In Brisbane, our family lives in a house in a row of wonky little houses that looks like all the others in the street; nothing more than a wooden matchbox on sticks.

Ma’s always complaining about it saying it’s too hot in summer and too cold in winter and nothing much else in-between. She doesn’t like it much here except for that big Jacaranda tree out front that swaps its leaves for flowers every October, changing our front lawn into a sea of purple.

Every year when it does that, Ma will go stand under it and just look up at that tree.
‘Hey you cutting!’ yells old Mrs Machenko from next door, waving her rake in the air at Ma as the breeze sends a flying carpet of purple flowers over her neat and green cut lawn.

‘Yes, yes,’ nods Ma over the fence, then turns to speak to me.
‘Ah, silly old nag. If it wasn’t for that tree, she’d be sitting on her verandah all day, twiddling her thumbs!’

I smile secretly at Ma.

Ma bends down to pick up one of the bell shaped flowers. She lifts the flower up to her nose, inhaling its soft honey scent, before placing it gently behind my ear.

Back home in Buenos Aires when I was a little girl, in the middle of la Plaza Flores there was this huge Jacaranda. Everyone called it ‘el gigante’ because it was so tall you could see its giant purple head poking out from amongst the building tops. People used to say the tree was as old as the city itself.

‘How old is that?’
‘Oh, about 500 years old.’
When Ma tells me that, I think of those purple-haired grannies wandering around the supermarket pushing their shopping trolleys and poking their purple heads into everyone else’s business. Each one of them must be 100 hundred years old −at least!
Ma runs her hand over the tree’s trunk, feeling its rough grey bark.
‘People used to say el gigante, was magic. If it heard you singing, it would respond by whistling you a tango. Some people even said that’s where el tango was born.’
‘That’s not true,’ I say.
‘Are you sure? Look up,’ Ma says.

I look up and notice the tree’s branches swaying with the breeze as if it was dancing to some kind of music invisible to my ears.

Ma catches sight of my surprised face and winks.
Smiling, Ma leaves the tree and goes over to the driveway, bends down and picks up a pebble. She throws it high up into the trees’ branches, and then quickly gathers the corners of her skirt up. I watch surprised as Ma breaks into a run, circling around the front yard catching the purple flowers as they sprinkle down into her outstretched skirt.
Slightly out of breath and smiling at me from ear-to-ear, Ma calls me over to her. She spreads her skirt around her and pats a spot on the grass signaling me to sit. As soon as I do, she starts to sing an old childhood song, a word for each flower she counts out.

Arroz con leche, me quiero casar
Con una señorita de San Nicolás
Que diga que ‘Si’,
Que diga que ‘No’
Con esa señorita me ca-so yo!

‘See how lucky I am? I’m going to get married!’ laughs Ma, holding up the last flower.
Then as if by magic, (as if the tree heard Ma singing), the Jacaranda sends another sprinkle of flowers. Ma smiles at the little purple flowers landing in her lap.
‘Ah, if only you could have seen your Auntie Lucy back then,’ she says. ‘How jealous she got when we’d play this game.’
‘And why?’ I ask.
‘Because she wanted to be the one to get married first!’
Ma looks at me then pretends to cry. ‘A mi! A mi! She’d cry. Sound familiar?’ (Yeah, my little brother Attila!), ‘But this one day, she snuck off and chose the biggest rock she could find and before anyone was ready she threw it high into the air.’
‘I’m going to get married first!’ she teased, as she took off running.
‘But your Tia Lucy wasn’t too quick. Her feet stuck to the ground like lead. And before she even knew what happened. Poom! Down came the rock hitting her hard on the head!’ Ma throws her head back and lets out a belly laugh. ‘How we all teased her that day!’
I can’t help smiling when I think of my Tia Lucy and Ma as little girls running around el gigante catching their husbands in their outstretched aprons. A tiny flower catches the breeze and helicopters down. Ma watches it land in my lap.
‘Of course, we played it when the nuns weren’t looking. They didn’t like us lifting our skirts too high or showing our knees. It wasn’t proper behavior for a lady,’ she says.

We sit together in silence, watching and listening to the flowers as they plink plink plink onto the roof of our old Valiant before Ma stands up and joins the cursing Mrs Machenko, by quietly scraping the fallen flowers into a pile.

Later, I’ll help Pa feed the flowers into the incinerator in the back yard. I’ll watch them turn from purple to brown. Pa fanning their smoke with a newspaper.

‘This tree is the only thing about this place that reminds me of home,’ Ma says softly.
Rake in hand, she stops a moment, and stares right down to the end of the street, gazing past the tall branches of the Jacaranda like she’s searching the streets for her own city.
Later, watching those flowers burn in the incinerator, I’ll try and imagine the city where Ma grew up with its avenues, life, laughter and songs.

And try as I might, well, I can’t seem to picture her city at all.