Alice’s Belize

“My grandma was born on a mahogany farm off the coast of Belize. She was the youngest of eight, but maybe the strongest. She learned that strength from her mother, here sisters, and the powerful sea. She collected memories like she collected shells and feathers and became as resilient as those great mahogany trees. Among the birds, the trees, and the waves, she learned to create, survive, and dream. Her memories live on the the sweetness of mango, the beauty of a seashell, and the wold growth of jungle plants as well as in the ones she called family.”

It was 1923* in Belize when Alice Joyce was born to James Keith and his wife Mary Selene Seay. Hurricane and depression hit in the 1930s. Her father died when she was 9 and one of her brothers succumbed from a snake bite. She made it to the US when she was 14 and enlisted in the Navy as soon as she graduated high school. I don’t know a lot about her childhood days in Belize aside from pictures and a few stories. What I do know is that she was an incredibly determined and resilient person. She made it through difficulty with her shoulders back and head held high. She was searching for something greater.

I also know that my grandma was a gifted artist and gardener. I have two small, beautiful paintings of hers, both ocean inspired. If she wasn’t dreaming about the beach, she was in her garden. She could grow almost anything. Even in her 90s in a nursing home, her room had more plants than I’ll ever be able to keep growing. I’m inspired by her life of strength, her ability to seek out goodness, and her creativity.

We celebrated her 99 year life (or was it 100?) in Texas this past fall where we also gave out packages of dried mango and cashews. I think she would have loved that.

Those two black and white pictures are her and my grandfather, not in Belize. But they both capture her adventurous spirit and I felt like they needed to be included.

These are notes she sent me once about her father’s mahogany farm as well as some seeds: cashew (a favorite of hers), cohune tree - a type of palm, and the tiny ones are called John Crow Beads.

A few other fun notes:

The colors were chosen to represent the sea and the sunrise. My grandma would probably be disappointed that there’s not a single purple in it. That was her favorite color. But as she often said about disagreeing with others, “to each their own.”

The title of this collection is called Belize and if you look at the notes she wrote, you can see that I used her handwriting for it.

*My grandma never stated her age. She just said she was around my grandpa’s age. He was born in 1925. In 2012 after my grandpa’s funeral, we found her documents from the Navy that said she was born in 1924. It was the first record anyone had actually seen. Years later, more documents discovered seemed to agree about 1923 being the year of her birth. My favorite document (below) is a record from her immigration to the United States from Belize that really looks like her birthday is 13 Feb. 1922.