Thanksgiving Activities

From letter dated December 8, 1962

I had to do some unexpected house hunting. Our charming landlady is coming back the middle of January, to our dismay. Still, she originally expected to be back in mid-November, so we’re pleased to have the house through the holidays. With my Dad coming for Christmas and bringing my sister Mary’s oldest daughter Peggy (to our utter delight) we will appreciate being in this lovely, large house on the waterfront.

Finally found a house that will do. It is adequate and in the same neighborhood, but it isn’t on the sea. It needs quite a bit of work and it isn’t furnished. We have very little furniture of our own after all this moving about. Still, we’ll fill in here and there and get along.

 

Had a lovely Thanksgiving. I like to do a little something though it isn’t a holiday here, so we invited three couples for a buffet supper. Two of the men had been with us last year after the hurricane when I also had a Thanksgiving supper. Their wives were in the States at that time, so it was fun having them all together with us. We also included the perfectly charming new American Consul and his wife plus their son, Alex’s age. Bucher got my turkey…all 25 pounds of it, the largest I’ve ever cooked. We had a nice dinner and really a very pleasant evening.

 

The following Sunday we went up to spend the day with Frank Norris, an American friend of Bucher’s who has a farm near the Western border. Frank and Martha Norris are lovely people and have worked like dogs for fifteen years. Their farm was “high bush” when they bought it…that means jungle with trees 80 to 90 feet high. Just clearing is a massive job, of course. They started logging the trees and built a lumber mill. As they cut out, they cleared and planted. Now they have bananas, cacao, coconuts, beans, and a fine herd of cattle that Frank is gradually upgrading with purebred Santa Gertrudis breeding stock.

We all got into Frank’s jeep pick-up and drove around the farm. The two-hour trip took us over things he called roads, but which looked like low jungle to me. We went up hills, down through muddy sinkholes, across fields full of stumps where he just finished bulldozing, and through a sea of sorghum-grass pasture. Although Frank said the grass had been cut down three weeks earlier, it was already higher than the top of the jeep.

Frank’s farm is up on a plateau above the Belize river, with the highest fields 30 feet above river level; in the floods after Hurricane Hattie, those fields were six feet under water. His banana trees along the river bank up on the highest level were mowed flat. He cut out all the trunks and new shoots came up from the roots. He said it had looked like a series of football fields paved with two inches of mud right after the storm; in the same spot just 13 months later we saw full-grown trees with massive bunches of mature fruit.

We saw a section that Frank had cleared three years ago and then, for some reason, had to leave without planting. It is now solid with trees and bushes and vines 20 to 30 feet high. The jungle sneaks up on you the minute you turn your back.

I was exhausted simply seeing the work that had gone into the farm. Frank has done well…and deserves it.