Regardless of how we all choose to celebrate the season, here’s wishing you and all abundant joy, unshakeable happiness, and unchanging peace! Here’s our holiday letter for 2017:
Happy Holidays from Bruce and Nancy in Yachats (pronounced “Yah-Hots”) on the Oregon Coast! We hope our letter finds you healthy and peaceful.
As many of you know, a year ago we moved from Colorado back to Oregon and have been living a couple blocks from the ocean and a stone’s throw away from our dear friends, Dean & Shelly Shrock – who we’ve known for about 15 years and who helped us find the home we’re now in. We’ve always wanted to live on the coast and now have ocean views of the Pacific from our windows and walk to surf views in about 5 minutes, another 15 to town.
We’ve been happily busy in this friendly, vibrant little community of about 700 year-round residents between Newport and Florence. Nancy has gotten involved in the community by volunteering with the Library Commission, creating the Friends of Yachats Library website and working on other community projects as well as helping local businesses with their websites. Art-wise, Nancy has started making art using driftwood! Bruce has been enjoying numerous online groups and website projects, often from pre-dawn until night. We both love photography; so much to explore!
We each had fun painting a banner on canvas for the city downtown banner project (see the photo below); the Heceta lighthouse (Nancy) and a sea star with 5 sand dollars (Bruce). Locals volunteered to paint banners for the street lights in town. There are so many talented artists here! The banners were auctioned off at the end of summer to raise funds for community events; it was fun to know they made some money for our lovely town.
Because of the humid marine climate, plants grow like crazy here and we’ve discovered landscape maintenance requires persistent gardening to keep the plants from taking over. During the summer our friend Dean helped us plant some veggies for our greenhouse – we even had tomatoes until a week or so ago. Nancy has done lots of gardening this year!
Being new in an area is always fun – there’s so much to explore. We’ve enjoyed numerous social events, tide-pooling, agate hunting as well as long walks on the beach with so many state parks and beaches around.
Lots more to share, but hopefully the photos will convey a bit more. (Annual Peace Walk on Jan 1, 2017, Community Bunko Game, etc.)
We’re wishing you a joyous holiday and solstice season and a very Merry Christmas! Happy 2018 and beyond! Love to all,
Bruce, Nancy, Cooper, and Sophie
