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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

  • April 16, 2025
    A cold wind rummaging through the forest, mixing up the sounds of crows and trains and sirens. The sun appears for a second or two…
  • April 16, 2024
    In the last few minutes before the sun crests the ridge, ghosts lingering among the trees turn back into blossoming shadbush. A chickadee is singing…
  • April 16, 2023
    Sun glimmering through fog as wild turkeys whine and gobble, mourning doves moan, and a red-winged blackbird sings in the marsh.
  • April 16, 2022
    Rainy, breezy and intermittently bright. The zigzag flight of a phoebe finding breakfast above the daffodils.
  • April 16, 2021
    The last to shed leaves in the fall is the first to regrow them: sprawling lilac with green tongues just long enough to catch drops…

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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