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Home » Columnists

Island Notes

Osage

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 17

Category:

Island Notes

On e week ago, the charger for my computer died. It was not sudden. I first noticed that the cord was starting to fray last summer, but in one of my habits that defies all logic, I did not order a new one as the delivery time seemed too many days away.It was a good three months before the little...
Remembering the songs

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 10

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

It was chilly, today. We seemed to have skimmed over crisp fall sunshine, like one of those flattish, roundish rocks my father tried to teach me to toss with a spin so they would skip over the surface of open water until a last, fatal, ker-plunk sent them to darkness below the waves. I am not ready...
Small Miracles

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 27

Category:

Island Notes

Wh en duties for this year's Roll Call Dinner were handed out many were the “what you did last year” default and so I happened to already have been assigned to the greeting of people and collection of money when I tumbled on Sunday and hurt my hand/wrist landing on the pavement. There were no...
Between Traffic and Wind

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 20

Category:

Island Notes

It is a time of year between the traffic that becomes ambient noise — a background we do not notice, but think we do in the blaring horns and foolishly loud motors and pounding speakers — and the constant of our winter lives: wind. Now, after the morning cool is displaced by mid-day warmth and car...
Day Is Done

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 13

Category:

Island Notes

A few minutes before six, the land was near golden with the light of a lowering sun. The shadows were long, reaching down to the back lot, but still it was a shock to realize sundown was less than twenty minutes distant. It is not yet — quite — that heavy hammer of winter that falls swiftly and...
Fallen Leaves

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 29

Category:

Island Notes

The last Monday in September, the first Monday of fall, it did not seem it would be as difficult as it proved to be to find the scant few seconds it required to take a photo of the Water Street curb, with no foot or vehicular traffic in the frame. It looked, strangely, like fall on the mainland,...
Forgotten Reality

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 22

Category:

News, Island Notes

Mo nday and the sky is pale, almost without color, the mid-day sun diffused by a cover of fog. September, I am hearing, is never like this and I try not to say too quickly or emphatically, “well, actually. . .” September is remembered as crisp and sunny, a month of gentle breezes and warm water and...
September Hay

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 15

Category:

Island Notes

I live on the Mansion Road, I grew up living on the Mansion Road. The Searles Mansion burned during school vacation in April of 1963 and in the twenty some years between that time and the purchase of the land and road by the town — with a healthy contribution from Block Island Conservancy — the...
Scattered Showers and Dappled Sunshine

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 8

Category:

Island Notes

It is going to be one of those days. The sun was out early, brighter and clearer than I expected it to be given last night's forecast. I dawdled but still made it to the dump with bins of recyclables, stacks of paper and three bags of trash. That seeming bounty represents no more than a long time...
Windy but Hopeful

Martha Ball

Fri, Sep 1

Category:

Island Notes

T u esday was gray and windy but hopeful. We are near the close of a summer of ever-escalating terrible traffic stories, mine capped, perhaps, by meeting a truck on Water Street, in its busiest section, between the turn onto Chapel and the statue of Rebecca. It came at me, not with great speed but...
Rain

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 18

Category:

Island Notes

L ast week, I came home with every expectation of going back out in the evening, but I started reading an old document about a summer of disease on Block Island, written at the start of the 19th century, then fell down the vortex of old documents in archaic language. The forecast was not good and I...
August Day

Martha Ball

Fri, Aug 4

Category:

Island Notes

It is August, long awaited by some, too quickly arrived for others. The already frenetic pace of summer on Block Island goes into overdrive as The End looms earlier and earlier, driven by school openings long before the once traditional Wednesday after Labor Day. When I was a child, the tourists...
Feathered Sunshine

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 28

Category:

Island Notes

Chiicory was leaning into the road, still the vivid blue in mid-morning that is generally reserved for early day. It opens bright and hopeful before the sun climbs high and blanches it to a pale ghost of its early self. It is a weed, with a deep tap root, the enduring green of an old yard like mine...
Ode to the Eagle

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 21

Category:

Island Notes

A p lane roars by, seemingly outside my window, and I think of open windows and the sounds of summer they gift us, airborne engines as well as chirping birds. It’s a nice moment, before I remember that, of course, there is more air traffic in the summer. As there are more people, strangers, among...
Near Mansion Beach

Martha Ball

Fri, Jul 7

Category:

Island Notes

In summer, we are not surrounded by the great whoosh of the winter wind. The first day after a very long Fourth of July weekend celebration is not peppered with fireworks and boat horns, instead, softer, gentler, sounds fill the air. I realize it first when I go outside, to hang clothes on the line...
Relocations

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 30

Category:

Island Notes

“How do you do that every week?” someone just asked me, a question I find validating every time I sit down to a blank screen and the reality of not only a deadline, but of having to find a topic. Today I have loose ends swirling around me. Last week I wrote about the building that became Ernie's...
Happenstance

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 23

Category:

