An hour long wait at a construction traffic block on the highway from Guatemala to Xela. An indigenous woman from Xela with long plaited silver hair that looks like she could be reaching the upper limits of 70s but who is probably actually in her 50s. An intricately hand woven bulky but always delicately made huipil blouse bristling with geometric patterns. Lots of black and white interlocking arrows making thin stripes circumscribing her body but always seeming to point to her husband on her left. Purples, reds, cerulean blues, and bright brocaded flowers spilling over and around the neck hole of the shirt. The visible part of the shirt ends above her bellybutton, where it is tightly tucked into an unimaginably full and pleated navy blue skirt with skinny stripes of light colors like tiny prisms running from bellybutton to ankle.
And somewhere in that woven cotton shirt is 25 centavos. In goes the hand and it does not stop its methodological and through rummaging above, below, around, behind, within, without, lift, let drop and I don't know how else within one's own shirt and breasts for an inconceivable hiding place. Finally, her hand emerges with the rather sizeable 25 centavo coin, with which she triumphantly decides not to go ahead and buy the 1 quetzal peanuts from the peddler she had just summoned. And back the coin gets plunked for safe keeping.
1 comment:
haha for sure... I love the heft of the coins down here but dislike the 25 centavo very much. it's like "let's put 3.2 cents into something the size of wisconsin" ... If it were proportionally smaller like the 50c piece i would be okay. the others to draw my ire are the 5c pieces. they can get lost in your hair but at least they're small enough to be at a value proportional to the Q1 coin (still my favorite coin of all time for its usefulness and heft)
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