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Columnists
Island Notes
Blue Sky
Martha Ball
Thu, Feb 25
Category:
Island Notes
The snow started earlier than forecast last Thursday. It was soft, on the border between rain and snow and then turned heavier than we have had in a while. It stopped me for a bit, knowing the storm was expected to last through Friday night and despite it following the track that had been predicted...
February Fog
Martha Ball
Thu, Feb 18
Category:
Island Notes
Among the many things I have had reinforced over the time I have been writing this column is the cyclical nature of our weather. What seems extraordinary likely happened if not last year then within the past several. A while ago, now, someone called me — embodying the definition of “hair on fire...
Another spoke in the wheel of winter
Martha Ball
Thu, Feb 11
Category:
Island Notes
It is early February and the forecasts, if not the realities, are filled with snow and cold. In the fall of 2012, between Superstorm Sandy and the official close of hurricane season, before winter had even arrived, the first “named winter storm, Athena,” blew around us. It annoyed me beyond measure...
The backside of winter
Martha Ball
Thu, Feb 4
Category:
Island Notes
January departed cold and windy, but it did provide us its usual parting gift, a sun rising before 7 a.m. and setting after 5 p.m., the last in a series of winter-turning hurdles. The first is always that early December afternoon when the sunset plateaus out, no longer gnawing at the precious...
Castle in the Air
Martha Ball
Thu, Jan 28
Category:
Island Notes
The big pond behind my house is shallow, surprisingly so, and more surprisingly, it rarely freezes. Even these days of deep cold, a significant portion of it is open, moving water, one moment a roiling mass of diamonds catching the scant sun, another the deep blue of a suddenly cloudless sky. The...
From the road
Martha Ball
Thu, Jan 21
Category:
Island Notes
Today, the sun shone, and it was not terribly cold, the wind blew. The dog was happily outside, bounding about; when she came back in it was to lie in the sun, following the patch of warmth as it moved across the floor. Then the sun slid behind the clouds and the sunny bright was gone. I noticed...
A Sin Against the Nation
Martha Ball
Thu, Jan 14
Category:
Island Notes
On most mornings, the light changes when the sun clears the horizon, and the soft, spreading promise of approaching dawn is realized. The difference is often enough for me to open my eyes and look out at the colors of the wakening sky floating over the ocean. I think, fleetingly, of how the sun has...
To keep Christmas well
Martha Ball
Thu, Jan 7
Category:
Island Notes
It is from one of the take-away lines from A Christmas Carol, that Mr. Scrooge learned “to keep Christmas well...” variations of which we repeat every year, wondering why we cannot maintain the magic of the season throughout the cold of winter, the activity of spring, the wilting summer and — for...
Threads across time
Martha Ball
Thu, Dec 31
Category:
Island Notes
Advertisements for various Hope-to-be-Hot Items for Christmas usually pass by me. One, with an old, but unmistakable, annoying, but catchy, jingle, for “ch-ch-ch-chia” rang a little bell but wasn’t enough to make me pay attention until I saw it had morphed with a pop icon, Baby Yoda. These things...
Candle in the Window
Martha Ball
Thu, Dec 24
Category:
Island Notes
With this dark year coming to a close, the Historical Society launched a last minute effort to brighten our building and our corner, with sponsored battery-operated candles (blockislandhistorical.org for further info). I was reminded, again, of five years ago, when the Historical Society was...
Angel Chimes
Martha Ball
Thu, Dec 17
Category:
Island Notes
A few summers ago I was wandering through the stuff amassed for a summer sale at the Harbor Church, feeling quite pleased with myself for having brought a collection of books, relatively new paperbacks I had read and would be happy to find on a sale table. They were all fiction, most set in...
Solstice Countdown
Martha Ball
Thu, Dec 10
Category:
Island Notes
It is the time of year when the sun drops the earliest, and darkness lasts the longest. A little more than two months ago, now, I came home from the hospital, a thankfully clean break high in my right humerus held together by what I somehow presumed to be a couple of pins — which I later saw to be...
But that was yesterday
Martha Ball
Thu, Dec 3
Category:
Island Notes
Monday night I took Autumn to the door, my west-facing front door that is the only one I use, contrary to tradition. It is to an entry, a rather informal space that is as much a garden shed as anything. The storm door hasn’t opened properly in over ten years, since I came home after a trip away to...
