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Island Notes

Water and warmth

Martha Ball

Wed, Oct 19

Category:

Island Notes

First fall arrives like the tides surrounding this island. It is akin to water, chill and wet and gray, that rises up over the summer sandy beach, turning it to a cherished memory —only to retreat, and let the extent of its coverage be briefly forgotten. The little plaques on the shelves in...
Dragon mired

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 6

Category:

Island Notes

The roll of the sea, the power of the surf, is usually foretold by the roar that rolls up, following the hollows of the land. Other days it seems it must be calm, it is so perfectly still as I walk toward the beach, surrounded by the clatter of crickets and an occasional birdsong. I am surprised to...
Second springtime

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 29

Category:

Island Notes

There were new green leaves on the forsythia — but forsythia is notoriously unstable — where is grows on the house. There, protected from the winds from the north and east and exposed to the full winter sun, it can flower, briefly, in December. The extent to which invasive species have tangled...
Summer's end

Martha Ball

Wed, Sep 28

Category:

Island Notes

The sun rises late these days. I see it rising from the ocean, molten gold, just after 6:30 a.m. on this day we presume summer will end. The equinox can come a day earlier and I check to be sure I haven’t missed it and find this is the odd year when fall does not begin until the morning of the 23rd...
Dragon rising

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 15

Category:

Island Notes

The storm came and went and when the sky cleared and the surf subsided there was little damage. We were lucky, more than we realized until the following week filled with reports of mainland towns still without power. Rhode Island is, in some ways, even more insular than Block Island. When visitors...
Sudden Sunset

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 8

Category:

Island Notes

It is 7:30 p.m. and it is dark and as much as I have known they were coming, these sudden sunsets, this one, two weeks before the summer actually, technically, ends, catches me by surprise. The weather has been cold and wet, as though summer is truly, irreversibly departed and were I a betting...
August Tuesday

Martha Ball

Thu, Sep 1

Category:

Island Notes

We are past the point of denying that the days are getting shorter — tomorrow’s daylight will last two minutes and thirty-four seconds less than today’s — and the light is different, moving toward the south, the shadows lengthening sooner. To seal the deal, a hurricane is brewing. The projected...
Another storm gone

Martha Ball

Wed, Aug 31

Category:

Island Notes

The storm would not be as big as first predicted, that is always a certainty. How much it would weaken and how far to the west it would go were variables. There is usually a point at which I calm down about these things, one year when someone reported that Isabelle was following the track of the ’...
Things forgotten

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 18

Category:

Island Notes

The land is almost as green as it is in May when the days are, incredibly, slightly longer than they are now. The light at day’s end is bright, sharply defining the façade of the Drug Store/Spa/Inn at New Harbor. I am just coming to enjoy the newness of the color yellow on the house on Indian Head...
Sunshine and sea breezes

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 11

Category:

Island Notes

It is really getting silly, this business of the Mansion Road. Last week I expressed annoyance that people seemed not to realize it is not a two-lane road; this week I reached the head of it and found a car with Connecticut plates across, the driver out of his seat, talking to cyclists. Thing is,...
Attitude of August

Martha Ball

Thu, Aug 4

Category:

Island Notes

At day’s end the jet streams lingering in the northeastern sky are the color of the sunset, pink against the quickly fading blue sky. It is cool and still and the calls of the birds flittering among the trees in the yard carry easily. It is a gentle sunset, slow and soft, the clouds reversing,...
Mansion Road is not a two-lane highway...

