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Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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garden

May 25, 2024May 29, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Clouds like scales on the belly of a blue fish. In the garden, ants immobilized by the cold cling to the sweet pink seams of peony buds.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags ants, garden, peonies
May 27, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Warm, humid, and overcast. In the side garden, the first twelve yellow irises opened in the night. Small flies walk all over my legs.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags garden, iris
May 3, 2008 by Dave Bonta

The air smells of rain. A large robber fly buzzes into my weed garden and lands on the underside of a dame’s-rocket leaf.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dame's-rocket, garden, robber fly
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On This Day

  • November 6, 2025
    Clear and cold, with wind supplying all the voices in the dawn chorus. A crow rockets past, wings at an oblique angle to its direction of travel, cheering itself on.
  • November 6, 2024
    Cloudy and unseasonably warm at sunrise. My head throbs from watching election returns. A small buck walks by below the house sporting a single spike of antler—a unicorn.
  • November 6, 2023
    Sunrise glowing orange between the half-naked ridgetop oaks. The yard fills with small birds: sparrows, kinglets, the inevitable wren.
  • November 6, 2022
    Daybreak. A buck sniffing the ground for signs of estrus scratches his head with a back hoof. A mosquito sings into my ear.
  • November 6, 2021
    Cold and very still. Every leaf in the myrtle patch—Grandma’s legacy—is edged in white. Sunrise stains the western ridge blood-red.

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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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