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Columnists
Island Notes
To Look for America
Martha Ball
Sat, Sep 21
Category:
Island Notes
It is not so often I go Off, to the Other Side, to the mainland, that place people are too fond of saying we “all” call America when some of us most decidedly do not. There is Block Island and there is the rest of the world. We go down the Neck because we descend Bush Lot Hill to reach the North...
Notes from Leona
Sat, Sep 14
Category:
Island Notes
People may think of a boat when they hear “Leona,” but she was a person first, the sister of the owner of the little fishing vessel that met a sad out-of-water end. Leona lived out on the West Side in a house painted dark green. My dad was a roofer and sometimes he took me along when he was going...
Last Days of Summer
Martha Ball
Sat, Sep 7
Category:
Island Notes
Last night I dreamt of the blackberries down my lane, as they should be, not as they are this year. In my nocturnal wanderings they were perfect, the drought-stricken-in-an-unusually-green-world fruit plumped to the sweet dark state of my memory. It was a harvest salvaged, I surmised even in sleep...
Another Rainy Tuesday
Martha Ball
Sat, Aug 31
Category:
Island Notes
The days of summer run together by August, but I know it rained two weeks ago because it was the day of the Historical Society House Tour. I had signed up for an earlier shift of hostessing at one of the houses on the loop and could have avoided the whole wet mess had I not had visiting relatives...
Whisper
Martha Ball
Sat, Aug 24
Category:
Island Notes
The sun has moved, I look up when a familiar car pauses at the stop sign at the elbow of Water Street and am temporarily blinded by the reflection on the glass and chrome. It has moved, I can tell by the evening shadows on the City Drug — known by various names by various generations — the ornate...
Ghosts of Coffee Hours Past III
Martha Ball
Sat, Aug 17
Category:
Island Notes
Two years ago I wrote of the coffee pots lurking in the depths of the Harbor Church, relics of Coffee Hours Past, the great stash of urns that lurked like inhabitants of some twisted gothic graveyard where things dead refuse to fade away. They were not without history, they did not lack a back...
Clothesline kind of day
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?!
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
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
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
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
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...
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