column may be familiar; it is the same as a Rolling Stones album released in 1966. As if the year is not horrifying in and of itself, realizing that the title was actually “Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)” is worse. Over the years I have pared down the vinyl and do not even...
Heavenly scribbles

By

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 29

Category:

Island Notes

Yesterday morning, purely by chance, I happened to be up wandering about; but it was too cold, too dark and too early to stay up and I headed back to bed. Passing the wide kitchen windows, a shooting star caught my eye. I thought first of meteor showers, and didn’t recall hearing of any expected...
Benchmark

By

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 22

Category:

Island Notes

Spring came in the dark of night, quietly, on a soft southwest wind. It came early, in the second hour of the twentieth day of March, spawning the usual change-of-season confusion that follows whenever the turn does not come on the twenty-first of March or June or September or December. It should...
Changing time

By

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 15

Category:

Island Notes

Time ago the day was balanced on the fulcrum of noon; midday was, in practice, the middle of the day. We were close to that standard the day before the clocks changed – the day before we changed the clocks. The sun rose just after six in the morning and set just before the traditional start of the...
Glove, bottle and sock

Thu, Mar 8

Category:

Island Notes

Last night I dreamt I awoke to snow. I rarely remember dreams and wondered if snow had fallen in the night, but the memory was not of white brightening a darkened landscape, it was of morning. Tonight it is raining. We roll toward the equinox, the length of visible light already over 12 hours, the...

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