“Poem for Nonnie” by Annabelle Jane Swift

Annabelle Jane Swift and Carol Mylander 

Whenever anyone asks me about summer, I tell them about my grandmother.

She lives in a small city so we walk to breakfast and make our own postcards. We eat dinner in the backyard, watermelon and humidity. These are the only early mornings in my childhood. And the children still sit on that picnic-dinner table while she paints their portraits.

There are swimming pools in every story I write. Every day, the blue of the water stays the same and I try on different words to describe its color. She works all day so I can have this: the sunburns and the golf carts, the dogs and the way the paper looks like it is lit from behind the words. I dive into the water when it gets too hot.

We take a long weekend. Still waking up early, that form of karate in the park by the water. I can never remember its name. I learn an important lesson in writing: sometimes the right words do not come.

I have lived in many places but nowhere do the roads dip down to kiss the water like this. We can taste the sea glass, the way the green pieces are nostalgic, the smooth of the blue on the soles of our feet. Sea glass is one of those things that can make me smile whenever it crosses my mind.

Annabelle Jane Swift

The cobblestones of Chestertown do not look as good in my postcard renditions, but never mind. I finish my first book during one of those summers. The first short story I have been so proud of. For the first time, there are birds in my poems. Trees and the boats on the river. I have fair skin, but I will not hide from the sun. I move and move, but never mind. Every summer is Chestertown. The local theater puts on another musical. There are more poems to be written, even if I can not always find the right words. She has books for the years of her life, too. She stacks books like I do, plays piano for the whole house to hear in ways I was so scared to.

In a story I wrote this year, I described the mother the way I think of my own. “A force of nature, like her mother before her.” The biggest compliments I know how to give are all about being strong like these women I know, being sensitive like the girls and being independent like the women.

When I was younger, I wrote that I could not imagine my grandmother being scared of anything. I can remember every summer thunderstorm that kept me awake. I had enough fear for both of us, I decided.

There are stories that force a moment on you after you finish them. It is quiet and you feel the weight of something large. It is the best feeling. It is the feeling I get late at night in my grandmother’s house, when the only sound is of the ceiling fan and her snoring.

Annabelle Jane Swift lives in Denver, Colorado and was born there. However, she is a 13th generation descendant of some of the original founders of Kent County and one of the first in her family who was not born on the Eastern Shore.  She is currently a third-year student at the University of Virginia, where she studies law, philosophy, and writing, and is a member of Kappa Delta sorority. She is an accomplished musician, playing piano, guitar, ukelele, and flute.  She has also done stand-up comedy at a campus club.  When she was a little girl and her parents offered to send her to summer camp, she said she wanted to go visit her Nonnie instead.  So every summer for years she went to “Camp Nonnie” in Chestertown. Annabelle is the granddaughter of Chestertown resident Carol Mylander and has spent many happy weekends and holidays in Chestertown and Kent County with field trips all along the length and breadth of the Eastern Shore of Maryland.