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Home » Columnists

Island Notes

Name-Worthy Stature

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 29

Category:

Island Notes

Chili always tastes better the second night, but it really tastes better the second night when the power has not just gone off with no hope of restoration until well after morning light, leaving no talk or music, no mechanical rumblings of furnace or creaky heat or refrigerator motor, none of the...
Beyond the Hall of the Mountain King

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 22

Category:

Island Notes

Snow was in the forecast. It did not bother the Pesky Pond Troll of Clay Head Swamp (aka PPT) one little bit, not this year. He had a nice heavy winter coat, he had — he always had — plenty of provisions on hand, and he could tell by the direction of the sun and the length of the days that it was...
Sand In My Socks

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 15

Category:

Island Notes

Yesterday, the rain sheeted on the south-facing kitchen windows, but the southwest sky beyond was filled with the light of the sun on its early afternoon path. It appeared to be shining on white buildings around the harbor and, despite the rain, there were shadows, albeit with soft edges, on the...
Weather Station Window

Martha Ball

Sat, Jan 9

Category:

Island Notes

The glass panel in the west-facing entry door was covered with the uneven lace of frozen moisture when I first let the dog out this morning. The hole she has been digging or, more, the clay on the grass, the fruit of her excavations, was a different hue, more yellow than tan the under the low,...
Fifty-seven and foggy

Martha Ball

Wed, Jan 6

Category:

Island Notes

The Sunday morning after Christmas it was 57 and foggy when I left my house in the morning. There was little wind and the fog held us in its embrace of mystical magical mild made warm by the fact of it being in late December. Three hours later the temperature had dropped only two degrees but the...
Martha Ball: Dear's Eggnog

Martha Ball

Wed, Dec 23

Category:

Island Notes

It all began with an innocent comment from Andre Boudreau — perhaps the first “innocent” comment of his life — “Ya know what’s missing during the Christmas season on Block Island? The old Town Hall Christmas parties, with the centerpiece, Violette Connolly’s ‘Martha Washington’s’ egg nog. The place...
Tennis Ball Trials

Martha Ball

Sun, Dec 20

Category:

Island Notes

As December moved from its second to third week, new record high temperatures were reached. They peaked, apparently, at an unusual time, on either side of midnight, the 14th and 15th of the month. Yesterday was foggy and mild, by 4:30 the sun was well below the tree line, the ambient light of a low...
The other side of the world

Martha Ball

Sat, Dec 12

Category:

Island Notes

Going out the Mansion Road this morning I spotted a light golden dog standing on the walk to “his” house and waved to him. A split-second later I remember asking my mother what she thought she was doing, waving to the horses who used to inhabit a pasture on the same road. I cannot remember her...
Come December

Martha Ball

Sat, Dec 5

Category:

Island Notes

When I come home and open the door to find Autumn anxious to go out it is not, I have learned, because she “has to go out,” rather because she has gotten into something she should not have touched and she knows she has been some variation of bad. She must think if she is out of sight I will not...
Gift of Lester Dodge

Martha Ball

Mon, Nov 30

Category:

Island Notes

There is not a great deal in this town with the name of Lester Dodge written upon it. It is in the cemetery, on his gravestone, and beneath one of the long stained-glass windows in the Harbor Church, given by him in memory of his mother, Emmaline. He put her name on awards at school, and that of...
Surrounded By Water

Martha Ball

Sun, Nov 15

Category:

Island Notes

It is with an abundance of caution thrown to the wind that I say my reaction to last month's meeting on coastal change, one intensified with my reaction to other people's reactions, was “what has happened to us?” I do understand the politics of it all and, absolutely, it is always a positive thing...
Sweet November

Martha Ball

Sun, Nov 8

Category:

Island Notes

“She needs a tennis ball,” an old friend comments on a photo of Autumn’s collection of toys. My response is “it’s in the yard!” thinking also of a net bag nearly full of the bouncy yellow spheres hanging in the kitchen. My dog has, at last, decided they are fun, although her dedication is not at...
The Hardest Time of the Year

Martha Ball

Sun, Nov 1

Category:

Island Notes

Too late, I think, for it to be sunrise, I open my eyes to a bank of color along the eastern horizon, that “red sky at morning, sailors warning” that makes one want to burrow deeper under the covers on the best of days. It is late October, and however beautiful it can be in mid-day, the daily...
More than a dinner

Martha Ball

Sun, Oct 25

Category:

Island Notes

Roll Call began in October of 1900 when the congregation of the First Baptist Church was only newly moved from the old Civic Center, in the middle of the island, to the flourishing center of commerce grown around the Old Harbor. Their church on Chapel Street originally had been built as an ultimate...
Our Lady of Fountain Square

Martha Ball

Sun, Oct 18

Category:

Island Notes

Columbus Day this year was magnificent, a perfect coda to a near perfect season of weather. In town, in the late afternoon, a young dad called back to his trailing family, all of them on bicycles: “Is everybody ready for one more climb... to the summit!” before leading them up the hill. There was...
October Blue

Martha Ball

Mon, Oct 12

Category:

Island Notes

Walking out in the morning to play with the dog, moving from the west-facing door in shadow to the barnyard in sun is like walking back into summer. Last week, during a morning of radio hysteria over a hurricane that seemed every moment to be less of a threat to us, the weather site upon which I...
Grounded Autumn

Martha Ball

Sun, Oct 4

Category:

Island Notes

It is fall, it is the season my dog, Autumn, came to live with me, just over two years ago. She has gone back to the chair she eschewed the summer long, my chair, that is, not one of the others in the living room I would gladly cover with an old sheet were she to favor it. She pretends not to see...
Smoke on the Water...

