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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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milkweed

September 8, 2026December 9, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Hard frost. As the sky reddens, the meadow comes alive with chirps and trills. A milkweed pod’s frozen spill of gossamer.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags juncos, milkweed, sunrise, white-throated sparrow
March 21, 2021 by Dave Bonta

A few degrees above freezing on a day forecast to be warm, and the air is already busy with flying things: insects, milkweed down, a phoebe.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags milkweed, phoebe
May 4, 2017 by Dave Bonta

The hollow tock-tocking of chipmunks. A milkweed seed floats past: quite a trick, I think, to turn a white beard into a balloon.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags chipmunks, milkweed
April 5, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Warm and windy. Great mobs of dried leaves cartwheel out of the woods. A piece of milkweed down drifts past, liberated from its seed.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags milkweed, wind

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On This Day

  • November 12, 2025
    Cold and gray, with the wind hissing through the last few oak leaves still on the trees. The male Carolina wren sleeps in past his mate, her ‘response’ preceding his call by nearly five minutes.
  • November 12, 2024
    An hour past sunrise, the sky is half blue. The two-year-old tulip tree inside its cage of fencing waves a last, yellow leaf.
  • November 12, 2023
    Sun through thin, high clouds—enough to make the last few scarlet oak crowns glow. An ambulance wails through the gap.
  • November 12, 2022
    A lull in the rains. The transition from a watercolor world to pencil-brown and charcoal-gray is nearly complete.
  • November 12, 2021
    Clouds scudding against clouds, and here and there faint suggestions of blue: a clearing wind, complete with the obligatory exultant raven.

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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