The Morning Porch

Dave Bonta December 5, 2008

Juncos gather on the gravel driveway, replenishing their gizzards with grit. Up and down the big maple, it’s squirrel kabuki, love and war.

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January 15, 2024
7F/-14C at dawn. The rifle-crack of a tree with ice in its heartwood. I peer like some ancient mummy through my layers of cloth.
January 15, 2023
Cold (20F/-7C) and clear. The half-moon is an ear cocked to the west, where sunrise spreads down the ridge like an orange rash.
January 15, 2021
An unfeasibly large number of chickadees foraging along the woods’ edge, calling, singing, dangling from black birch twigs like mutant fruit.
January 15, 2020
Slow winter dawn: light leaking through the trees. A Carolina wren’s molto vivace prompts his mate to respond in sforzando.
January 15, 2019
Wandering tracks of sparrows and juncos in the snow below the porch. Beyond that, bare patches pawed open by hungry deer in the night.