The Law of the Procurement

Procurement comes from pro + curare: to care for on behalf of. It is not wishing and it is not buying; it is the whole discipline of obtaining what the house needs, in order, and keeping it once it comes. She begins consistent — the same on Tuesday as she was on Monday — and how she moves is to even a thing: level it, smooth it, take the humps out until it can carry weight. What she works with is obtainment, the getting itself. Until a thing is obtained it has not been reached; nearly obtained is not obtained. She becomes constant, and constant is more than consistent: consistent repeats, constant endures, and preserve is the better part of this word — it does not lapse when nobody is watching. She stops merely getting and begins to earn, and what she becomes is the obtainer. She obtains. This is how a woman goes up the rung of the ladder: not by one lucky getting, but by becoming the woman a thing is obtained through. In the Sovereign she becomes cohesive — she holds together, so nothing she obtains falls out the bottom. Her movement is to endure, and endurance here is a mastery, not something to grit through: it is the preserving quality itself, cohesive learning, the ability to keep on keeping. Obtainment becomes obtainer becomes obtainments, plural — she obtains many things and, which is rarer, she keeps them.