Moses Lake resident provides a little lockdown cheer
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald A leprechaun maintains proper social distance in Alan Coulter’s front yard display.
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald A teddy bear in the window of Larry Tracy’s law offices at 305 W. Fourth Avenue in Moses Lake, one of over 60 stuffed animals in windows as part of the great, worldwide “Bear Hunt.”
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald The display in Alan Coulter’s front yard.
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald An inflatable moose dressed as Santa Claus wearing a cloth mask.
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald A Valentine’s Day bear in Moses Lake resident Alan Coulter’s front yard.
MOSES LAKE — One Moses Lake resident has decided the town needs a little cheering up during the COVID-19 lockdown.
So, Alan Coulter put up some of his inflatable holiday display animals in the front yard of his house, at the corner of West Inglewood Avenue and South Crestwood Drive.
Two of them — a Valentine’s Day bear and a Christmas moose — are wearing masks, while all of them are maintaining a proper six-foot “social distance.”
“There’s been a lot of negativity and bad news and not a lot of things that make your day brighter,” Coulter said.
Coulter and his wife Cheryl put up the small display of inflatable characters representing significant holidays — an inflatable American flag, a Valentine’s Day bear, a leprechaun, a scarecrow, an Easter Bunny holding an egg, and a moose dressed as Santa Claus — two weeks ago to help lighten the city’s mood.
Coulter is known for his ornate Christmas yard displays of thousands of lights and scores of inflatable characters, as well as displays at other days like Halloween.
“I saw a piece that someone put up their Christmas lights,” Coulter said. “Someone asked me to do that, and I said no. I’d just put them away.”
But he did decide to take out one character for each holiday.
“It takes people’s minds off things for a little bit,” Coulter said. “But we’re not getting the traffic we get at Christmastime, which is good. People are staying home like they should be.”
Coulter said he also has a couple of stuffed teddy bears in his windows as part of the worldwide “Teddy Bear Hunt” inspired by Michael Rosen’s children’s book, “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.” It’s a game people are playing wherever the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted closures and lockdowns, putting teddy bears in windows and then counting the ones they see.
In fact, there’s a Facebook page devoted to the teddy bear hunt in Moses Lake.
“We have a few of them,” Coulter said. “We found 62 of them around town.”
And once you start looking for them, you see them a lot of places. For example, a pair of stuffed sloths grace the window of The Cutting Edge Salon on Third Avenue, and a bright green teddy bear with a silver bow and holding a smaller black teddy bear sits in the window of attorney Larry Tracy’s offices on Fourth Avenue.
“My kids put it there this weekend,” Tracy said.
“We are a family here,” said Ali Prentice, owner of The Cutting Edge, noting that the 5-year-old daughter of one of her stylists was very excited about putting the stuffed sloths in the window. “This all sucks, but we’re going to be fine.”
Salons and barber shops were among the first businesses Inslee closed.
As for his yard display, Coulter said he wasn’t sure how much longer he would maintain it.
“I gotta mow and fertilize the yard pretty quick,” he said. “Maybe another week or two.”
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].
