Poetry

Holiday

A poem about visiting Long Beach, Washington

I love a small town that builds a big, hand-lettered arch to lay claim to the “World’s Longest Beach.” I love a bungalow with a view not quite of the beach but of the arch.

I love the word “bungalow” because it makes me feel like Greta Garbo to rent a cozy, quiet place with a king-sized bed from which I can see fireworks above the arch

on New Year’s Eve because I’m lucky and cancer-free. I love my surgeon. I love winter sun despite the glare that hides the flash of the lighthouse at Cape Disappointment on New Year’s Day.

When I read Trista’s writing prompt about your local love, I remembered a poem I’d written about staying at Long Beach, Washington over the new year’s holiday a few years ago. Although it takes about three hours to drive there, I think of it as my local ocean beach!

I’ve visited Long Beach several times to stay by the Pacific Ocean. I live near the water here in the suburbs of Seattle, but it’s not the open ocean. There’s something different about looking out over the ocean where you can’t see any land, just water, and more water.

Long Beach is a cool destination in other ways, too, as it has a retro small-town feel to it. You can have a delicious sandwich on freshly baked bread at a local bakery. You can play Skee-Ball at the small arcade. You can go to the general store and buy pick-a-mix saltwater taffy and old-fashioned sodas by the bottle. You can visit two lighthouses just south of town.

Two years prior to the trip I describe in this poem, I’d been feeling ill since just before Christmas and had surgery during the first week of January for an ovarian tumor. So it was a big relief a couple of years later to be at the beach and in good health.

I haven’t visited Long Beach in a few years now, but I’d like to go again sometime soon. It’s close to the Oregon coast, too, so it could be part of a longer road trip.

“Holiday” was originally published in an online poetry magazine called Impossible Archetype.