counterclockwise

How do you top a 20 foot long anaconda? Well, I don’t suppose you can, really. So bear with me while I return to more quotidian topics.

There hasn’t been much of anything photogenic in Tacuatí lately because we’ve been absolutely inundated with rain. In ten days’ time, we got twenty inches. Our rutted dirt road is even more of an adventure than usual, the bus driver shrugs and stays home as often as he runs his route, and the frogs in the pond next to me sing at a cadence and a volume that closely resembles a car alarm.

For all that it’s getting hot, no one’s swimming in the river these days. Not for fear of finding snakes there, so much as for fear of getting swept away in the absurdly high water, or getting tangled in the small trees you occasionally see drifting downstream. A little ways down from where our current bridge stands, where the Vikings allegedly carved the rocks, there used to be a ferry. The pilings are still there, or so I assume. Last time I checked, the water was high enough to completely cover over the gear boxes.

The Guaraní word of the day is iñaña, meaning bad. I’m being bad, coming into town this week, because in two weeks time, I’ll be out again for a long and fantastically expensive Thanksgiving celebration in the other end of the country. I feel a bit hypocritical giving advice on frugality at work this week. But it’d been a month since I’d been to Asunción, and I was out of books and ibuprofen and peanut butter, and in the last two weeks I’d ripped major holes in both of my favorite pairs of pants. So we’ll call this a little mental health leave with time set aside for retail therapy.