We saw them in the morning as we were heading to summer ballet: a company from Georgia was digging up portions of the street and shoulder to lay pipe. There were various vehicles for digging, grading, and flattening, and I proposed, “After ballet we could walk up here and watch them use those big machines.”

We decided it might be a good photo opportunity, so I took our big camera and L took our small camera, telling jokes on the walk to the top of our street where we’d seen them working. I hoped it might inspire the Girl to take pictures of something other than the ground, her favorite subject.

When we arrived, though, the workers had already left. Their various tractors stood idle, some of their cabs enclosed in pad-locked sheets of metal. “Perhaps they begin early in the morning to avoid the heat,” I suggested. Still, we decided to look around, first examining an old Ford tractor’s street brush attachment.

“Know what this is for?” I asked.

“It’s wire!” was the answer.

“Yes, but what do you think they use it for?”

A shrug. “Dunno.” (Where did that come from? Where does she pick up all these things? Is she a sponge?)

“They use use it to clean the street.” I paused. “Funny, huh?”

Giggles for a moment, then she exclaimed, “I need to take a picture of that.” She took two, both of them fairly well composed for the Girl’s thrust-camera-forward-and-click photo composition method.

And of course, being the photo-geek I am, I had to take a picture of her taking pictures.

“Why is it blue?” she asked.

“Because they wanted to make it your favorite color” I replied. She gave me that look she’s now mastered that says clearly, “There’s no way I believe that.”

She clarified: “But why isn’t it all blue?”

“I don’t know,” I responded, hoping that would be the end of it. Accepting the limits of my knowledge is something that takes time for the Girl. Later in life, we refer to this as the realization of one’s father’s mortality; for now, it’s simply impossible that Tata doesn’t know everything.

Yet I do know how to operate a camera, and lately L has become more aware of being the object of photos, and so it was today. Pictures were posing events.

New locations, new shots. New questions, new fears overcome. Each day with the Girl can be filled with surprises.

And there was even a bit of role playing.