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Home » Columnists

Island Notes

Horses and tractors

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 23

Category:

Island Notes

Summer, by its final milepost, the Autumnal Equinox, ends tomorrow night, in the dark, a bit after nine, a time three months ago there was light lingering in the sky. Slowly, at first imperceptibly, then with increasing speed, the days have shortened since then. It was a while ago, now, I looked at...
History in plain view

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 16

Category:

Island Notes

It is the middle of September, the sun has made that turn it should not until until after the equinox, and is setting after 7. It seems a tad earlier on the eastern side where the earliest sun strikes the cliffs and beaches and east-facing windows. We tumble, now, down the black slide that suddenly...
Two years, three summers, a lifetime

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 9

Category:

Island Notes

Two, two-and-a-half years ago, really, we were on the edge of the pandemic. Despite the forecasts of the global experts we were, in March of 2020, still hopeful we would somehow slip through it if we were really, really careful. And we did because we were, it seemed, until the fall of that year...
Early morning rain

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 2

Category:

Island Notes

It was almost dark tonight when Autumn started barking her most excited “someone is here, someone is here!” bark. I saw headlights, then the shape of a big black box turning into the barn-less barnyard — not unlike the treeless Orchard or the pig-less Pig Lot — and thought impossibly her dog food...
On Monday it rained

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 26

Category:

Island Notes

Monday rain was forecast, in ever-diminishing percentages, but rain nonetheless which was falling in the morning, not in a deluge but enough to make me think of lowering windows. I was careful to take the little rain jacket that can fold into its own pocket and keeps out as much rain as a heavy...
By the monument

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 19

Category:

Island Notes

The water by the monument was up to the rip-rap below it this afternoon. There used to be a deeper strip of land there and a little beach below it. In 1993, before technology and electronic communication had taken so much from our day-to-day conversations, a contingent from the Army Corps of...
A Matter of Attitude

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 12

Category:

Island Notes

Last night the power went out. I am not sure when it happened. It was nearly dark when I came home from helping serve another dinner cooked by other people to the delightfully grateful, endlessly polite international students who come up the hill once a week for food at Harbor Church. I had stopped...
Finding Gratitude

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 5

Category:

Island Notes

Years ago now, a doctor friend in the city (doesn’t that sound posh, at least more than my sixth cousin or first cousin six times removed, depending upon which one of us is drawing the chart) started sending me dire predictions of the pandemic just creeping into this part of the country, complete...
Not Exceeding Three Percent

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 29

Category:

Island Notes

It is hot outside but lovely and breezy here down the Neck. The house is cooled by a cross-breeze but Autumn wants to go out and lie in the cooler shade of the trees in the yard. She is under house arrest, I hope under the last full day of the dreaded cone. The nice vet in Westerly called last week...
A single photograph

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 22

Category:

Island Notes

Twenty some years ago, when the Carolinas were suffering horrific hurricanes, terrible flooding, devastation of pig farm lagoons, which rolled into widespread death of whole flocks of domesticated turkeys, it happened that I was officiating at a wedding with guests from that part of the country. I...
A little beach background

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 15

Category:

Island Notes

Perhaps, for the bathing beach, the true Golden Age – so far – began in the early 1950s. At the start of that decade the wheels were turning for the new pavilion, a modern structure to complement the airport construction that marked a mid-century looking to the future. Air traffic was increasing...
The last first day of summer

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 8

Category:

Island Notes

Two nights after the Monday Fourth of July, fireworks are still exploding off the beach. My dog is still snoozing through them after a perfunctory “woof” or two. The same dog that barks at the boat passing off to the east or a great silver bird catching the sun high above us. She cannot go out and...
Buffalo Springfield

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 1

Category:

Island Notes

The Fourth of July has always been the first real holiday of summer. Memorial Day opened the door when I was growing up, but our lives went quickly back to school and places around us gradually opened up for the season. More than anything, I remember going to the Old Harbor Dock, Payne’s New Harbor...
Dump Days

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 24

Category:

Island Notes

On a Sunday at mid-day, any Sunday, any time of year, it is odd to find the Neck Road so empty one can stop and take a photo without pulling over, without waiting for at least one vehicle to pass. Even in winter it is dump day. It was back when the dump was a casual operation, when refuse was less...
Patterns

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 17

Category:

Island Notes

My peonies were late to open this year. It has been a cool spring but other people on the island had them in glorious bloom while I had the single plant by the door graced by multiple buds that seemed so tightly clenched I could only think “white knuckle.” There were three plants from sometime in...
On the Way to Summer

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 10

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

Yesterday I went out to check on the dog’s whereabouts, thinking it is coming to that time of year when I have to pay her better mind. She’d been under the big maple at the corner of the yard but seemed to have vanished from that nice, shaded spot. As my eyes adjusted to the bright sun I realized...
Back to the Hill

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 3

Category:

Island Notes

It is always the same this time of year. The “summer” beach roses are in their fullest glory, some days in bright sun, others in fog, the grasses that have not yet been cut have gone to seed, but are still young and pliant and run before the breeze. The lilacs have truly faded while the blue flag...
Saucy Swallows

