Four billion years, and the great inheritor of all our striving has fallen down under a heap of warm cloth and gone limp.
Behold the basket. Consider what it took. The lungfish gulping the poisoned air, betting on a lung that half worked. The shrew who did not sleep, who could not sleep, whose whole life was the flinch before the shadow. The woman who kept the fire alive across the frozen weeks by not once, not for one hour, letting it die.
All of it, all of us, funneling down through the ice and the fever and the years of thin gruel, so that this one, our one, could carry a woven vessel of clean dry fabric across a heated room and set it down.
We watch the hands. Those are the fire-tending hands, the flint-knapping hands, the hands that pulled the child from the flood. Look at them now. They pluck a warm shirt from the pile and press it to the face and breathe. Just breathe it in. For no reason. For pleasure.
We do not fully understand this. There is no wolf. There is no winter coming through the wall. The cloth is soft and dry and smells of nothing that could hurt them, and they have chosen to stop, in the middle of the day, and enjoy a good smell.
Some of us are suspicious. Most of us have stopped breathing to see what happens next.
Nothing happens next. That is the wonder of it. The heir of the shrew and the fire-keeper folds one small square of warmth, and folds another, safe, fed, unhunted, humming.
We buried the seed corn for this.
We would do all of it again.