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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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opossum

April 26, 2026 by Dave Bonta

In the half-light of dawn, the pale apparition of an opossum at the edge of the woods. It climbs through the lilac, zigzags across the rain-soaked yard and disappears into the crawlspace under my house.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags lilac, opossum
May 11, 2024 by Dave Bonta

An hour past sunrise, an opossum is out hunting earthworms pushed out of their burrows by the all-night rain. She keeps pausing to raise her snout and sniff the air like a connoisseur.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags opossum, rain
March 19, 2013 by Dave Bonta

In the new snow, the splayed-hand tracks of an opossum cross the porch. A brown creeper busies itself on a tree at the wood’s edge.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags brown creeper, opossum, snow 1 Comment

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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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