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 25

Category:

Island Notes

It is the 21st of September, the day we grew up thinking of as the first of fall; this year the equinox does not come until early morning of the 23rd. There will still be an hour more of visible than actual daylight, a standard which holds true across the year. It is such both in summer when the...
September Sojourn

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 18

Category:

Island Notes

The cousins and their families are walking out to the North Light. My pace is not what it used to be I tell them and time is at a premium, I will stay behind; it is not until I look out along the beach that I realize they, too, have grown older. But I remain in the parking lot, looking at the big...
Summertime Dream

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 11

Category:

Island Notes

It has been the longest and the shortest summer of my life. It is warm, summer warm, too warm for after Labor Day when school starts but every conversation is of all the other years it has been too warm, another anomaly of the season that is not. But my yard looks like fall, the tiny apples on the...
For Denice

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 4

Category:

Island Notes

Labor Day is as late as it can be this year, and the town feels September-quiet in the week preceding the holiday. The humid heat is back with a vengeance much like the cancer that returned last year and finally, yesterday, took my cousin Denice's life. The world conspires in odd ways. Today came...
Another August's end

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 28

Category:

Island Notes

Years ago, I thought every year was so special, that every August was unique. Then I scrolled back through columns I had written other years at the same time and found “August Muggies” the year it was so damp the gaps between the planks in the old table in the editor's house briefly lessened and a...
Flashing Green

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 21

Category:

Island Notes

T he trees at the west end of Chapel Street are burnished, as is the great horse chestnut at the old Town Center. Yet it came as a surprise that the maple at the corner of my yard was not full and lush; only in a photo did I notice sky showing through its branches. Perhaps I do not notice it when...
August

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 14

Category:

Island Notes

In the midst of a beautiful summer day, I want back all the time I have spent on the phone trying to get Verizon service to be Verizon service. Forty-six minutes today with no resolution to the problem I called about on Saturday. Weirdly, it is not the internet — just the email. I think I should...
250 and Counting

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 7

Category:

Island Notes

This year, the Harbor Church celebrates its 250th anniversary in October. “Gathered” is the word on the sign on the lawn of the current home of the congregation. Some place the date of origin to the earliest settlers meeting in the Bay Colony, seeking a different life in a place where they could...
Sunday Night Still

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 31

Category:

Island Notes

S unday night and the Harbor Church is strangely still. Even for this building in summer, the activity of the past week was manic. In addition to our regular services and programs, scheduled meetings of outside groups, twice-weekly bridge gatherings and dinners for international students, we had...
All Too Possible

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 24

Category:

Island Notes

Y esterday it was hot. The air, I think at first, was a heavy, sodden blanket then realize all that sun could not have gotten though such a cover. I wonder if even out here in the middle of the ocean we are feeling the impacts of the pollution that causes Ozone Alerts to be issued in the cities on...
Baling twine

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 17

Category:

Island Notes

T his morning I looked out to the east and had a strange flash of misplaced memory, sheep on my neighbor’s bank lot, between the big pond behind my house and the ocean. Once they were in those meadows, big wooly beasts sheared in the summertime, probably just as they were about to keel over in the...
Arc of history

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 10

Category:

Island Notes

We all have one of those youthful summers of exceptional remembrance, mine was the summer of 1969, historic by any account. It was the year Pete Seeger and his crew launched the sloop Clearwater and sailed into the New Harbor and came to town and performed on the stage...
Sirens and Summer

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 2

Category:

Island Notes

A few minutes ago, the police stopped traffic at Fountain Square, something they do only when an emergency vehicle is expected. A moment or two later one of the ambulances, sirens blaring, came through and headed up High Street toward the Medical Center. Now, they have been followed by a fire...
Rearview Mirror

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 26

Category:

Island Notes

A week before the Summer Solstice I picked some of the peonies by my front door, solid buds ready to open into glorious pink flowers, and brought them to town where I put them in a vase. These were joined by two creamy white boutonnieres, a sweet reminder chivalry is not completely dead...
Week Of White

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 19

Category:

Island Notes

Of wild roses, legendary leviathans and great white sharks. It is a drab and rainy Monday, startlingly cool after a glorious summer weekend. Even Autumn, my golden retriever, who spent the winter whining to be out in the snow turns to me at the door with her plaintive “fix it!” look. It is both...
In the Water

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 12

Category:

Island Notes

Then there are the nights I walk into my kitchen and see a white glow behind the old farm next door. It is not the color of flame nor is it in the right place for a beach fire, rather an other-worldly light from a source that is hidden, mysterious. It is too even to be any natural phenomena, surely...
Cusp of Summer