Martha Ball

Fri, May 27

Category:

Island Notes

Today, I have no words. A little over 23 years ago I was at a friend’s house. We told each other we would not watch the memorial service about to be broadcast, live, from Columbine, Colorado, site of a horrific school shooting. There was nothing to be gained, nothing to be changed by our wallowing...
Stages of Spring

Martha Ball

Fri, May 20

Category:

Island Notes

Every year I try to take a photograph of the lilac at the corner of the dooryard, and every year I have varying degrees of failure. The wind is always blowing, the sun is never quite right, the blooms are never as lush as they appear to the naked eye. They are, on the other hand, great examples of...
Everyone knows it's Windy

Martha Ball

Fri, May 13

Category:

Island Notes

Yes, it is a line from a song, a very old song, from the 1960s. It was cute and catchy and did not make a whole lot of sense. Unlike some of those tunes there is no “oh, that’s what they were saying” revelation when I read the lyrics. No, it’s just Windy. It’s been windy, the hard, lasting wind...
Hope

Martha Ball

Fri, May 6

Category:

Island Notes

It is Rhode Island Independence Day, a fact I feel obligated to share every May 4. I am greatly chagrined these words will not be printed until well after this date, as I am writing of it only after the fact. It did not fall off my calendar in the usual way of dates forgotten, rather this late-...
Mist over New England

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 29

Category:

Island Notes

I was, as usual, half-listening to the news, and not watching at all. It was almost 7:30 and had been on for quite a while, recycling some bits of local events and human disasters that have become the staple of newscasts, no matter how distant, and a blurb or two about the machinations of Hollywood...
After the Storm

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 22

Category:

Island Notes

Easter Sunday on Block Island was beautiful, sunny, not too warm, with a dip of short-lived clouds in the afternoon before a golden end. Monday, I looked out and saw the egret closer to the house than I’d ever seen it, walking down the lane just beneath my dining room window. It is usually right...
Thanks and celebration

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 15

Category:

Island Notes

A few times I have opened the door from the hall to the open entry and heard a flurry of wings, birds in a nest location scouting or building mode I presumed. It is not an issue, as long as they stay out of my way. And my bookcase when all the doors are open. It is a bit of a haven for them down...
More than a wildflower

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 8

Category:

Island Notes

The building should look familiar, it is the old Odd Fellows Hall, today its anchor business a café of the same name. This piece should have been in March, for Women’s History month but it is rainy and gray in April, it feels like March. When the Ragged Sailor Gallery, the creation of Eileen Lee...
April too soon

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 1

Category:

Island Notes

It has seemed overall a milder winter than many. We had one big snow, but it was cleared quickly and what was left was gone in the fast-arriving rainy mild. The wind has been great, it has felt the last two winters it was even more omnipresent than before if that is possible. So I am somewhat...
Red Roof, Blue Sky

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 25

Category:

Island Notes

One day last summer or early fall someone came into the photography gallery on the corner with an old photo. They’d been sent to me - not to the gallery - as a last-ditch effort in identifying the location in the faded shot. It was taken from somewhere on High Street they thought and following that...
The end of winter

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 18

Category:

Island Notes

It is winter, still, by the calendar. The vernal equinox comes early, in late morning on the twentieth of March, a whole week after we have “sprung ahead” I feel obligated to note. The world makes less and less sense. It is the end of winter, the last of the days we can see what will be hidden by...
Among the Lobster Pots

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 11

Category:

Island Notes

Sunday, it was gray when I left the Harbor Church after worship. By the time I reached the Seaside I had either driven down into the fog or it had deepened: the Surf was clouded by gray. Turning down the Neck Road it was a wall, none of that rolling-in business, just a wall, so dense I pulled over...
April Illusion

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 4

Category:

Island Notes

Thirty years ago there was a snowstorm on the vernal equinox. I remember it well, I was transitioning from a typewriter to a computer with a word processor and misfiled the piece I had written and had to re-write it. Which, because it was all new, I could recall and still do, opening with putting...
Sunday, 6:03 p.m.

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 25

Category:

Island Notes

Sunday, 6:03 p.m. The time of the photo, taken on February 20. Sunsets have their own glory on the east side of the island and in middling-toward-late February it is the aftermath, the light lingering so much after the sky would have been dark in December that is such a balm to the soul. We are...
Climbing temperature

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 18

Category:

Island Notes

Earlier, around mid-morning, I stood washing dishes, looking out over the snow-dappled field. It looked like winter, the good winter of clear, sunny skies and the remnants of a storm. It was not the rare, perfect snow fallen in the calm, a gentle blanket on the land that could last days in sub-...
Hidden in Plain Sight

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 11

Category:

Island Notes

A photo of the west side of Front Street from roughly 1900 shows an iteration of many of the buildings that stand there today, seeming to be neatly aligned, their facades a wall facing the newly constructed harbor, from the National to the Seaside. The street, such as it was, did not move, the...
Many more knew our name

