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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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spring peepers

October 28, 2023 by Dave Bonta

In the dawn light, the tulip poplars glow a deep orange. It’s unseasonably warm. A spring peeper calls at the edge of the woods.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags spring peepers, tulip tree
September 9, 2023 by Dave Bonta

A whippoorwill interrupted by a screech owl falls silent after three attempts to steal back the stage. When the owl falls silent, a peeper calls.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags screech owl, spring peepers, whippoorwill
April 7, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Dark and rainy at sunrise; ridgetop lost in fog. Down in the boggy corner of the meadow, one spring peeper is still calling.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fog, rain, spring peepers, sunrise
October 16, 2021 by Dave Bonta

The last star blinks out just as rain begins to tap on the roof. A spring pepper calls. Dawn begins to seem like a possibility.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dawn, rain, spring peepers, stars

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On This Day

  • July 29, 2025
    From fresh green to dark green to yellow and brown, the bracken is in a perpetual state of resurrection. Two fawns rush past, tormented by flies.
  • July 29, 2024
    A cabbage white butterfly dances in a patch of sun—the method to a madness of perfectly random moves. An annual cicada’s slowly falling note.
  • July 29, 2023
    White sky with distant crows. The stiltgrass in the meadow is still lying low after a thunderstorm yesterday at dusk.
  • July 29, 2022
    Bleary sun. Tree leaves are all astir, but not by much. Those birds who still sing make it sound perfunctory.
  • July 29, 2021
    A brief glimpse of sun through the mist and rain-soaked leaves. Then back to the humdrum of pewee and pileated woodpecker.

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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