Day 26 of NaPoWriMo.*

For today’s prompt, we were asked to fill out an “Almanac Questionnaire” that you can find here, then use our responses as the basis for a poem. And so I came up with this depiction of where I live.

The Simple Life

I live in Washington.
State, not DC.
In the city of Vancouver.
United States, not British Columbia.
Across the river from Portland.
Oregon, not Maine.
Oh, never mind. It’s complicated.

Explorers Lewis and Clark wandered through here
on their way to the Pacific Ocean.
Lewis wrote that the area was
“the only desired situation for settlement
west of the Rocky Mountains.”
Then he moved on and settled in Oregon instead.
When asked why, it is said he was said
to have said, “It’s complicated.”

Captain U.S. Grant was stationed here,
at Columbia Barracks. Then he resigned from the army
and became president. Eventually.
A very uncivil war intervened in that General timeline.
We’re still hashing that war out.
Complicated, indeed.

Sasquatch roams the forests in these parts.
Kinda shy, though; we don’t see him much.
Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding roamed the ice rinks here.
Then her competitor was cut off at the knees —
so to speak – and Tonya took the fall. So to speak.
It’s complicated.

We don’t carry umbrellas when it rains here.
For the most part we don’t jaywalk.
We wear dark clothes on dark days.
Maybe that’s why we forego jaywalking.
On sunny weekends we go hiking in the Gorge.
On rainy weekends we hike faster.
Simple pleasures.

You can wander down most any alley here and find
a micro-brewery or a coffee shop. Or both.
The local newspaper, The Columbian,
(named for the river, not the country)
sported this headline yesterday:
“There’s no reason to struggle to get your coffee fix —
even in the middle of a pandemic.”

We have our priorities, after all.
They are pretty straightforward.
Come visit us sometime, if you can find us.
It’s kind of complicated.

*National Poetry Writing Month, Day 26