Island Notes

In a small town things have a way of intersecting. I read a restaurant review of Breakfast at Ernie's and thought how happy my father would be to know another generation was carrying on the tradition in which he had such faith so many years ago. It happened to be the weekend of Father's Day and in...
June

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 16

Category:

Island Notes

The heat came back and with it the June bugs, the air-borne, armored, harmless but annoying creatures that fly through open windows, buzzing about aimlessly until I feel a touch, the slightest weight of one landed on my head, in my hair. Then, all bets are off and the little tank of a beast is...
Sunshine Afternoon

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 9

Category:

Island Notes

It is June and, when I am home, I leave the front doors, living room, hall, and entry all wide open. My springtime expectation of birds flying into the house, confused by plentiful natural light within, has not been much realized this year, although the season is new. A nest was begun in a corner...
Waiting for Summer

Martha Ball

Fri, Jun 2

Category:

Island Notes

This past weekend I somewhere read that among the reasons May 30 was chosen for Memorial Day, before the Uniform Holiday Act relegated it to a Monday, was the fact that flowers were in fullest bloom. It is a harsh reality of the start of every June, that grasses, where allowed, have grown tall and...
At the Harbor

Martha Ball

Fri, May 19

Category:

Island Notes

The rain has stopped, and with hanging sheets on the line I think of my mother saying this was the time to spread white linens on new grass to brighten them. Then I realize I feel the strength of the spring sun on my face from an hour spent beside the water yesterday afternoon. The work on the Old...
It’s An Island

Martha Ball

Fri, May 12

Category:

Island Notes

The last few years the prevalent theme of my columns written in early May has been centered on green and gray, underscored with a protest that it should not be this way. My easily recalled memories of the start of this month are all golden sunshine, long afternoons and verdant hills. While I do not...
Sirens in the Sea

Martha Ball

Fri, May 5

Category:

Island Notes

Monday was reminiscent of one of those Easters when we have to take on faith that there is a sun rising from the ocean out behind the clouds, easy enough when our imagining is buoyed by ambient light growing as we let slip our hope for a ray of gold to gild the sky and show us that morning truly...
Heavy at Times

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 28

Category:

Island Notes

We live in a small town, some of us have always lived in this small town, I think when crossing paths with someone, a younger brother of a classmate who will always be that, no matter that he is long grown, with a son of his own now in college. “Heavy at times” he remarks, a nod at the gentle rain...
From the Bayside

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 21

Category:

Island Notes

The poet who gave us “what is so rare as a day in June... ” called that month the “high-tide of the year” — which seems apt early in that month, when the days are still lengthening and tall grasses are just beginning to go to seed, when the beach roses blanket the dunes, and a lingering pale sky...
Look-at-me-yellow

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 14

Category:

Island Notes

My forsythia needs more attention than I have been willing to give it. The roots are old, the flowering shrub sprung from them has soared back toward the sun after several severe cuttings over the years. It always grew at an absurdly rapid pace, tall and lush, scraping the old wooden gutters that...
Rite of Passage

Martha Ball

Fri, Apr 7

Category:

Island Notes

And so we come into April with great winds and high seas. The rains are heavy, with nothing of sweet spring showers about them. There are no boats today; tomorrow, April 2, in 1980 the spare notation in my mother's hand does not include a name but it was likely the Manitou, intrepid little vessel...
Moving Into April

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 31

Category:

Island Notes

Last night, after the final downstairs lights had been extinguished, I thought to look south, and for it saw a faint edge of a haze beyond an empty space I still call “The Mansion” after the grand structure that burned 51 years ago this spring. A story higher, even an old-house-story-higher,...
Outside my own memory

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 24

Category:

Island Notes

A search for a particular postcard rarely ends with my putting my hand on the image I had in mind to start. It began with a thought of the Public Market, the brick-faced store on Dodge Street that was, when I was a child, truly a food market, one of two year-round groceries on the island. For a...
White Board Down

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 17

Category:

Island Notes

A single white board lies on the grass, lifted out of the slots of the two uprights that support it, forming a new sort of an old fashioned bar-way, a single piece of wood barring entry through a gap in a stone wall. It is just there and I have to presume it is a leftover of yesterday's great wind...
On Big Dog Paws

Martha Ball

Fri, Mar 3

Category:

Island Notes

The first day of March comes in like a lamb, the morning filled with birdsong and fog. I look out to the south, to my measure of visibility, and see, as I can in all but the heaviest snows and thickest mist, the shape of the farm buildings on the far side of the one-time pasture. They stand, from...
Washington's Birthday

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 24

Category:

Island Notes

Snow chased my dreams. It is rare I remember these stories my mind tells while I sleep, rarer, still, that they are more than scraps, jumbled snapshots, overlapping, utterly confusing seasons and places and decades. This one, or a segment thereof, fell into current time and place, a snow come...
Spot of Hope

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 17

Category:

Island Notes

The sun is moving out of its winter home in the south. First light falls differently in different seasons and now it comes through the more southern of the east windows in the ell of my house, in the room where I sleep. It rises, visibly, from the ocean, at the edge of one of the places where the...
Happiness

J.V. Houlihan, Jr.

