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The Sway of the Palms
A trim Cuban native stands at the tip of his rowboat, one foot placed in front of the other for balance. He uses a long, wooden paddle to dip into the calm creek-water, passing billowy fronds hanging over and protecting an elderly woman from the penetrating sun as she watches her bare children play with stagnant water in a docked dinghy. The man floats under a clothing line that sways as a woman standing on a protruding column of wood drapes a shirt over the line, and then crouches down as he floats through the darkness underneath a shack elevated by stilts dug into the marsh. Bracing himself with his ore and standing up, the man re-enters the open sunlight that glistens on his tanned and muscled back. He navigates around another bamboo-walled hut nestled in the edge of the river with a girl in a flowing day-dress sweeping the wood-paneled floors, and as he bends his knees and plants his toes on the edge to steady the boat, his achilles strains and his cave-muscles tense. He maneuvers past one woman filling a container with water while balancing on a rugged, wood-paneled floor near other women wringing water out of some clothes. He passes another man skimming through the water on his floating platform, wafting down-stream towards the overgrown mangroves and fanning royal palms that sway in the day-breeze, and hunches over to travel below a thin, wooden bridge as a mother balancing a basket on her head guides her children across the extension above him.
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