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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

  • January 23, 2025
    Out before dawn. The roofline’s lone icicle glitters in the light of a moon grown thin and sharp. Out of the corner of my eye,…
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  • January 23, 2023
    An inch of wet snow clinging to everything. The juncos and chickadees sound the most excited I’ve heard them in a month—which might also be…
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    A warmer morning, and all the birds are calling: Carolina wren, robin, crows, a flicker. Squirrels chase back and forth across the snow.
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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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