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Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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pearl crescent

May 29, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Exotic dancers of the Lepidoptera have names like Little Wood Satyr and Pearl Crescent. Their underwings bear black suns and crescent moons.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags little wood satyr, pearl crescent
September 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

I sit scribbling in a notebook, a pearl crescent butterfly weaving between the legs of my chair. It comes to rest with one wing in the sun.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags pearl crescent
August 25, 2012 by Dave Bonta

A small brown butterfly flutters low over the porch floor, checking out the three brown walnut leaflets, one of which trembles in its wake.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags black walnut, pearl crescent 2 Comments
June 28, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The plaintive bleat of a left-behind fawn. A pearl crescent butterfly explores my palm with its proboscis, reading between the lines.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags deer, pearl crescent 5 Comments

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On This Day

  • May 2, 2025
    Overcast and damp, with the intense green of new leaves everywhere. Two doves moan in different keys. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks down the…
  • May 2, 2024
    A warm breeze at sunrise. My reading is interrupted by an unfamiliar trill: a redheaded woodpecker in the dead crown of the tallest black locust.…
  • May 2, 2023
    A hair above freezing with rain tapering off. Two skinny deer, still in their gray-brown winter pelts, pick their way through the sodden vegetation.
  • May 2, 2022
    Sun through thinning fog—prismatic beads of water twinkling from every twig like the souls of dead leaves. It feels almost masochistic to turn my eyes…
  • May 2, 2021
    Like green tassels on Victorian lampshades the birch catkins fluttering in the breeze. It’s warm—a perfect day for tree sex.

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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