22 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
It is raining, always a blessing in the desert. But this morning, it is especially sweet as Basho and Issa take their first walk in the rain. Everything is heightened—the colors, the smells, the clouds moving across the face of Castleton Tower. Each minute is charged with what each kitten perceives through their eyes, ears, nose, whiskers, tongue, and paws. I am watching lion cubs prowl the ever-expanding territory of their home ground. In truth, they are more like children venturing outside the house slowly, and then, gaining confidence as they explode with joy leaping over rocks and landing in small troughs of water that startle them. As I write to you, they are wrestling one another in wet sand—the kittens now pink.
I wonder what good mischief these boys will find when they are no longer captured in your lens. Their six faces of curiosity, fear, skepticism, distraction, terror, and surrender highlight and foreshadow potential moves against a plastered wall of white.
Their feet tell us as much as their eyes do. One boy’s feet are perched on the wooden ladder with his hands clasped behind his head that is bowed, chin to chest, his glamorous body slightly curved; on the other side of the ladder another boy sits highest on the upper rung with one foot lifted, his leg leaning against the long side pole, his other foot balanced on the rung below (his elbow rests on the foot of boy unseen); the boy beneath him is sitting on the outer edge of the ladder on the cross stick on a lower rung still, his left foot splayed on the rung with his heel touching the backside of his thigh, knee pointing forward pulled up toward his chest, with the ball of his right foot touching the last rung of the ladder for support—his is a complicated and precarious pose; the boy standing on the ground (held in place by the hand of the smallest boy gripping his arm) has the feet of a ballet dancer placed in third position looking elsewhere; the rest of the boys’ feet are hidden.
What haunts me in this photograph, Fazal, is the dark open window behind the boys—watchful like a mother’s eye.
Always,
Terry