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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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snow

December 23, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Parallel relics of the plow, the only snow yet to go glows in the dim light. A song sparrow by the spring house sings his spring song.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags snow, song sparrow, springhouse
December 22, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The ongoing warmth and rain have reduced the snow to scattered patches. Above the roar of the creek, a flock of goldfinches whistling.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags American goldfinch, rain, snow, stream 1 Comment
December 21, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Warm rain. Fog rises from the melting snowpack, lifting and sinking in obedience to imperceptible changes in the air.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fog, rain, snow 1 Comment
December 20, 2013 by Dave Bonta

A gray, dank morning. The light tapping of meltwater on the porch roof. A single squirrel forages in the trees at the edge of the woods.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags gray squirrel, snow 1 Comment
December 19, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Dimples stipple the snow below the porch where icicles dripped. Sparrow tracks circle a dame’s-rocket seed-head bent down by the last storm.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dame's-rocket, icicles, juncos, snow 1 Comment
December 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Snow must be falling in the darkness—I feel the flakes on my hand. The porch shivers as the furnace under the house kicks on.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags snow 2 Comments
December 17, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The curious satisfaction of watching snow erase my own footprints. Up in the woods, the woodpeckers too are busy fixing what isn’t broken.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags downy woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, snow
December 16, 2013 by Dave Bonta

With deep snow, the ground is so much smoother, and the sun can stretch across it now without getting lost in a thousand holes and hollows.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags snow
December 15, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Sometime in the night, the rabbit ventured out for a quick snack on lilac bark. Its tracks are half buried by still more snow.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cottontail, lilac, snow
December 14, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The steady, insidious business of snow. A chickadee lands on a small branch and samples its line of white powder.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags chickadee, snow
December 13, 2013 by Dave Bonta

After two days of soaking up sun, the sage plant’s fat, gray-green leaves have melted the snow-pack around each protruding sprig.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags garden, sage, snow
December 11, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Hollow thumps where a rabbit dashes across the slick snow-crust, alarmed, perhaps, by the sun’s blinding path through the trees.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags cottontail, snow, sunrise
December 10, 2013 by Dave Bonta

At first the snow falls straight and serious. But as it thins, they seem to lose their direction and wander back and forth, these flakes.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags snow, snowflakes
December 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

After 15 hours of freezing fog, every twig is spiky with eldritch feathers. A squirrel makes a small thunder by running on the crusted snow.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fog, gray squirrel, snow 1 Comment
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On This Day

  • February 1, 2025
    Temperature falling as the sun rises. The sound of wind from far off. A small scarlet oak that kept some of its leaves shivers a…
  • February 1, 2024
    Just past sunrise the sky almost clears, then clouds over again. The thermometer’s black arrow points straight at 32. The mound of plowed slow at…
  • February 1, 2023
    I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to this: bitter cold with the ground mostly bare. Chickadees are having a fracas. Snow drifts down…
  • February 1, 2022
    With crows about, a raven skulks through the pines, talking with its mate in sotto voce rattles. They fly over the porch with labored wingbeats.
  • February 1, 2021
    Half-way through a slow snowstorm. The birds seem restless. First a titmouse, then a nuthatch land on the edge of the porch to tell me…

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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