No News Required

A Basecamp Dispatch on the satisfaction of watching squirrels

Welcome to Basecamp Dispatch — my weekly check-in from the woods, the homestead, or somewhere else with spotty cell service.

I’ve been ducking the news lately. Not because I don’t care, but because I do. Too much, some days.

February isn’t helping. It has a way of shrinking my world to nothing but dull gray hues and cold air. It’s that stretch of the year where one season has ended, and the next hasn’t quite arrived. Duck season is done. The shad run is still a rumor.

It makes me feel like that awkward kid from middle school who didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands.

That restlessness showed up a couple of ways in my world this week. A few people unsubscribed after I posted a love letter to the shad run. It stung a little in the moment.

On Valentine’s Day, I posted a photo of a deer heart. Not as a joke. More as a quiet act of resistance to the images of stuffed animals, roses, and white tablecloths filling my feed.

The photo was flagged as violent content. I guess it is. But it didn’t look all that different to me than the steak dinners circulating under the banner of romance.

Then I found myself staring out the window of my writing studio. There’s a big willow oak just outside, the kind of tree that stays busy without making a show of it. Squirrels come and go. Birds drop in, hop around, leave again.

I meant to glance up for a second while wrestling a stubborn sentence. A solid twenty minutes slipped by instead.

Because a buck squirrel sat on a branch at eye level, working over his tail. Turning it this way and that, focused in a way I didn’t know their little ADHD rodent brains could manage. Unbothered. No audience. No urgency.

He was lost in it. So was I.

Just satisfied to be exactly where we were.

No news required.