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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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Month: October 2009

October 17, 2009 by Dave Bonta

The hush of snow against leaves like soft brushes playing on the skin of a drum. A chickadee calls, and then a nuthatch. Dee dee. Yank yank.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags chickadee, snowstorm, white-breasted nuthatch
October 16, 2009 by Dave Bonta

A wet blanket of snow has crushed the lilac and bowed down the flaming maples and still-green oaks. Every 30 seconds another crack or crash.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags lilac, snowstorm
October 15, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Cold rain rattles in the leaves. On the side of the house, an assassin bug with huge hind legs—about to die, it seems, with his boots on.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags assassin bug
October 14, 2009 by Dave Bonta

A patch of silver in the yard: first frost. A jet glints in the rising sun, its short contrail twice as bright as the crescent moon.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags frost, moon
October 13, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Rising late, I listen to loggers’ chainsaws from over the ridge to the west. The trees are almost at their peak of color. A distant crash.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fall foliage, logging
October 12, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Now I realize why the Adirondacks seemed so quiet: no jays! One reconnoiters the porch, pivoting in front of my chair with an odd screech.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags blue jays
October 11, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Cold and clear. Stripes of sunlight don’t distinguish between the gold on the trees and the gold already on the ground: everything glows.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fall foliage 2 Comments
October 10, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Coming back from the Adirondacks, I find a different mountain: much redder and yellower than it was a week ago, and much less mountainous.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags Adirondacks, fall foliage 4 Comments
October 4, 2009 by Dave Bonta

[Gone camping in the Adirondacks. Back in five or six days.]

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Categories Plummer's Hollow 2 Comments
August 26, 2012October 3, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Thick fog. Silence punctuated by the muffled thuds of black walnuts landing on the lawn. The distant, mad cackle of a pileated woodpecker.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags black walnut, fog, pileated woodpecker 1 Comment
October 2, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Cold drizzle. The burble of a song sparrow. A flycatcher of indeterminate species flutters up from the foxtail millet beside the stream.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags flycatcher, foxtail millet, song sparrow, stream
October 1, 2009 by Dave Bonta

A sudden commotion of geese. I run to scan the sky out of habit, as if they were migratory, and their “V” still a horn open to the north.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags Canada geese
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On This Day

  • June 10, 2025
    Everything wet and shining as the clouds move out. A towhee flies up to a low limb and rubs the caterpillar in his bill against the bark to remove its bristles.
  • June 10, 2024
    Cold and very blue through the trees, where a great-crested flycatcher is going wheep wheep wheep wheep wheep and the leaves whisper everything they’re told.
  • June 10, 2023
    Breezy and clear. A deer steps out of the woods, grunting softly to collect her fawn, who comes leaping through the purple pom-poms of dame’s-rocket.
  • June 10, 2022
    A gnatcatcher is searching for breakfast on the undersides of leaves. A redstart lands on the porch railing and cocks her head at me.
  • June 10, 2021
    Downpour. An ant abandons its dead caterpillar. An earthworm dangles from a cardinal’s bill.

See all...

Related book

Cover of Ice Mountain with a linocut of a big ridgetop tree.

What I do after I sit on the porch. One winter and spring's daily walks distilled into short poems with linocut illustrations by Beth Adams.

Header image: detail from Paper Garden by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (used by permission)

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