So Much Water
Plein Air Poetry
So Much Water: A Memory Poem and a Painting of Roses
My Grandmother's Swimsuit and Brad's Painting from Friendship Park
Plein Air Poetry, Alexandra McIntosh, and Brad Davis
Jun 19, 2026
So Much Water
Our eyes swim in it, glint in the light.
My Nana was scared of water, she couldn’t swim.
She held her breath in the shower, bracing as the
stream ran over her soft curls, brown when she was young, silver-tarnished when I was a child. In my memories, she always has lipstick on her teeth, apple-red. Laughing
with her mouth closed, she runs her tongue back and forth beneath high cheek bones, her eyes bright. In the summer
at the YMCA, she sits on the edge, her long legs in the water, hers black swim suit, pink roses on her chest. My cousins and I
hold on to her shins, descending hand-over-hand like scuba divers, down to her ankles, her painted toes reaching toward the bottom, where our feet finally land.
Brad made this painting earlier this spring in Friendship Park in Cincinnati with a few of our painter friends. I’d started writing this poem in the fall at a retreat near the Ohio River at the Thomas More Biology Field Station— a place I’ve written about before. When I returned to it this week, I thought of Brad’s rose painting—I know my Nana would’ve loved it. The red roses against the blue sky made me think of her swimsuit.
I’ve previously shared a poem from my book called “ Portrait of My Grandfather as a Boy, and I see this as a companion to it. I was fortunate to know my Papa into my adulthood—he passed when I was in my late twenties. I spent lots of time with Papa and his brother and knew many of his childhood stories as well as I know my own. But his wife, my Nana, passed when I was in high school, and she’d suffered a series of strokes before that. My memories of her are largely from my childhood: sleepovers with my cousins at her and Papa’s apartments, her famous spaghetti and meatballs, her soft fingers petting my arm when I got to sit next to her at family dinners. My memory of her is mostly an impression of sweetness, her smile while my Papa told silly stories to make us laugh.
I grieve that Brad never got to meet her, and that she never met him. Especially since losing my mom, I grieve the memories of her own mother she took with her. I’m thankful that my dad got to know my Nana for a long time, and nearly everyone in the town I grew up in remembers her fondly. It’s officially summertime, and just about every trip I take to our local outdoor pool means I run into someone who loved my Mom and Nana. We stand in the sun as they talk about these women who loved me, and the sun glints off the water.