In 1947, Nancy Hopkins left her childhood home in Berkeley, California, to join her husband, Samuel Hopkins, in their newly-built home in Big Sur. Their simple, redwood home, three miles up a narrow dirt road, was perched high on a ridge overlooking the Big Sur coast. As Nancy settled in and raised her children, she chronicled her country life in letters to her parents. Writing about what she loved most-her husband and children, the books she read, the nature that surrounded her, her pleasures at home and with friends, the Big Sur community’s social gatherings-she captured a time and place. Her letters describe Big Sur in the 1950s, a time when “you could drive to ‘town’ 30 miles north on Highway 1, and not pass a single other car along the way.”