It was mid-August in Kentucky, and rswfire was sitting inside his camper naming a chapter before he had crossed into it. He had thought chapter four would be the pilgrimage to Nevada — that was the plan he had been carrying — but he revised it in the telling. Autumn would stay in Kentucky. He said he absolutely loved the nature there, that autumn was magical in that place, and that with summer ending the campgrounds would likely feel the way they had when he first started out. One more of those. Then, before winter, west.
He was honest about the west in the same breath he committed to it. He is not a big fan of deserts; he has said so many times. He could picture himself out there wanting to hike and finding nothing to look at — and he acknowledged the mining towns, the outposts, the things that are technically there to see, and said plainly that they were not his kind of thing. What he did not do was treat that as an argument against going. He said he would try, that he would give it a fair chance. Nevada was still likely, because he wanted to do some stargazing, and he thought he would simply enjoy the experience. Winter required somewhere. Florida was out. He and the cats needed to be warm enough, and autumn on campgrounds would hold.
Between the ambivalence and the commitment he stated the mechanism behind both: his environment matters a great deal to him, everything affects how he feels, it is integrated. He used that not as a reason to avoid the desert but as a forecast for it — an instrument for reading a crossing he had not yet made. And from that same place he named the chapter. The Embrace — because he felt very close to truly embracing the lifestyle he had created for himself, and now his extended family, now that he had Luna. He said it had taken him this long, and here he was.
The naming opened into the family it referenced. He missed Oliver. He had been thinking about his mother lately, and part of him wanted to reach out. He described her as a very sweet person, said there was so much he loved about her, and said it was complicated. Then he said where it came down: his father. She stayed with the man, and rswfire cannot separate the two. He set the areas where his mother could have done better alongside a broader observation — that literally no one gets him right, no one, so why would his mother — and let people do the best they can stand as the frame. He said he did not think he was going to act on it. His internal state told him it was not something he would do. The matter was closed with the reason attached, not left open.
Then his train of thought went. There had been two things, and one of them was gone. He noted it without frustration, said he would have to watch his own video, and left it there. The rest of the night would be chilling. Tomorrow there was still some work to do in the camper, though not very much — his things were coming out of the storage phase, the art supplies going into the closet, paints and bracelet-making moving toward active use. He was unsure whether the paints had survived storage; he said he had no idea how that worked. But he had made room by the way he had organized, and they would be in the closet when he needed them, when he wanted them.
The camera came down off the talking-head frame and found the cats. Bailey and Luna were sitting close, almost chilling, watching each other — a sight to see, he said, and then the moment broke when he moved. Bailey threw up a hairball, and rswfire noted the hope that it was not something picked up from Luna. He opened Luna's cage, spotted a place he had missed cleaning on it, and coaxed her out for her first time out that day. She came to say hi and did not explore. He offered her the floor — completely clean down here, nothing on the floors, that area all cleaned up except the dehumidifier — and set the boundaries of the space out loud: not the bathroom, he still had work in there; not the cab, Bailey was in there and there was work there too. Everything else was good. He was quite happy with it. She wanted to hang out rather than look around, and that was allowed.
Then, through the opening, a short ways down: a deer. Then another one over there. He tried to get the second one in frame, found it, and narrated the finding — there it is, there. He wondered aloud whether Luna had ever encountered them, and answered himself that she probably had, since they were around a lot there. They were just hanging out. He said so twice. Very cool. The chapter had a name and a direction and a date that had not arrived yet, and the evening held two cats, a clean floor, a closet waiting on paint, and deer grazing in the last of a Kentucky summer.