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Home » Columnists

Island Notes

Life, good and pure and hopeful

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 31

Category:

Island Notes

The early morning news of Pete Seeger’s passing came as a surprise but not a shock. He had, it seemed, an immortality which I realize even as I write the word, he truly does have. In the summer of 1969, I waited table at the Narragansett Inn. Radio was a different medium then and the cooks always...
Expectation of Winter

Martha Ball

Sat, Jan 25

Category:

Island Notes

It is snowing and I have to move my car, at least from the barnyard, out beyond the bend in the road that is drifted over in any storm. It is snowing and it is cold, but when I hear the time on the radio I realize with some joy that my reaction to it is “it’s only 4:02” as though I have...
Time to Go Home

Martha Ball

Sat, Jan 18

Category:

Island Notes

My dining room table is old, the kind with a leaf or two or three, down now to one, which I consider some minor victory. It collects paper in a way that surely defies science and leaves me every month or so sorting, which really means realigning piles of paper, as I search for one particular thing...
Paperwhites & Fountain Pens

Martha Ball

Sat, Jan 11

Category:

Island Notes

Cold came on either side of the New Year, with high tides that fell and left white ice hanging from the grasses rimming the tidal pond on the north side of Dunns’ Bridge. A few days later, Indian Head Neck Pond was partly frozen, and a solid sheet spread over an area of the lavender marsh, another...
You can't tell anyone where you got it

Martha Ball

Sat, Jan 4

Category:

Island Notes

On a sunny Christmas Day my growing puppy, Autumn, trots down the road, happily carrying a rapidly degrading tennis ball. She is a child, she wants both the slimy tennis ball and a stick found along the way. Her mouth filled with one, she tries to pick up the other and is for a second or two...
Good-bye Year, Good-bye Sofa

Sat, Dec 28

Category:

Island Notes

This year has been one of extraordinary sadness in our little town. Everyone knows that and needs no recounting so I search for topics uplifting which loosely translates to ones that make me happy. There is a golden dog lying in the sun on the kitchen floor, and I am startled by her presence. She...
Palatine Christmas Card

Martha Ball

Sat, Dec 21

Category:

Island Notes

Yesterday it did snow, not as forecast but enough to turn the farm next door to a Christmas card, the north roofs of the old Cape Cod house and big barn and outbuildings so oriented made solidly white in the fading light of afternoon. It was not on the ground any more than the slush snow we had...
Wouldn't It Be a Shame?

Martha Ball

Sat, Dec 14

Category:

Island Notes

The rain I hear is before first light, pounding on the windows, reminding me, yet again, how fortunate in puppy terms, I have been with Autumn. By early afternoon, following a few moments of hopefully clearing sky, a heavy mist clings to the branches and fills the air with moisture. There was a...
Circles in the Grass

Wed, Dec 4

Category:

Island Notes

The late afternoon sun comes in mid-afternoon these days of the year when it sets earliest. “It doesn’t get any worse than this,” my mother would say in early December and, of course, she was right. While the mornings continue to devour the day into January, the sunsets have hit their nadir by the...
Apple Pie Day

Martha Ball

Sat, Nov 30

Category:

Island Notes

First light is not so early these days, but Nature does not follow a clock and in an abundance of caution I let the pup out for a few moments while I wait in the entry, shoes half on, shielding my feet from the cold cement floor. There are sunrise deer in the front field, their coats blended with...
Lingering Wildflowers

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 15

Category:

Island Notes

There is no need to hurry sundown in November; gray clouds hang over the cemetery, ready to drop like an anvil on Veterans Day. A week ago, after yet another service that should not have been, I walked over to my uncle’s grave to run my fingers over the name cut into the stone. The only prayer I...
Patriots' Day Legacy, 2013

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 8

Category:

Island Notes

It is a beautiful morning, all sunshine and still air. Autumn, my growing puppy, races across the barnyard in pursuit of a toy thrown, a golden streak of focused determination moving so fast when she reaches her destination that instead of coming to a halt she tumbles onto the grass. She is...
Into November

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 1

Category:

Island Notes

It has been a year since Superstorm Sandy wrecked her havoc along the eastern seaboard. This day could not be more different from that one. Yes, I spent the summer telling visitors who asked if those pictures of devastation were really Block Island. We were hit, and while we lost the edge of Spring...
Snips and Snails and Pond Trolls' Tails

Martha Ball

Sat, Oct 26

Category:

Island Notes

The Pesky Pond Troll (PPT) of Clay Head Swamp was grumpy. (For the uninitiated, or the forgetful, the PPT makes occasional appearances in this space. He is a creature with Hobbit-like feet and a heavy coat of long brown hair, be it a natural color or simply one from years of wallowing in the mud is...
Waiting for rain

Martha Ball

Sat, Oct 19

Category:

Island Notes

When we leave the house I have no intention of continuing beyond the gate but it is warmer and sunnier than I had expected and I decide to keep walking realizing too late I have neither tissues – for me nor treats – for my fast growing puppy, Autumn, in my pocket. It will be a short walk I assure...
Pilfered Shoes

Martha Ball

Sat, Oct 12

Category:

Island Notes

The room in which I sleep is an unlikely place in an old house, an odd space at the top of the narrow stairs on the end of a narrow two-story ell. In the oldest photographs, faded and scratched, it is not even an ell, rather an almost separate 1 ¾-story building joined only at its corner to the...
Only October

Martha Ball

Sat, Oct 5

Category:

Island Notes

The morning of the Equinox I was awakened by a pounding, slamming downpour, the kind that batters the windows and hits the roof so hard it bounces. It had lessened to steady rain a few hours later when I parked my car in what appeared to be a created space at the end of a row in the Interstate...
Arrival of Autumn

Sat, Sep 28

Category:

Island Notes

It has been like this for years, I do not go off-Island for months then twice in a week. This time it has been three times in 10 days which may have set a new bar and one way too high at that. Summer is over by every measure, gone in a split second on a Sunday afternoon. Today the morning air is...
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...

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