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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

The Morning Porch
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March 19, 2025 by Dave Bonta

Cool and clear. At sunrise a red squirrel appears on the end of my porch instead of the usual gray squirrel, spots me, and moves over to the stone wall where chipmunks always sit, nervously peering all about.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags red squirrel, sunrise
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On This Day

  • June 11, 2025
    Cool and mostly clear at sunrise. A goldfinch chirping in pentameter. The cerulean warbler changes trees—a blue-striped blur.
  • June 11, 2024
    Cold and gray. A catbird crosses the yard with a fecal sac from one of its nestlings in its beak. A male ruby-throated hummingbird buzzes the boot soles on my propped-up feet.
  • June 11, 2023
    Rising late, I’m in time to see the last cottontail going back under the house for a mid-morning nap. Cuckoos call in the distance. Common yellowthroat. Wood pewee.
  • June 11, 2022
    Writing on the porch for a while, I am confronted, every time I look up, by three bracken fronds in my yard that have already turned yellow, like needlessly complex skeletons of fish.
  • June 11, 2021
    Overcast and cool. A titmouse appears to have developed a taste for caterpillars, circling the trunk of a walnut like a nuthatch.

See all...

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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