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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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Month: January 2024

January 2, 2024January 2, 2024 by Dave Bonta

An icy breeze curls around the house and makes the big dial thermometer squeak and moan against the wall: five degrees below freezing. The whistle of a mourning dove’s wings.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cold, mourning doves, wind
January 1, 2024 by Dave Bonta

Overcast and quiet before dawn. A half-inch of fresh snow sticks to everything, glowing faintly in the light of a hidden moon.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags moon, snow 1 Comment
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On This Day

  • April 2, 2025
    Gray sky with a smudge of sun, as bright as the half-out forsythia against the woods. A woodpecker and his echo. The rumble of freight.
  • April 2, 2024
    Rain. Every ditch runs with whitewater. Behind the bright forsythia, a gray wall of fog swallows the trees. Nevertheless, a wren.
  • April 2, 2022
    Clouds that looked dark before sunrise are mottled with blue-gray and yellow. Woodpecker blast beats. Wrenish riffs.
  • April 2, 2021
    Bitter wind. Up in the woods, sun glints off an old jar the frost heaved up. When I go to fetch it, ice colonnades crumble…
  • April 2, 2020
    Birds keep landing on the empty feeder, like kids in a home with an unpaid cable bill staring at the TV. The wind pages through…

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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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