Wednesday 20 August 2008

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Aphrodite at Saturday Morning AusKick

© John Sawyer – August 2008

Forty pairs of eyes watched her as she lifted her youngest to her hip and they kept watching as she sipped her latte from a paper cup and laughed at her friend's story. It wasn’t a polite dainty laugh. It was a full hearty laugh with sympathetic movement of her head and upper body. It was an animated laugh that celebrated her existence on the slightly damp late winter’s morning.

The forty pairs of eyes weren’t exactly staring. They were pretty busy scrutinising their own kids’ performance in the formalised running, marking, handball and kicking drills on the oval. But she was beautiful and forty pairs of eyes wandered and wondered. Slightly ginger, yellow hair pulled like a ballet dancer’s into a high, tight pony tail but with a couple of stray curls on her forehead. Her penetrating brown eyes sparkled as she yelled encouragement to her son and some of his schoolmates. The watchers noticed her high cheekbones, her full lips and the proper sized nose. The whole package reminded some of a roman Aphrodite in white marble. Others thought of the Botticelli Venus rising from a shell. Others just watched.

When the drills finished, the dads, granddads and some mums spent time kicking the ball up for their young heroes to take easy chest marks. The watchers waited for their Aphrodite to show her skills. They weren’t disappointed. Forty brains clicked at once:

“So beautiful and she doesn’t kick like a girl. What joy!


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