At Boat Time
Martha Ball
Thu, Nov 26
Category:
Island Notes
Back in the spring we had hoped by this time the spread of Covid-19 would have been contained and we would be in a holding pattern awaiting a vaccine. We feared the summer, and were haunted by historical reminders that the great pandemic of 1918 had abated in the warm weather only to surge in the...
The east side has the boat
Martha Ball
Thu, Nov 19
Category:
Island Notes
The afternoon is crisp, the line of the horizon off to the east sharp and clean, a seam binding the deep blue of the ocean to the paler hue of the sky, the two stitched with tiny, perfect, invisible stitches. Overhead there are no clouds but out over the water there are layers of white and violet...
Autumn Earthquake
Martha Ball
Thu, Nov 12
Category:
Island Notes
My dog is big and my house is old. The latter is a constant source of worry, what did some noise signify, every first-time-notice sound, be it an engine offshore or the clattering of metal at the transfer station across the Neck, more than a mile away. There is a spot in my dining room where Autumn...
In living color
Martha Ball
Thu, Nov 5
Category:
Island Notes
These days when I walk into my living room half-listening to voices, I glance reflexively at the space where the television used to be. It has moved all of a few feet, from a space between two west-facing windows — where a television has been most of my memory — to a different wall. I am of an age...
The Red Trailer
Martha Ball
Thu, Oct 29
Category:
Island Notes
There is a horse trailer in the front field. It arrived nearly a week ago, all shiny and bright red. The three Icelandics who live down here have all been introduced to it, with appropriate fanfare, and it has moved a bit, but not much and never on its own. It still catches my eye when I walked...
One night in October
Martha Ball
Fri, Oct 23
Category:
Island Notes
On the long list of things I need to replace is a computer; it is old even by my standards, and keys stopped working over a year ago. It’s a MacBookPro, a plug in keyboard was absurdly expensive then someone suggested I try a generic, an “Amazon Basics” which even by my standards was inexpensive...
Shimmering October blue
Martha Ball
Thu, Oct 15
Category:
Island Notes
The boats did not run yesterday. The long spell of good summer weather was, I think, more a blessing than a curse. While it surely lured more people to Block Island, it also kept life outside, windows stayed wide open, air circulated and for all that went terribly wrong the over-riding fear of the...
A lesson in perception
Martha Ball
Thu, Oct 8
Category:
Island Notes
Well, drat, someone pointed out the obvious, that I do not need two hands to type, only a keyboard, although I am finding it a tough adjustment using both hands on a plug-in keyboard. Back to the old system of up and down arrows, which predated the computer mouse, which predated touch pads. Both of...
Porches and bird’s nests
Martha Ball
Thu, Oct 1
Category:
Island Notes
Ed. Note: Our columnist Martha Ball broke her arm this week. She’s fine — it was set at South County Hospital. But she is out of commission for a while, so we grabbed a column that describes an August in 2014. Another note: this week’s photo was taken by Chris Blane.
While I have never...
Knife in the Road
Martha Ball
Thu, Sep 24
Category:
Island Notes
The first time I noticed the knife in the street near Rebecca, it was bright and shiny, the white of new plastic in the sun. Another year I might have picked it up but this year we are all more hesitant to touch things we would not — or I would not — have given a second thought in the past. Instead...
Seven years
Martha Ball
Thu, Sep 17
Category:
Island Notes
Fall comes next week, officially, astronomically. It used to come sometime in the week after Labor Day, then to the holiday and earlier as schools opened sooner and sooner. Oddly, September seems to be our first and last gasp of a normal summer, people still on the streets as the days turn crisp...
Lost a pedal?
Martha Ball
Thu, Sep 10
Category:
Island Notes
This morning I heard a rumbling while I was still lolling around, discussing the upcoming day with my dog. It happens, sometimes the town road crew early to work, over the past weekend, engine noise punctuated by the slamming of little motorboats out on the ocean. This sound was coming up the road...
Now, it is lace
Martha Ball
Thu, Sep 3
Category:
Island Notes
The day did not begin well. This morning, I closed the door behind me, leaving Autumn, my drizzle damp dog, in the house and looked over through the misty rain to see the windows of my car wide open. “That’s impossible” I thought, remembering looking at the forecast the night before and thinking...
