The Morning Porch

February 20, 2026 by Dave Bonta

The stream is loud with snowmelt and last night’s rain. The fog retreats up the hillside, leaving black birch trunks aglow in green lichen.

February 20, 2025
An hour after sunrise and the squirrels are mostly back in their burrows. Weak sunlight on a snowfall fine as flour. A mourning dove calls.
February 20, 2024
In the rising sun’s slow shadow-play projected onto the snow, sleeping trees drift on a sea of glitter. A visitation of wings.
February 20, 2023
Mid-morning, a lid of clouds slowly closes over the east. Caroling juncos fall silent. The wind picks up.
February 20, 2022
Clear and still. The stream has subsided from a roar to a babble: one inmate instead of the whole asylum. The first, skinny clouds.
February 20, 2021
Large, compound snowflakes drifting this way and that. A titmouse suddenly begins darting after them, hovering and diving like a flycatcher.