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Island Notes

A powerful illusion

Martha Ball

Fri, May 14

Category:

Island Notes

Many months ago I heard rumors that what is commonly known as the Capt Willis House, one of the sentries guarding the portal to the Neck, was being demolished. Dumpsters arrived, some activity took place, then attention was focused on the building of a structure in its side yard. It seemed to be a...
The things we don’t see

Martha Ball

Fri, May 7

Category:

Island Notes

Falki was by the gate, as he often is, when I came home from a trip to the harbor. He is an Icelandic horse, sweet tempered but a bit of an escape artist. The youngest of his small “herd,” he was able to slip between posts, gliding beneath the single chain connecting them. A gate replaced the chain...
Sounds of Spring

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 30

Category:

Island Notes

It sounds like spring outside. Not the peepers of the evening nor the birdsong of morning, but construction, some construction, somewhere, floating on the still air. A pounding, it sounded from the yard, then a hammering, then a pounding, again. I remembered the sound of what I still say was a...
Far side of the pond

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 23

Category:

Island Notes

There is a day in the fall when I look west from the Neck Road and see the New Harbor, emptied seemingly overnight, the blue water that had been populated with boats, as many some summer days as there are houses on the land, wide and open. It is wide and blue and empty but for the mooring balls,...
Yellow Time of Year

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 16

Category:

Island Notes

These days I don’t first awaken when morning gilds the sky, or even when the first flush of color spreads up from the ocean; it is earlier, when the east-facing window I see when I open my eyes, takes on definition of its own, a rectangle of pale gray distinguishing itself from the dark wall around...
Go to Meeting Shoes

Martha Ball

Thu, Apr 8

Category:

Island Notes

Once upon a time I had the notion if I wore shoes, shoes with heels, not tall spiky heels, but heels high enough for me to be able to pretend I wasn’t quite as short as I am, at least once a week, I would never be one of those people who said “I used to wear things like that. . .” Then I broke my...
Patchwork pasture

Martha Ball

Thu, Apr 1

Category:

Island Notes

Spring, such as it is in this part of the world, arrived by the calendar, the beginning of last week. Here, it has come and gone, over and again, since then, even in the course of a single afternoon. Saturday, I know, was beautiful, as we older folks flocked to Legion Way at our appointed times,...
Different Perspectives

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 25

Category:

Island Notes

The horizon looks impossibly high today, the world sunny and calm. I go to the door and am met by the sound of spring rolling in, long breakers rushing to the shore, the same lines I watched earlier, a steady march toward the shore that makes me marvel that there is any island left. The atmosphere...
Ready, Not Ready

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 18

Category:

Island Notes

Winters have been following a new pattern, mild through most of the darkening days of fall and into the winter with sporadic rounds of deep but not long-lasting cold. Springs are late in coming. The daffodils around my house are poking up through the ground; some years the earliest are in bloom,...
Slow Dialing

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 11

Category:

Island Notes

A year ago the Town Council was still meeting in the Town Hall. Someone had left glasses months previous, they had been sitting on the little table just inside the Council Chamber, waiting to be claimed for some time. I had been sick for the better part of February last year, really, horribly sick...
March wind

Martha Ball

Thu, Mar 4

Category:

Island Notes

I grew up in a house where watching the news was not a requirement, it was a given. Decades later I remarked to a friend that among my earlier memories of television was my father watching “Meet the Press” on Sundays. The response was a reflection of the huge shift in our lives from that time, from...
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...

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