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Home » Columnists

Island Notes

Clothesline kind of day

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Aug 10

Category:

Island Notes

Yesterday I restrung clothesline. This morning I am struck by the fact I can look out and tell who hung which pieces of damp fabric on the line. Accustomed to the wind, I anchor thinner materials with something heavier to keep them from slip-sliding into a bunch. The sheet I put out is neatly...
A Fading Pluto

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Aug 3

Category:

Island Notes

Earlier this week I wrote the numerals “7/29” and thought in passing — as I do every year — that it was my mother’s birthday, forever engrained from the year I was in junior high and decided to make a cake at a friend’s house on Connecticut Avenue, one since completely renovated. It was a wonderful...
Summer World

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Jul 27

Category:

Island Notes

Day is ending and the temperature is finally dropping; perhaps the weather will take its long-promised turn. Last week was what this week — and a second in the earlier part of August — should be. The world is a different place, it is unthinkable that all our excesses would not make it so, but I...
It Is the Heat!

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Jul 20

Category:

Island Notes

There are very few days of the year I turn on the air in my car for more than a minute or two, going up the dusty road on a hot day, keeping out most of the grit and cooling the piping just enough that a regular fan on cool will suffice for the short distance I am going. Today I gave up, and after...
July

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Jul 13

Category:

Island Notes

The air is shifting by the hour. Yesterday I walked down the hill from the church and wondered that the grass, so open to even this occasional summer sun, was harsh and dry underfoot. The soles of my feet were not happy when I crossed the pavement from the you-can’t-get-there-from-here stone steps...
Porches and other places II

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Jul 6

Category:

Island Notes

White flash met white flash all ’round me, with no delay before the booming thunder shook the foundations of the earth, and I wondered how it could be that I used to meet people who would speak of a raging storm the night before that was news to me. Still, wandering about, not wanting to do...
Porches and other places

By

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 4

Category:

Island Notes

As I look out my open window I cannot get much past lines from Prelude in James Russell Lowell’s The Vision of Sir Launfal, or what we tend to know better as the “what is so rare a day in June” poem which I too often think of as the “what is so fine as a day in June...” The work is old, over a 150...
Privet & Picket Fences

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Jun 22

Category:

Island Notes

It rained great buckets and I found myself on the Neck Road thinking of driving with my brother out in Michigan, at night, between Lansing and Grosse Pointe, where every underpass felt like a fording. My brother, the submariner, just plowed on. Of course there is no connection between running a...
Roses of December

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Jun 15

Category:

Island Notes

The water willow that has rimmed the pond behind my house since long before I was born is always late to turn from bare winter wood to summer greenery. In late spring it is often barely higher than the level of the water but that gap increases as it grows so high it bends over onto itself, a change...
Tha-whap!

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Jun 8

Category:

Island Notes

At day’s end the rain was gone, its wrath waning as it drifted off to the north and east. A fog had settled over the land, a thick golden-bronze against which the trees at the edge of the yard stood lush and green, while everything any greater distance removed was swallowed by the strangely colored...
Lineage of Fortitude

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Jun 1

Category:

Island Notes

The lilacs down the lane have turned from soft and fragrant blooms to crisp brown cones, shriveling a bit more each day. The armful of these flowers I picked just over a week ago did not last long. Some were close to turning even as I snapped their stems and separated them from their mother tree,...
p 280 of V O

By

Martha Ball

Sat, May 25

Category:

Island Notes

The Canada geese were in the distance it seems no more that yesterday, staying out of sight, huddling at the end of the land behind my house, where the grass is thick and fast growing. The goslings are getting bigger and bolder, five of them now, already looking as much like small, albeit misshapen...
Scattered Orphans

By

Martha Ball

Sat, May 18

Category:

Island Notes

The big pond behind my house is disappearing as the leaves of the pussy-willow and shad begin to unfurl. The spray of white when the geese land and the sparkle of morning sun on the water are still visible, but through a thickening lacework of trees. The level looks high and I worry about the drain...
Tomorrow's Sunrise

