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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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May 13, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Cold and clearing. The black cat pads up the driveway, coyote bait still in her belly and the usual hungry, hateful look in her yellow eyes.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow
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On This Day

  • September 27, 2025
    Overcast but not gloomy. Above the usual yammering of a red-bellied woodpecker, I catch a few phrases of warbler buzz: cerulean, I think.
  • September 27, 2024
    Fog that lasts for hours, blurring the lines between night and day, and between sky and ground for night-flying migrants now foraging all along the woods’ edge—a cloud full of food.
  • September 27, 2023
    An hour past sunrise and the sky is brightening. A red-bellied woodpecker makes anxious chirps, prompting a flicker to respond. A tree drops a dead limb into last year’s leaves.
  • September 27, 2022
    Rising late to find the sun already in the trees and the air redolent of autumn. Silhouettes of birds pass as quietly as thoughts through the canopy.
  • September 27, 2021
    My first day on earth without a father. It takes me ten minutes to notice the sky—cloudless blue. The laboring engine of a distant plane.

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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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