The Reef That Raised Me

I was born on Roatán, the largest of the Bay Islands, on a hill where you could see the water before you saw the road. In my family you learned to swim about the same time you learned to walk, and the beach at West Bay was our backyard, our playground and, on good days, our dinner table. My first memory isn't a face or a room — it's a color: that impossible turquoise the sea turns over white sand, a color I have been trying to catch with my hands ever since.

Just past the swim line, the reef begins — part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second largest coral reef on Earth. That was my school. I'd float face-down for hours with a borrowed mask, watching parrotfish crunch coral, sea fans wave purple against the current, and whole cities of color go about their business below me. People travel across the world to see what I could see before breakfast.

One morning, when I was maybe eight, a green sea turtle rose from the deep right beside me — unhurried, ancient, utterly unbothered — took her sip of air at the surface, looked at me the way grandmothers look at noisy children, and sank back into the blue. I swam home breathless and tried to draw her with crayons that had no business attempting that green. Nothing on paper ever matched. That frustration, I understand now, was the beginning of everything.

Because a girl who cannot copy the reef with crayons starts picking things up instead. Shells with pink secrets inside. Sea glass sanded soft by the tide. Tiny corals the storms broke loose. I filled window sills, then jars, then shoe boxes — and one afternoon my mother, tired of the clutter, handed me a spool of fishing line and said: make something. My first necklace was shells and knots, crooked as a mangrove root. A tourist at the pier bought it off my neck for two dollars, and I have never stopped stringing since.

Every piece I make today is still that little girl trying to bring the reef up for air. Mother-of-pearl chips because that's the inside of the water. Glitter suspended in resin because that's sunlight landing on a sandbar. Pearls in rows because that's how bubbles rise when a turtle lets go of her breath. The hibiscus, the palm and the wave in our logo aren't decoration — they're a map home.

The reef taught me the most generous thing about beauty: it gives itself away all day, to anyone who bothers to look under the surface. That's what I want this studio to be. The pieces are affordable on purpose — because where I come from, the most beautiful things in the world were free, and everyone deserved to wear a little of that home.