Martha Ball

Fri, May 29

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

The lilacs I picked two days ago have consumed most of the water in their bulb shaped vase, the one that makes me wonder why all vases are not so shaped; it is not top heavy, and the smaller neck supports stripped stems, keeping the flowers from fanning out awkwardly. The fragrance of these...
Nothing Gold Can Stay

Martha Ball

Fri, May 22

Category:

Island Notes

Two days ago the shad at the edge of my back yard was in full glorious bloom, shadblow at its most fragile — and best — moment. My little camera may have finally given up the ghost, it sits on the table, its little lens stuck in the wrong position. "Will shut down automatically” its screen reads...
Nathan's Park

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 17

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

Old signs disappear and fall from memory. Some, if we are lucky, reappear, such as the one that once graced the entrance to the Nathan Mott Park. It is big, neatly lettered, including the names of the original park trustees: Clarence Lewis, Lester Dodge, Russell Champlin, Harry Smith and W. Earl...
Easter Monday

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 10

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

The day after Easter is a holiday in many countries, one of those bits of information that has somehow eluded me all these years. Further, it is the day of the Egg Roll at the White House. That it is and always has been on Monday is something else I learned today. The ways in which one can be...
Palm Sunday

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 3

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

The day after Palm Sunday there is a red-wing blackbird fluttering about my front field and crocuses have braved the cold. It was my long ago understanding that the trinity of spring, the appearance of this fauna and flora was sealed by a flurry of snow. Saturday night the dog...
Harbor Refuge

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 27

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

It was snowing at the moment of the Equinox, soft flakes, but snow nonetheless, falling into the softest wind, but a wind nonetheless, floating between north and east. It continued through the night, never heavy but there, coloring the world with winter well into the morning. Then it stopped, the...
Spring Swale

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 20

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

The list of things wrong with my old house is one people who have long lived in old houses can well understand — although after this winter of no frozen pipes I am hesitant to complain about the lack of closets and limited electrical outlets. Then there are all the nights I climb the narrow stairs...
Almost spring

Martha Ball

Mon, Mar 16

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

The sun is shining, a miracle it seems. The air is clear, the ocean deeply blue, its surface annoyed, all little tears, white caps. I think of an evening knitting at the Library, hearing someone say “wintry mix” and, before looking up from my own stitch counting, envisioning yarn, a soft wool, new...
Around the Island

Sat, Mar 7

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

Snow was forecast last night. Just snow, no great wind or tidal surge, nothing to turn the shouting red “advisory” on my favored weather site to a screaming bloody “alert!” So it snowed into very little wind, unusual-for-Block Island snow, settling in thick blankets on cars and walkways. It is the...
Winter Whining

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 27

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

To the east of my house is a field a handful of us call The Orchard, a place where trees have not grown in my lifetime. They were, I speculate, apples, big enough that my dad and his three older brothers climbed among the branches. Tightrope walking between them may have been in the realm of...
Cold

Martha Ball, Photos by David Hawkins

Fri, Feb 20

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

One of the talk show hosts on WPRO tells a story of being in the newsroom during a storm years ago and the excitement among the less experienced weathermen. One of them ran into the room shouting “It just hit 105 [mph] on Block Island!” That was yesterday; today I am feeling as old as he claims he...
Kodachrome 1965

Martha Ball, Photos by David Hawkins

Fri, Feb 13

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

We had what seemed a routine snow storm in 1965. At the close of the school year, David Hawkins, one of our teachers, treated us to a slide show in lieu of an algebra or science class. He was young, just out of Brown, and he and his wife lived in the Bayside, the lovely white building on the west...
Spatters of salt

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 6

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

One time not so long ago — and I swear it happened once and only once — I was out in the afternoon, late afternoon ran into early evening, and I suddenly realized I had at home a dog who had been expecting her dinner for over two hours. So, I set an alarm on my phone, allowing me enough time to get...
Before the Storm

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 30

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

There was a dusting of snow on the ground a few days ago and new snow at first light today, but it quickly devolved into plain old cold winter rain. Yesterday, last Friday, someone who needed to be back by Sunday called for advice about travel plans. I went to the NOAA site; it did not sound bad...
Return of the Manitou

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 23

Category:

Island Notes

The clock on my phone, one of the few in my house not set five — or 10 — minutes early, read 6:59 when I finally pulled myself out of some quickly forgotten dream in which the odd sound of the alarm, set at three different times in consideration of having to make the early boat, had long been...
Piano Moving Day

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 9

Category:

Island Notes

The most wonderful sound in the world on a cold winter morning: the furnace kicking back on after a power outage. It signals not only that the electricity has been restored, but whatever happened did not do something to the electronics of the still almost new burner. The second most wonderful sound...
To the heart of winter

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 2

Category:

Island Notes

It’s all relative. The windshield wipers on my car are disintegrating. It would have been a dreadful realization had I not first noticed the piece of frayed, fluttering black rubber when I was driving and the wipers were at rest. I thought it was the gasket holding the windshield in place that was...

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