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Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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cicadas

July 7, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Overcast and humid. It seems unusually quiet, and after ten minutes I realize why: no cicadas! See you in 2025, oh weird ones. Insha’Allah.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cicadas
June 26, 2008 by Dave Bonta

A shower blows in. Like late at night when the fridge cycles off, it takes me a second to place the sudden silence: the cicadas stopped.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cicadas
June 11, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Clear, 54°F. Squirrels leap through the dripping branches, chase each other up and down trunks. A distant traffic noise of cicadas.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cicadas, gray squirrel
June 8, 2008 by Dave Bonta

The weird weAHHHHHHHHHHHoh calls of 17-year cicadas join the morning chorus for the first time. A male scarlet tanager flashes past my feet.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cicadas, scarlet tanager
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On This Day

  • October 23, 2025
    Gray skies with a bitter wind. Colored leaves fly past. A pair of gray squirrels meet on the trunk of a black locust and touch snouts.
  • October 23, 2024
    Before dawn, a moon with toothmarks. The tick tock of an acorn dropped by a flying squirrel.
  • October 23, 2023
    First frost here and there like someone’s first white hairs. I crunch through it en route to the top of the field to watch the dawn approaching from 50 miles away.
  • October 23, 2022
    Dawn. Low over the trees, the last sliver of moon like fangs of a snake trying to swallow a dark, glowing egg.
  • October 23, 2021
    A dark and rainy dawn. One especially well-harmonized train horn and the sparrows and wrens wake up.

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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