Thu, Aug 4

Category:

Island Notes

...just saying. Not that anyone who thinks it is a two-lane road reads this column. But maybe this will catch the eye of those who do not — although I think, in truth, the culprits do not pick up the Block Island Times unless it is the give-a-way summer monthly. Granted, there are plenty...
Harry Potter moon

Martha Ball

Wed, Jul 27

Category:

Island Notes

There is a point in the spring when I realize I am not obsessing over weather, hopping from site to site, pouring over the predictions of the cold that might come, the wind that might blow, and, especially, the combination of the two, the dreaded wind chill factor. There is nothing I can do about...
Rolling Wind

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 14

Category:

Island Notes

Usually, I trust the numbers on the weather sites but I do not believe it was only 83.7 degrees today, with humidity 10 points lower. Why trust the water company numbers when the thermometer on my car, sitting, baking, in the sun, was close to 90? It was one of those days when it was warm in town...
Ghosts of coffee hours past, part II

Martha Ball

Wed, Jul 13

Category:

Island Notes

I left off last week on the verge of realizing, last spring, that the Harbor Church was in coffee-maker crisis. For the uninitiated, it need be understood, this treatise is about things that should be simple: not ornate samovars or complicated cappuccino machines, just plain 40-cup percolators. The...
Ghosts of coffee hours past, part I

Martha Ball

Thu, Jul 7

Category:

Island Notes

It began with Tercentenary Punch. It will end there. Roll Call at the Harbor Baptist Church is widely known as a harvest dinner. It has been a touchstone of the calendar for over a century. Today, still, there is the calling of the roll of members, not as it was in the beginning as a part of a day...
The First Full Day of Summer

Martha Ball

Wed, Jun 29

Category:

Island Notes

The solstice came on a fair wind, the softest of breezes from the southwest. The first full day of summer brought rain and sun and rain, again. The temperature wavered between cool and warm, comfortable and on the edge of humid. It was never truly hot and the pavement did not billow steam as it can...
Red Moon for New England

Martha Ball

Sat, Jun 18

Category:

Island Notes

The moon is a great silver disc — showing just a bit of a face — hanging in the eastern sky. I think it looks slightly misshapen but I think it is less a very sharp eye and more the knowledge that it was technically full a few hours ago, during the daylight of early afternoon, that makes it so...
Mute lightning

Martha Ball

Thu, Jun 2

Category:

Island Notes

This morning I saw a snapper ambling up the lane, moving, as they do, with an odd rolling gait. It wasn’t a large turtle, but it had a huge head, stretching out over the shorn grass. They appear every now and then, and I wonder where they are headed — it is a fair distance to a pond that will last...
Groundhog Retreat

Martha

Thu, May 19

Category:

Island Notes

The sun is shining. It poured last night, it rained this morning, there is more rain forecast for later today and for tomorrow and the day following as well. The ground was dry, the roads were dusty, the little vernal ponds almost summer dry. We needed the rain, we tell each other. All these days...
Independence Day

Martha Ball

Thu, May 5

Category:

Island Notes

It is 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, was also the first of the colonies to declare independence from the crown as well as the last to ratify...
Next Week It Will Be May

Martha Ball

Tue, May 3

Category:

Island Notes

It wasn’t before there were houses, simply before there were so many, 1970 when we were closer than we realized to the encroaching world. There were a few places where fields were burned in late winter and grew brightly green in the spring. The walls around them were clearer than even the most...
Nod to Nature

Martha Ball

Thu, Apr 28

Category:

Island Notes

At the top of the seventh the Red Sox are ahead. A lot can go wrong between now and the end of the game. They are not doing as badly as I imagined, they’ve won 5 games and have lost 11. Amazingly, they are not at the bottom, the rock bottom, of the standings, inched out by the Mets who stand at 5-...
Muskrats & Mallards

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 22

Category:

Island Notes

My mother put on the Today show school mornings; we did not have to leave the house until the local news and weather brief that came on at 8:25 had concluded. One day in April 1961 they were broadcasting not from New York but from South Carolina. A re-enactment of the firing on Fort Sumter had...
You can't go wrong when . . .

Martha

Thu, Apr 14

Category:

Island Notes

You head for the steeple. Sage advice, it was, from my cousin the mariner, he still so belonging to the world of deepwater he will not park close to the supermarket door. He acknowledges only that his wife has gently questioned the rationale of this “anchoring out” hold-over from his sea-faring...

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