August Sky
Martha Ball
Thu, Aug 27
Category:
Island Notes
Late this morning it seemed time was standing still. It took longer than I care to admit for me to realize it was the clock, or more accurately, the clock battery, that was the problem, and I had managed to lose almost three hours of a precious summer day out of town. The days are markedly shorter...
Reckoning
Martha Ball
Thu, Aug 20
Category:
Island Notes
Last night I came home to find kindness on my doorstep, summer’s bounty in a basket of cherry tomatoes, topped by a gift of a bag of those homemade cookies filled with enough oats and raisins that they seem they have to be healthy, despite being cookies. I opened the door to let the dog out and...
Isaias
Martha Ball
Thu, Aug 6
Category:
Island Notes
The yellow flag was flying at the Town Beach when I went out in the early afternoon on Tuesday. The much heralded storm had already been downgraded, the predicted westward shift of its path holding steady. The hurricanes of my childhood had familiar names, the still gold standard of 1954 was Carol...
A kinder time...
Martha Ball
Thu, Jul 30
Category:
Island Notes
There are few certainties to life on Block Island and today with the news of Merrill Slate’s passing there is one less. We all knew it was coming, we had watched him decline with age and the loss of his wife, but a decline temporarily halted, maybe even reversed a bit, by reconciliation with the...
Eastport to Block Island
Martha Ball
Thu, Jul 23
Category:
Island Notes
The past weekend was another Perfect Storm, fueled by the start of the first real heat wave of the summer, prompting people to want to get away, to the beaches, to the water, to Block Island. It was simply too hot, and there were too many people both from within the state and beyond our borders,...
The Column About The Airport
Martha Ball
Thu, Jul 16
Category:
Island Notes
This morning I was reminded by Bob Champagne Willis, Block Island Historical Society President, via a photo of a medallion, that it is not only 2020, that this day, July 15, marks, without fanfare, the seventieth anniversary of the ceremonial opening of our State Airport. The fact the airport was...
Amber Waves
Martha Ball
Thu, Jul 9
Category:
Island Notes
When the media exploded with the removal of characters long associated with certain products, one was the hot cereal, Cream of Wheat. I had bought some over the winter, when it was on sale, thought fleetingly that the box looked different, before I emptied its contents into a glass canister and...
Waves Rising
Martha Ball
Thu, Jul 2
Category:
Island Notes
Every year I refer to “the egret” in the pond behind my house, but always wonder if there is more then one. There used to be a heron, great and blue — or blue-gray — that nested at the edge of the swamp, just to the north, over the wall, in a bayberry bush grown so tall it seemed a tree. It once...
Ice Plant Remains
Martha Ball
Thu, Jun 25
Category:
Island Notes
We used to start school the Monday after Labor Day. It was long one of those impossible memories, but underscored by another, of the first year we started on the Friday after the holiday, a half day. That and more memories came rushing back when I heard the announcement that all schools in Rhode...
Down the beaten path
Martha Ball
Thu, Jun 18
Category:
Island Notes
It is almost summer and, much as some believe they can wish away the uncertainty that has engulfed us for so long, the reality is we have yet to see the back side of the hurricane. It is all speculation, from educated guesses to wildly uninformed declarations. “But you don’t have COVID out here” we...
Arcs of June
Martha Ball
Thu, Jun 11
Category:
Island Notes
Every year, around this time, when the grass is tall and heavy laden with seed, we get a big rain; this year was no exception. We experienced a summer squall Saturday night. It had been foggy in the morning, then it seemed to clear to sunny warm. Some serious system on the radar mappings looked to...
Calendar Maple
Martha Ball
Thu, Jun 4
Category:
Island Notes
Several years ago I first noticed a volunteer maple tree, seeded I guessed, from the older tree at the corner of the front yard. It was in the tall grass, perhaps three feet high but the time I even realized it was there, at the time partly in the shadow of a gnarly, dying olive. It seemed, in the...
Slow Waves
Martha Ball
Thu, May 28
Category:
Island Notes
Spring arrives in slow waves and we watch them crest and crash on the shore, then recede to become part of the wide ocean. Yellow daffodils and forsythia and creamy shad have all gone by, the first to withering stems, the others to greenery. Some trees flower only to be consumed by a day of searing...
