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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 23, 2025
    Gray skies with a bitter wind. Colored leaves fly past. A pair of gray squirrels meet on the trunk of a black locust and touch snouts.
  • October 23, 2024
    Before dawn, a moon with toothmarks. The tick tock of an acorn dropped by a flying squirrel.
  • October 23, 2023
    First frost here and there like someone’s first white hairs. I crunch through it en route to the top of the field to watch the dawn approaching from 50 miles away.
  • October 23, 2022
    Dawn. Low over the trees, the last sliver of moon like fangs of a snake trying to swallow a dark, glowing egg.
  • October 23, 2021
    A dark and rainy dawn. One especially well-harmonized train horn and the sparrows and wrens wake up.

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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All works on this site by Dave Bonta are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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