thunderstorms – The Morning Porch

July 25, 2022 by Dave Bonta

The sky never gets fully light before thunder starts to rumble. Now it’s getting dark again. The birds fall silent.

June 21, 2022 by Dave Bonta

One gray squirrel shadows another, nose to tail, down the gray driveway. Mid-morning thunder. A patter of rain.

June 11, 2025
Cool and mostly clear at sunrise. A goldfinch chirping in pentameter. The cerulean warbler changes trees—a blue-striped blur.
June 11, 2024
Cold and gray. A catbird crosses the yard with a fecal sac from one of its nestlings in its beak. A male ruby-throated hummingbird buzzes the boot soles on my propped-up feet.
June 11, 2023
Rising late, I’m in time to see the last cottontail going back under the house for a mid-morning nap. Cuckoos call in the distance. Common yellowthroat. Wood pewee.
June 11, 2022
Writing on the porch for a while, I am confronted, every time I look up, by three bracken fronds in my yard that have already turned yellow, like needlessly complex skeletons of fish.
June 11, 2021
Overcast and cool. A titmouse appears to have developed a taste for caterpillars, circling the trunk of a walnut like a nuthatch.