Roadblock Reminder
Martha Ball
Thu, May 21
Category:
Island Notes
We have learned, or had confirmed, these past, endless weeks, that all the talk of going back in time inspired by old photographs is the stuff of fantasy. I am old enough that I remember when all winter we had one boat from Galilee, one boat that landed at noon and left at two or two-thirty. As I...
Stamina and perseverance
Martha Ball
Thu, May 14
Category:
Island Notes
There was a time when Canada Geese had about them a mystique. They were the birds in a Joni Mitchell song, those “in chevron flight, flapping and racing on before the snow.” We watched them fly in formation, rising up to leave us, honking as they passed over the open pastures, their long necks clad...
You Don’t Know What You’ve Got
Martha Ball
Thu, May 7
Category:
Island Notes
“They paved paradise Put up a parking lot With a pink hotel, a boutique And a swinging hot spot Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘Til it’s gone” T he lyric of ”Big Yellow Taxi” was the written reaction of Canadian singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell to various vistas...
Dooryard
Martha Ball
Fri, May 1
Category:
Island Notes
In the interests of full disclosure I have never been a student of poetry, and, I admit envying poets all that white space that us writers of prose must fill with words. Nonetheless, even I had some vague knowledge of “When Lilacs Last on the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the long poem Walt Whitman penned the...
The George W. Danielson
Martha Ball
Fri, Apr 24
Category:
Island Notes
“What was the first ferry to bring folks?” someone asked and I realized I would have to look that up, and is so often the case with everything Block Island, how to define such a thing? Would it have been the first recorded excursion, a group rowed into the landing, before there was a proper harbor...
Kitchen Tools
Martha Ball
Fri, Apr 17
Category:
Island Notes
Somewhere, I sort of stopped cooking beyond the most basic of dishes. On some level I realized what was happening, but how far it had gone hit me squarely the other night when it took four, yes, four, implements to open a bottle of olive oil. A knife to cut the foil, then there were two jar openers...
Certainties in an uncertain world
Martha Ball
Thu, Apr 9
Category:
Island Notes
I t feels the calendar revolves even more than usual around the sunny, hopeful, days, the dramatic spring tides, the great moon filling the sky, all pushing aside the inevitable gray April rains that mirror a national mood. Monday was glorious and I left the door open, tired of Autumn's let-me-go-...
Rolling spring
Martha Ball
Thu, Apr 2
Category:
Island Notes
W hen I came inside yesterday afternoon the sparse forsythia scraping my window, the same that seems unable to recover from having been cut to the ground a few years ago, that refuses to do more than send ever taller shoots upward, glowed. Its yellow blossoms were like so many little suns on the...
Everlasting
Martha Ball
Thu, Mar 26
Category:
Island Notes
I t is March and it is 43, the sky is cloudy and gray, the wind is blowing from the east, the sound of it rising and falling, blocking out birdsong and the dull thunder of the white-capped ocean. I do hear the dog, moving between the yard and the front lot, barking at whatever she has decided it is...
Our little island
Martha Ball
Thu, Mar 19
Category:
Island Notes
W e live on an island. It is not the Block Island of 1918, already sliding from the Glory Days of early tourism. A war was winding down while another trend was emerging: transportation was starting to shift away from the rail and steamers that had fed the great hotels all along the New England...
Information and voting
Martha Ball
Thu, Mar 12
Category:
Island Notes
In the fall of 1986, it was becoming more difficult for my mother to ascribe to “arthritis” the visible impact of the terminal bone cancer that had been diagnosed in January 1981. She told us, my brother and me, at the outset that she would not be making it public, she didn't want people asking her...
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Island Buzz
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2/25
*** Annual Meeting September 20th 11am Program 11:30 am Please join us on zoom ** Thank you for your interest in the Block...
TimberTech by AZEK
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2/25
Riverhead Building Supply offers TimberTech by AZEK Building Products. Click here for the latest collections and styles...
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2/25
Sullivan Sotheby’s International Realty has some great options, if your still searching for that perfect Summer Rental. We...
This weeks Nature Conservancy Schedule
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2/24
Check out this weeks Nature Conservancy Schedule at https:// www.natureblockisland.org
Solstice Senior Living Offers Life on Your Terms
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2/24
Solstice at Groton offers safety and peace of mind, so residents get the most out of life. Visit our website Phone: (860)...
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2/23
Coralberry Block Island is open! Stop by the old Primitive Methodist Church on Center Road to see all the wonderful styles...
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