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  • 12/16/2010

12/16/2010

Dave Bonta December 16, 2010

I pause at the door, coffee in hand: six juncos decorate the dead cherry, fat, motionless. A pileated woodpecker cackles at the wood’s edge.

Posted in Plummer's Hollow
Tagged cherry tree, juncos, pileated woodpecker
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On This Day

  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2023
    43F/6C an hour after sunrise. Not a cloud in the sky. Black walnuts crash down at random intervals.
  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2022
    A high cloud ceiling full of holes. In the meadow, one snakeroot flower nods: hummingbird.
  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2021
    Dawn is its own thing—not just a transition, I think, as fog forms and grows. When it lifts, the no-longer-dark meadow glows goldenrod-yellow.
  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2020
    Weak sun. The bright blue of New York asters almost lost among the goldenrod. It takes me a moment to place a distant bird call:…
  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2018
    It’s been 20 years since the butternut tree fell over, but I still miss it: the sky too big, too blank, the nuthatch’s call too…
  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2017
    The corpse of a bee hangs six feet above the garden, swaddled in webbing. Inside its fence, the amelanchier sprout is starting to redden.
  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2016
    A turkey vulture glides low over the trees, circles once to gain altitude, setting off a jay and a squirrel, and soars off down the…
  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2015
    Sunrise stains the treetops. The woods are full of anxious-sounding calls: chipmunks, jays, nuthatches, an endlessly scolding squirrel…
  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2014
    Droplets of fog, back-lit by the sun, stream upward into the blue like reverse rain. At the woods’ edge, a migrant phoebe clears its throat.
  • 12/16/2010
    September 15, 2013
    Cold at sunrise. A pileated woodpecker hitches up the trunk of tall locust, pausing to yell when he reaches the sunlit crown.

Go all the way back to 2008...

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.

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