Peanuts

My father keeps asking me if the kids and I fell into a hole during our walk in June, preventing me from blogging ever since. The imagery works pretty well for me though, in that we left for a long summer vacation requiring eight flights in total, followed by some serious ineptitude on my part involving a new digital camera and a switch from PC to Mac. Needless to say, the learning curve has been impressive, and I'm still not out of the hole.

Meanwhile, as each day passes there are new and exciting African experiences occurring to us that I'm not writing about. Today, however, I had an experience that made me decide to get back to blogging. While it wasn't particularly noteworthy for anyone actually living here in Port-Gentil, it left a very African image in my head that I thought I ought to try to describe for friends and family who have yet to come visit us down here.

As I was driving through town this morning I swerved to avoid hitting a jaywalking woman balancing an enormous tray on her head piled mile-high with peanuts. And I don't mean little bags of peanuts or anything, I mean thousands of individual peanuts stacked carefully one on top of the other reaching an unbelievably delicate peak balancing up there all on its own. While I've never actually counted that many peanuts before, I would venture to guess there must have been a good 3,000 of them on her head. Not that I had time to count. As my car turned sharply and this woman's near-death flashed before me, I was left with a lasting image of thousands of peanuts strewn from one side of the busy street to the other. Good thing that part was only my imagination.