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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

  • September 9, 2025
    Another cold sunrise. A distant Carolina wren song prompts the wren roosting atop my heating oil tank to come flying out singing and land in the bracken.
  • September 9, 2024
    A cold and cloudy dawn. The thump and clatter of hooves, deer crashing through the underbrush—hounded not by a predator but the first stirrings of rut. A migrant thrush’s soft call.
  • September 9, 2023
    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.
  • September 9, 2022
    Thick fog slowly infused with sunlight. A squirrel drops pieces of black walnut shell into the dew-soaked weeds.
  • September 9, 2021
    Autumn comes from the ground up: stiltgrass stems reddening as bracken fronds bronze, while funnel spiderwebs snag the fog.

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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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All works on this site by Dave Bonta are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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