Wuthering Heights Sounds Like Spring to Me
​

My mother took me back to England 
to say goodbye to my aunt, who was moving to Australia.
I remember spending days preparing for her party. 
I can still hear my mother and her sisters laughing like witches
in the front parlor of my grandparents’ house,
cutting square cucumber sandwiches and shelling hard-boiled eggs, with the windblown daffodils knocking the crown glass panes like a bouquet of restless Cathy’s.
 
Top of the Pops was on TV as white noise until I heard her, 
a banshee in a black dress, yowling:
Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering Heeeeiiights, Heathcliff… 
her eyes wide, moving side to side, seeing things only a cat could see.  
I wanted to know more about Wuthering Heights and this woman singing it. 
I was only six, going on seven.
My aunts pulled the novel from the bookcase and held it high like a Book of Shadows.
Haworth, they said, is too far from where we are in Birmingham. 

My grandmother, sensing my disappointment, took me by the hand
and walked me to the record shop where she purchased my first 45:  Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. 

We passed the silly daffodils on the way back,
but it was the rolling, grassy hills that called me, and I hummed back, out on the wily, windy moors we’d roll and fall in green, 

forever imprinting the sound of springtime
 and the softness of my grandmother’s hand.

Published in Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry

 

Artist: "Jenni" Guinevere von Sneeden, @guinevere.von.sneeden