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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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grass

May 25, 2024March 5, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Sunny but cold. The woods-edge chipmunk scuttles back and forth. Tips of dead grasses hanging into the stream have new feet of ice.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags chipmunks, grass, stream
March 22, 2016March 22, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Before sunrise, I’m fascinated by the yard’s labyrinth of dead grass, that tangled thatch. A robin warbles for a while and falls silent.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags American robin, grass
November 5, 2011 by Dave Bonta

A hard frost softens the edges of leaves and blades of grass. The witch hazel blossoms beside the house have curled into woolly fists.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags frost, grass, witch hazel 2 Comments
June 21, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Ushering an enormous wolf spider outside, I disturb a baby woodchuck. Grass blades weighed down by rain spring up as it barrels through.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags grass, groundhog, spiders, wolf spider 6 Comments

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On This Day

  • October 6, 2025
    Crystal-clear. A Cooper’s hawk calls from the top of the tallest tree in the yard as sunrise reddens the western ridge.
  • October 6, 2024
    Clear and cold, with more sky showing through the ridgetop trees. A raucous assembly of crows gives way to ravens—their resonant croaks.
  • October 6, 2023
    Heavily overcast—what the weather app calls “light rain”—with a crow yelling in the distance and a yellow-bellied sapsucker mewing like a kitten.
  • October 6, 2022
    Another woods-edge maple has gone red. Bouncing bet still blooms beside the porch, four months on.
  • October 6, 2021
    Overcast at dawn. The silence is broken by the periodic splats of black walnuts. A barred owl’s single, round note.

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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