By

Martha Ball

Sat, May 11

Category:

Island Notes

The first time I saw chunks of wood, chunks of tree, suspended from the cables near the awkward four way intersection of Connecticut Avenue and Old Town Road I thought — in that fleeting way ones thinks of things utterly preposterous before realizing the inanity of the notion — that they were...
Birdsong

By

Martha Ball

Sat, May 4

Category:

Island Notes

The shad is coming into bloom, almost in protest, refusing to be cosseted any longer by the spring that cannot take hold. It was the faintest blush on the land as April ended, a reminder that nothing holds back the march of the seasons. These few days of intermittent sunshine have turned the pink...
Spring Unhalted

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Apr 27

Category:

Island Notes

Write something happy they tell me as though it will make a lick of difference in the world we have known this past two weeks. Someone suggests it is time for the Troll of Clay Head Swamp to make an appearance; unfortunately, the troll is in his cave, dazed, not even caring that the daffodils have...
Where Am I

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Apr 20

Category:

Island Notes

It has been a question I have been asking since Sandy swept through last fall. I know, of course, where I am, but in so many locales touched by that hurricane and the string of storms that followed, nothing feels quite right in a way that is difficult to quantify. Is the beach really higher, did...
Broken Stones

By

Martha Ball

Sat, Apr 13

Category:

Island Notes

There is a sign at the gate to the Island Cemetery. It is placed too high to read at night — set above the reach of headlights. It probably warns of trespass after sunset but I do not care. Someone mentioned in a casual aside after dinner if my grandparents’ headstone, the one between the towering...
Fragile as Frost

By

Martha Ball

Wed, Apr 10

Category:

Island Notes

Easter came early this year. It the most mobile of the holy days of the Christian calendar, following a centuries-old formula that has to it a pagan ring, dependent upon full moons and the changing of seasons. Next year, it will fall three weeks later than this, but three years hence it will come...
Almost April, Almost Easter

By

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 29

Category:

Island Notes

On Thursday, the first full day of spring 2013, it snowed. It was not the storm of the equinox in 1992 when I heard the rattle of a winter-weary plow coming down the Mansion Road in the night, pushing aside drifts of white. It was not night and I was not unable to sleep, distracted by the furnace I...
Representation of March

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Mar 26

Category:

Island Notes

Today, Tuesday the 19th. It is March as it has been for nearly three weeks, but on this day the true character of this deceitful month is on ruthless display. March in like a lion or a lamb, out like ... Sin as it is to wish away time, does anyone truly care as long as it is gone? February, three...
Heralds of the Season

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Mar 19

Category:

Island Notes

The beach continues to astonish. Sand has come, it seems from the sea, to begin rebuilding the dunes just south of Mansion and there is a smooth albeit narrow swath at their base, a foundation, a beginning we can only hope. Great banks of stone cascade down to the water’s edge, the shore still...
Taste of Spring

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Mar 12

Category:

Island Notes

There has always been a stand of knotweed (spite weed, Lizzy bush, fake bamboo, etc.) at the edge of the yard. It is there, barely visible but there, in photos taken when I was a child in pigtails, the youngest of the lot, more interested in the camera dangling from the hand of a cousin I’d never...
On the Wind

Wed, Mar 6

Category:

Island Notes

February is slipping away, by week’s end it will be another chapter in the weather almanac. The month has rushed by, and as much as I am not sorry to see it gone I hate that the surface of the list of things to get done this winter has barely been scratched. It rained last night. I remember only...
Carousel of Winter

By

Martha Ball

Tue, Feb 26

Category:

Island Notes

The week after the (first and worst weekend) storm was not a good one — more, it was one of those black blocks of times that need be sealed in a lead box and dropped to the bottom of the Atlantic, not the sandy sea bed that lies between Nantucket and the mainland but the craggy ocean floor that...
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...

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