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  • Wednesday April 27, 2016

Wednesday April 27, 2016

Dave Bonta April 27, 2016

Overcast and cold. I am listening to the woodpeckers the way one listens to a marimba, savoring the varied, rich tones of dead wood.

Posted in Plummer's Hollow
Tagged downy woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker
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On this date

    January 16, 2020

    I find my chair where the wind left it at the far end of the porch with a cracked back. Dried cattail leaves flap like banners for the dead. …

    January 16, 2019

    A dusting of fresh graupel, and more flying past: like large grains of salt, or snowflakes which, tragically, are in no way unique. …

    January 16, 2018

    Cat tracks in the snow disappear under the house. The Carolina wrens have survived another cold snap; will they be killed in their sleep? …

    January 16, 2017

    Heavy frost blurs the difference between snow-free meadow and woods, where a white fur lingers. The distant stutter of a Jake-braking truck. …

    January 16, 2015

    A raven croaks somewhere above the ridge. Snow fine as flour. A Brownian cloud of small birds scuds over the treetops: pine siskins. …

    January 16, 2014

    It's cold—I can hear it in the way the wind hisses in the dead grass. As the sun climbs through the trees, I close one eye then the other. …

    January 16, 2013

    Three inches of fresh snow, unmarred by a single human track. A scrabbling of claws: five squirrels on the trunk of a dead maple. …

    January 16, 2012

    My new glasses have some sort of prismatic coating. I turn my head and see a rainbow-banded sun rising east-northeast among the pines. …

    January 16, 2011

    Bands of blue move east and close just before the sun can enter them. Once, when the wind dies, it's completely quiet for fifteen seconds. …

    January 16, 2010

    Day 3 of the thaw. A month's worth of apple cores are beginning to surface. Inside on my computer screen, via webcam, a black bear sleeps. …

    January 16, 2009

    Clear at sunrise, and so cold the mucous freezes in my nostrils. Trees pop at random intervals. A good day to be a black bear, fast asleep. …

    January 16, 2008

    Spindly icicles glitter on the eaves, stunted by too little of the white soil they need to grow, thinned by too much of the life-giving sun. …

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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.

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