Saw some begonias earlier today, and got lost in thoughts of our long ago weekend in Whitby when we were young and when we had driven up from Bedford and exited the A1 north of Leeds and traveled through the Yorkshire Moors under a slate grey sky, and stopped for tea and thought of “Wuthering Heights,” and I feigned Heathcliff and you, my Catherine, and we arrived later that afternoon, and checked into our room at the B&B in Whitby proper, our room’s window overlooking Whitby Harbor and the Gun Battery and the North Sea, and we were young then and we walked up those long steps from the sea to the Abbey and looked out over the North Sea.
And after looking for flotsam and jetsam on the lonely beach below the Abbey, we returned to our room at the B&B, and hot and tired from our walk we napped, initially, until we found each other in the bed and made love in the late of the day on that rickety noisy bed before we laughed and slid down onto the floor as the cool afternoon trickled into our room and, outside the open window, the seagulls screamed, drowning out you.
And later in the early evening in twilight we found ourselves walking onto Pier Road along the River Esk.
We smelled that sea smell, and I kidded you about “Dracula” and you told me that the novel was erotic, and we stopped and kissed under a star-strewn sky next to the harbor’s dark water and all the while the Abbey looked down on us from the commanding heights.
And we had dinner at an off-the-beaten-path pub and had a few pints, then went back to our B&B as a cold fog filled the harbor, and the night reigned, and thoughts of Dracula persisted.
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