The morning had warmed enough to be worth remarking on, though rswfire said plainly that it was still cold. He carried the camera out with him, holding it as he walked, and opened the recording the way a person opens a door — made it outside guys — the landscape already behind him and the work already underway.
The books came first. He offered no apology for them, only the shape of one, and then withdrew it: a grown man his age with Minecraft books he could not part with. He said he couldn't, twice, and left the sentence there without finishing it into a reason. There was a server too, one he pays for every month, sitting unbuilt. He named it, named the cost, named the fact that he hadn't done much with it yet, and then named the wanting — I want to — and let that stand as sufficient. It was fun. It was relaxing. That was the whole of the accounting.
He turned the camera to the tall storage bin and showed his work. Some volumes he was setting aside with an intention attached: he wanted to try to display them inside. The rest went into the bin, and he assessed the arrangement out loud with the flat accuracy of someone who builds things — a very inefficient way of using the space. He knew it as he did it. The bin went up high; there was room in it he wasn't using well. The telescoping ladder was still waiting. The camper's contents still needed to come in here. He would have to figure something else out. He said it without strain, a note placed in the ledger for later.
Then the cookbooks. I don't know how to cook, guys. He said he had to learn, and held up the books as the instrument of that learning — hopefully these things will teach me. Hope so. A capability not yet acquired, sitting on a shelf next to the ones he kept purely because he wanted them, both belonging to the same inventory, neither ranked above the other.
And then he lifted his eyes from the bins. The day was absolutely gorgeous. He was all by himself, and he said so in the same breath as it's beautiful — the two facts arriving together, unweighted, the solitude simply part of the description of the morning. It went as far as you could see. Somewhere out in it was terrain he could hike, and he said he couldn't wait to get out there, the anticipation surfacing whole and immediate, the way it does when the ground is right in front of you.
And then we come over here — the camera turning, the tour continuing, the sorting unfinished and unhurried, a man in the cold arranging what he owns against an open horizon he had chosen.