The Morning Porch

December 9, 2008

Dave Bonta December 9, 2008

How the acoustics vary from one morning to the next! Yesterday, the hollow was a soundproofed room; today it’s as echoey as a concert hall.

Dave Bonta December 8, 2008

Cloudy and cold, but the chickadees, titmice, juncos and finches are carrying on as if they were seeing these trees for the very first time.

Dave Bonta December 7, 2008

I come out during a snow squall and am quickly camouflaged in white. Twenty minutes later, the sky is blue and I’m squinting into the sun.

Dave Bonta December 6, 2008

It’s cold—the porch floorboards pop when I come out—and still as a tomb. The distant calls of a female great-horned owl go unanswered.

Dave Bonta December 5, 2008

Juncos gather on the gravel driveway, replenishing their gizzards with grit. Up and down the big maple, it’s squirrel kabuki, love and war.

Dave Bonta December 4, 2008

Patter of rain from a leaden sky. Mouth-shaped wounds on the cherry tree where the porcupine chewed it—by far the brightest spots of color.

Dave Bonta December 3, 2008

Out before dawn, I hear the crunch of boots up in the woods. It stops. All over the mountain, hunters are sitting silently in the trees.

Dave Bonta December 2, 2008

It doesn’t take a hard wind to get the trees talking, merely the right wind. A nuthatch’s nasal commentary. The whistling of doves’ wings.

Dave Bonta December 1, 2008

A half-hour before dawn, the stars begin to lose their luster—always a more melancholy thing than a sunset to me. The wind picks up.

Dave Bonta November 30, 2008

A slate-gray sky. From the birdfeeder up at my parents’ house, the sound of squabbling crowds, pushy as bargain shoppers ahead of the sleet.

Dave Bonta November 29, 2008

The snow gives them away—a crunch of footsteps, the unambiguous shapes: five turkeys 150 feet away, going single-file through the laurel.

Dave Bonta November 28, 2008

An hour before dawn, a deer-shaped shadow drifts out of the woods, apparitional against the snow, like the photographic negative of a ghost.

Dave Bonta November 27, 2008 1

That drum so low it sounds as if it’s in your head? A ruffed grouse, beating the air with its wings like one hand clapping. Or so they say.

Dave Bonta November 26, 2008

Enough snow now to make the ground a blank page for the calligraphy of weeds and the meandering tracks of birds, the prints of their wings.