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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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cottontail

January 24, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Treetops sway wildly at first light, squeaking and clattering. A rabbit zigzags across the yard, pausing at each dark patch of bare ground.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cottontail
January 12, 2009 by Dave Bonta

The moon comes out, and there’s the rabbit, crouching next to the lilac. It races across the driveway and disappears into the cattails.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cattails, cottontail, lilac
January 9, 2009 by Dave Bonta

At first light, a rare glimpse of a rabbit below the porch. I can hear the ice shattering as it chews on a clump of dead brome grass.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cottontail, gray squirrel
May 14, 2008 by Dave Bonta

At first light, the silhouette of a hawk in a dead tree above the corner of the field. A small rabbit grazes in the yard, ears twitching.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cottontail
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On This Day

  • July 4, 2025
    Clear and cool at sunrise. In the holiday-morning silence, a worm-eating warbler’s dry rattle in the woods accompanies the catbird singing in the yard and field sparrows in the meadow. A crow. The rumble of a jet.
  • July 4, 2024
    Overcast and very humid. The big dial thermometer behind me on the wall is buzzing loudly. A minute later, a mud dauber wasp emerges.
  • July 4, 2023
    Cool and humid—enough to muffle almost all valley noise. The sun goes back in. A carpenter bee sizes up the rafters.
  • July 4, 2022
    Cold and clear. The maternal clucks of a hen turkey. A nearly adult rabbit hops onto the porch and regards me with alarm.
  • July 4, 2021
    Catbird and tanager trading licks. For half a minute, a vagrant sunbeam sets one of the two mullein stalks aglow.

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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