Sun, Feb 12

Category:

Island Notes, The Ferry Dock Scribbler

An old Chinese proverb: If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a month, get married. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody else. Yeah, I know,...
Before the storm

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 10

Category:

Island Notes

I t is unseasonably warm, 50 degrees and sunny, a day I have twice caught myself leaving my coat on the car seat as I walk away wearing a sweater that is more a weight for spring and fall than winter. The ground is slightly soft from yesterday's rain but there has been no deep frost and no mud...
Reaching for the sun

Martha Ball

Fri, Feb 3

Category:

Island Notes

It is the last day of January and it is snowing softly in mid-afternoon, wreaking far more havoc on the mainland — where multiple crashes are being reported on the highway — than on Block Island — where the distant horizon moves between sharp and fuzzy and back again. It does not promise to be much...
Inflexible spirit

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 27

Category:

Island Notes

The week began with rain shifting from drizzle to downpour and back but with a hard, steady, wind, the blast of winter that roils the sea and keeps the boat in port for two days in a row and even kept the planes on the ground for a part of the time. The wind slammed in from the east and northeast,...
January Road

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 20

Category:

Island Notes

There was an after the storm lull this morning, a moment of near calm, in which the sound of the ocean, a muted surf, rolled up from the beach. When I opened the west-facing front door to let Autumn out I was met with the distant beep-beep of a truck backing up, an early visitor to the dump/...
Without the Sound

Martha Ball

Fri, Jan 6

Category:

Island Notes

The rain has abated at last, the drizzle that began yesterday as we approached the big church on Chapel Street to attend a funeral dreaded for the fact of it marking the end of a life cut too short. It proved to be quite beautiful in its celebration, filled with both ritual and simplicity, with the...
The tractor, 25 years later

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 30

Category:

Island Notes

Twenty-five years ago I submitted a handful of short pieces of writing to Peter Wood, then Editor/Publisher of The Block Island Times . The first he used was my recollection of sitting, with my niece from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, on the old cistern cover in the back yard. The neighbor was...
Winter Sun

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 23

Category:

Island Notes

It is, technically, the last day of fall, sunnier and calmer than forecast. On the other side of the year we have an abundance, nay, an embarrassment, of light, come so early and staying so late I wonder how anyone can function more to the north than we. Now, the length of day in Anchorage is three...
From the Lighthouse

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 16

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

It has been too long since I have been to the lighthouse, the grand gothic structure sitting on the bluff high above the ocean. It is never far removed from my life; it is visible from my house, a silhouette on the crest of the land in day, a faint green blink at night. The structure, all two...
On a distant hill

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 9

Category:

Island Notes

It rained through the night, battering the east windows, and the wind howled its winter banshee wail. It sounded cold so it felt cold, but did not make me think beyond reaching in the dark for the comforter that has been waiting, patiently, at the foot of my bed. There was an odd noise, continuing...
Displaced Autumn

Martha Ball

Fri, Dec 2

Category:

Island Notes

In the damp, sun-deprived days of late fall and early winter — and in winter's cold — I sometimes walk into my kitchen solely to feel the sun pouring through the south facing windows. Of late, at a certain time of day, that short trip involves stepping over a big golden dog who lies in the pool of...
Postcards from the edge

Martha Ball

Wed, Nov 23

Category:

Island Notes

For the holidays, postcard images from half a century ago, showing Block Island, still the sleepy little town time almost forgot, when a few cars constituted a busy summer day and views were wide and open. The same things were advertised as are today, “...
Surrounded by the Sea

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 18

Category:

Island Notes

We live surrounded by the sea, we hear the sound of it in the dark and feel its dampness on the raw east wind. We smell it when it is filled with sea weed and roiled by a storm passing off to the east, we taste it on our skin when we walk too close to its salty mist. We see more or less of it...
Such great hope

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 11

Category:

Island Notes

The morning dawned bright after a long dark night, the sky and sea spread with the same rose gold, a vibrant and hopeful color reflected in the flat calm surface of the big pond behind my house, emerged in early November from its cover of summer greenery. I wondered at it for a bit, even thought of...
Bells

Martha Ball

Fri, Nov 4

Category:

Island Notes

W e are in that time in the fall when first morning sun is still too far to the east to spill through the south-facing kitchen windows and provide that flood of sunlight that is the saving grace of those cold winter days when it is warmer when I come downstairs than it is in early November. By noon...
117 and counting

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 28

Category:

Island Notes

T oday, it is likely more people know — or have some vague familiarity with — the quote “justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream” from the extraordinary speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington DC on a hot summer day more than 50 years ago, than from...
October's Offering

Martha Ball

Fri, Oct 21

Category:

Columnists, Island Notes

It is one of those October days that is the reminder that comes every year and every year comes as a blessing. These are days — I am sure I have written other Octobers — of miracle and wonder. By week's end we will have slipped into the darkening world of sunrises after 7 a.m. and sunsets before 6...

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