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Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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flood

March 11, 2011 by Dave Bonta

The ground is mostly bare again, but the wind is salted with more fine flakes. Water thunders in every ditch. A freight train wails.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags flood, rain, snow, stream, train 5 Comments
March 14, 2010 by Dave Bonta

A pair of mallards—probably the ones who nest every year in the field—are dabbling in the flooded creek, here, there, like connoisseurs.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags flood, mallard, stream
March 13, 2010 by Dave Bonta

After all-night rain, the snow is almost gone from the woods, and the gray-brown leaf duff glistens, slick as an amphibian—one that roars.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags flood
January 25, 2010 by Dave Bonta

12 hours of downpour and the stream’s a torrent, water clear from running off frozen ground. Small clouds rise like spirits from the snow.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags flood, fog, rain, stream 2 Comments

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On This Day

  • March 24, 2025
    A damp, gray dawn sweetened by the calls of field sparrows and a bluebird up by the barn. A small shower passes through the woods,…
  • March 24, 2024
    Clear and cold as the moon’s searchlight sinks through ridgetop trees. Dawn stains the east. The cardinal wakes up, full of cheer.
  • March 24, 2023
    Gray and still. Springs gurgle their liturgies. Looking nervously all about, a squirrel disinters a walnut and races into the woods with it.
  • March 24, 2022
    Under a uniformly gray sky the same titmouse has been singing the same monotonous notes, I realize, for the past 45 minutes.​
  • March 24, 2021
    Dawn. A phoebe and a cardinal are singing in the rain. At the woods’ edge, the last patch of snow has shrunk to the size…

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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