Sometimes you see a naturally occurring palm vaguely similar to an upside-down feather duster. If you stand beneath it, you see what's shown below:
And, did I say that this palm is spiny? It's very spiny, with big, hard, sharp spines, as shown below:
In that picture my hand can hardly find a place among the trunk's many long and short spines jutting out at odd angles. To a lot of Maya folks the big thing about Coyol isn't their spininess, but rather their nuts, which are like little coconuts. Coyols produce abundant crops of such nuts, as shown below:
The wonderful thing is that these nuts make good eating! Sometimes the Maya sell little plastic bags of boiled Coyol nuts swimming in thick, super-sweet syrup. Usually Northerners don't see the point in them, finding the nuts too hard and tasteless and the syrup too sweet, but the Maya say that they're something sweet that lasts for a long time and, to Maya thinking, that's good.