There have been years Rebecca has sported a Patriots’ number 12 jersey after the Super Bowl, others when her base has been piled with snow plowed from the street, white mounds laced with dirt and sand. This year her basins sport red hearts for Valentine’s Day, not obvious in the photo because of the angle of the sun, but there, more work of our Gardener Elves who tend to her needs the year round, dodging summer traffic and braving winter cold. The street looks empty, deserted even, just before three on a Tuesday afternoon in February, a deception of an instant. I had a few minutes earlier pulled out of the Medical Center, or reached the exit onto Payne Road. . . A little diversion, I never realized until a Providence Journal photographer wandered around Block Island for pictures for the Sunday supplement magazine, The Rhode Islander, that there was a bit of a chuckle in the two signs, one atop the other, Payne Road and Dr’s Office. Nor did I realize how it was I just could not spell Connecticut properly, or how I had come to be so certain the name of our neighboring state ended with a double “t.” The sign on Ocean Avenue, stamped metal, white on black then, was also featured, proudly proclaiming “Connecticutt Ave.” So, back to Payne Road, where I found myself in Block Island’s version of traffic, waiting for a break in the total of five cars passing both ways. It was not until I turned back toward High Street that even more vehicles appeared and finally I realized school was getting out. I had wanted to stop and look at a tree being removed on High Street but there was too much traffic behind me – I know, I sound like someone who goes to town when the summer boat is unloading and complains about the cars and people on the street. So, I pulled over when I reached Fountain Square, which did once have a fountain but has never been a square, thinking it was time for a wintertime Roundabout Report. The sun was so bright it was almost blurring the white facade of the City Drug/Spa/Rags/Inn at Old Harbor and it was keeping Rebecca’s red hearts in deep shadow. The same angle threw the east faces of the buildings on the Front Street into deep shadow and swallowed a retreating car. The iconic double-porched structure, referenced in a will not for its retail street level but its upper floor “residence on the square,” the one with its gingerbread and tower and hooded upper landing that was the sole image used years ago in a New York Times feature “36 hours in. . .” gleamed in the afternoon light. The sky was wildly blue, the ocean beyond wildly blue. By several accounts the lady who owned the building was, at the time of her death in 1941, the largest holder of property on the island, inherited from her husband, her father, perhaps other relatives, and flat-out purchased. And she lived above the store. Someone of my father’s generation told me she recalled another lady, from a grand house on the West Side, a burned ruin when I was little, would come downtown in her chauffeur-driven car and visit. The hostess and visitor sat on the second level porch, dressed as proper ladies should dress, sipping whatever it was fine ladies sipped from their teacups, watching the goings-on at the then-busy end of town. I’ve no idea how much of that was true and how much was a young girl’s fancy but it did make them decidedly Characters in a novel of a Small Town. Getting the photo of the empty space, though, was like capturing one of Rebecca in summer, a hold the phone — a term that has taken on a whole new meaning with these phone cameras — task, waiting for an instant when there would be no vehicle passing by, no interruption, because as much as we tell each other the streets are desolate, they are not. There is parking to be had, although there is still the random car parked here and there along the street in front of an empty building. It is February, and after our 36 hours of deep winter the weekend before last, the land has the look of winter, tan grass, dull brown brush, bare trees scratching the sky. The wind seems relentless one night and by the next I am trying to track the source of what sounds like an engine I am hearing. I go out and look around, finally to the black east, an abyss before the moon rises, and see white lights out beyond the land. There are times it is calm without even the whoosh of a soft wind, or the crackle of cold branches, and sounds, a vessel’s rumble from the east, a tolling bell from the west. Winter calm is rare and it is uncluttered, sound has a clarity it lacks in summer. Winter calm nights remind of the year foreign fishing boats, two of them, sat off the Mansion Beach, their huge lights bright all night. On particular nights my neighbor and I could hear the fishermen on the stern deck, could discern that the language in which they were speaking was not English, could see the white gulls circling them, hopeful sky rats. Tonight there is some wind, soft in the relative mild, deserving some name not on the Beaufort Scale, a hearty breeze. When I go out to fetch Autumn the sound of it melds with that of the surf. The sky is dark, white stars spread across it, and a faint band of pale color brushes its edge off to the northwest where the mainland lies across the water. The air is enveloping but it is also one of those moments it does feel we live on the falling-off-point of all creation, a populated civilization in one direction, the deep in the other, and one misstep could make all the difference.