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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

  • October 2, 2025
    Cold and still, with a wash of cirrus clearing off after sunrise. Sound is out of the east, so instead of the usual roar of interstate traffic, I hear the shrill beeping of quarry trucks reversing to be filled and the grumbling of stones.
  • October 2, 2024
    Another dark, rainy dawn. I can’t stop thinking of my last dream before waking, in which I had died and reincarnated as a deer. I had so many legs, and everything was delicious!
  • October 2, 2023
    Sitting by the front door to enjoy the moon, I’m startled by a rabbit running between my feet in her eagerness to graze. Five minutes later she runs back to evade a weasel loping down the road. Orion emerges from the trees.
  • October 2, 2022
    Light rain seasoning the breeze. A squirrel perched on a swaying limb chisels open a walnut—that haunted-house sound.
  • October 2, 2021
    Mares’ tails reddening in the east. The reedy songs of white-throated sparrows. A raven’s nasal croak.

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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