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 4

Category:

Island Notes

Tonight it is mild, the snow turned to fog, billowing off the roads and rising from the land. “Haze” is the condition given on the lazy (pre-loaded, lazy for me) app on my phone. It is disconcerting, out of time and place, although even as I write the words I find myself wondering how far back I’d...
Habit

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 28

Category:

Island Notes

As I have often related, there were wooden cartons on the boat on February Saturdays in the late 1960s. It was the Sprigg Carroll, the little vessel that plied the waters between here and Galilee, carrying everything from mail to groceries and, yes, the kitchen sink. My mother and I were coming...
Ice on the grass

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 21

Category:

Island Notes

It is January and the weather is reflecting the calendar and mirroring years past, days of intense cold sandwiched between mild, horrid wind exacerbating the cold, giving the weather people their beloved wind-chill factor drama. They seem, the Channel 10 folk —and I’ve no reason to believe the rest...
Winter Visitors

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 14

Category:

Island Notes

We didn’t have a lot when I was little, not many of us did. And we lived out here, in the middle of nowhere, it seems in retrospect. So, my mother used what we had to entertain me, in those early years of clear memory, when school started with the first grade and my only sibling was a convenient,...
The age of speed

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 7

Category:

Island Notes

It was cold yesterday morning, 19 when I first checked the temperature, but sunny and bright for the first time in many, many days. Today, it seemed colder and I was surprised to see a reading of 52 — which until I die will be, in Salty Brine’s voice, a “warm” temperature for a winter’s day. A bit...
Joyful Gaits

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 31

Category:

Island Notes

Thirty years ago Peter Wood, BI Times co-owner and editor ran a little piece I had submitted, about my sitting with my niece on the cover of the old cistern, listening to the engine of the tractor the neighbor was running up and down the slope of his sister’s bank lot, a sometime sheep...
A living Christmas Carol

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 24

Category:

Island Notes

The world and the nation have changed radically in the last several decades, gradually pulling Block Island into the vortex spinning forward. Much of the technology we take for granted has evolved during my lifetime, from the first spacecraft to orbit the earth to the moon landing that today’s...
The Escape

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 17

Category:

Island Notes

Autumn stood in the yard in the snow, on high alert looking south to the wide open field. There might be geese out the field, although she saw no geese. There might be deer but, again, she saw no deer. Still, she sensed something was there, that elusive something that lurked around the edges of the...
General Store

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 10

Category:

Island Notes

There are two framed posters, made from Providence Journal photographs, dated only 1930, on the wall in the town hall. I wonder, increasingly, if we should affix to their backs details of the buildings shown. The photo shown with this column is of one of the buildings on the wall, one...
Pumpkins on the steps

Martha Ball

Thu, Dec 2

Category:

Island Notes

The Thanksgiving weekend weather is always a wild card. I remember horrid trips on the Manitou going to visit relatives in the years the Manitou was new and ran in about any kind of weather; 35 years ago, now, standing on a stoop in Mansfield, smoking because no one wanted it in the house — I can’t...
Remembering When

Martha Ball

Tue, Nov 23

Category:

Island Notes

Remembering When...
Low Sunshine

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 18

Category:

Island Notes

A few nights ago a text came through while I was talking on the phone. “A car pole accident on Mansion Road tonight?” The reply to my “No idea” was: “On the BIBB from Jeff Wright” So I got up and walked around and there were flashing yellow lights up the road. I made out the form of the big white...
Nightscape

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 11

Category:

Island Notes

Long past are the early evenings when leaving the house for an hour or two, the thought of turning on the hall light is far from my mind. Daylight Saving Time ended last Sunday morning, a week into November. It has been the way things are for a while, but it was this year that that extra week made...
Into November

Martha Ball

Thu, Nov 4

Category:

Island Notes

Eight years ago, when the damage - and repair – surrounding Sandy was new. It has been a year since Superstorm Sandy wreaked 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 it those pictures of devastation...
October Storms

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 29

Category:

Island Notes

The high wind advisory that was supposed to end at two this afternoon was bumped up to three. It seemed on target, the wind was letting up in mid-afternoon when I finally decided to brave the storm, or what was left of it. A long night of intermittent pounding rain and howling wind had faded into a...
October Red and Blue

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 21

Category:

Island Notes

Until we hit that day in early December when the setting of the sun stops its race back toward noon and sets a spell, realigning its center of gravity before creeping back toward five, every day I think of how unbalanced the natural world is. In my perfect world, length of the orbit of the earth...
Roll Call Pivot

Martha Ball

Thu, Oct 14

Category:

Island Notes

October brings our last holiday weekend of the season. It has been a tough summer for seasonal resorts, help has been lacking, especially in restaurants, closures seemed to come earlier this year while visitors continued to arrive and the question “what’s a good place for lunch?” became a less...

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Island Buzz

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Posted By

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We would love the opportunity to meet with you! When listing your home for sale, our goal is to market your property in an...

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