I am in a Sydney summer, where the berries are in season and the lychees are juicy and sweet. We eat raspberries straight up from the punnet, or, late at night and over a rented DVD, blueberries and ice cream over warmed chocolate fondant. In this Sydney summer, the frangipani trees shed perfect white flowers on the sidewalk. We pick them up and tuck them behind our ears on the way to the park.

Nights, I sleep with only the bug screen pulled shut; the sliding doors are open to the night, to the sailboats bobbing in the harbour.



We arrived Thursday, CC and Maeve and me, after a midnight flight. I fell asleep on the carpet that afternoon.

I am awake now. The sky is blue. The water is blue.

Saturday morning we rose early. Maeve had been talking about taking ballet lessons for months, so this Saturday, CC roused Maeve by muttering into her ear: “Ballet class… Ballet class… Ballet class!” The girl sat up straight and slid out of bed. Her eyes were still shut, but she knew what she was going to wear: pink.

We waited outside the school hall in Leichhardt while the other parents and their small, variously pink- and sparkle-clad daughters assembled – seven, maybe eight in all. One of them had wings. The teacher was blond, with a straight back. “Maybe that’s your teacher,” we told Maeve, and she glanced behind her and then turned back to us, eyes alight. “Hey! That’s my teacher!” she said. She slid her hand into her mum’s and we filed into the room.

The teacher taped a line of blue tape to the floor and said, “OK, girls, come and sit along this line.” Maeve, who all the previous night had been crowing, “I’m going to ballet school! I’m going to ballet school!” this morning turned around and said, hesitantly, “Mum?” She wavered between us and the Blue Line before she regretfully took her place. The teacher introduced two minutes of “creative dance”, and the girls swung their arms and tiptoed, skipped, trotted their way across the shiny parquet floor. Maeve sat, suddenly shy and watching with wide eyes, at the line. When the teacher called the girls back to the starting point, Maeve uncrossed her legs, slowly, and walked across the room to where we sat, over by the side. “But don’t you want to dance, Maevey?” CC said. The teacher was modelling pliés and sautés. “I want to eat,” she said, and she reached for her banana.



In the playground before sunset, though, this is the girl who fearlessly hangs from the monkey bars. She clatters across the shaky wooden bridge. She slides down poles, she walks up slides. If there were a tree with branches hanging low enough, she would climb it – or at least try to. She is sweet and small, and, at three years and four months, she sometimes pronounces her ls as ys. “Ee-ee,” she said to me proudly the other day, and her grin was wide and ready for surprises, “this is our yucky day.”