The loofah pods return to la Posa

Corina Leonor was walking with a group of tourists through the scrubland when someone lifted a dry pod from the ground — dark, weightless, spent. It was a loofah pod — possibly from *Leucaena* or *Enterolobium* — discovered among the dense shrubby vegetation of la Posa de los Borrachos, that corner of the sanctuary that already carries history in its name. La Posa was, years ago, a place of washerwomen. The women would come down with their bundles of clothes, find the water, and — who knows — perhaps also find these fibrous pods that the land itself offered them for scrubbing and cleaning. Today tourists walk the same path without knowing any of this, and suddenly nature places in their hands an object that reaches back to that everyday past. The discovery was captured in a photograph: a hand holding the pod against the blue April sky, white clouds and green hillside filling the background. A small detail, almost without consequence. But in la Posa de los Borrachos, even the things that dry out and fall to the ground have their own story to tell.