One of the greatest thrills of life is discovering a word you never knew, especially when it so aptly describes something that you have always loved. In this case, it’s the word ‘apricity’ – which means the warmth of the sun in winter. Tell me that’s not an exquisite word, with an exquisite meaning. It contains a gorgeous bit of tension in its juxtaposing elements, eliciting a silver thread of hope from the barren doldrums of the slumbering season.
When posed with the question of why I have written posts for this website for over twenty years, my first, and perhaps over-simplified response is that I love to write. Inherent in that is a love for words – how they’re used, how they might be transformed and rearranged into something new and spectacular, how they might be both masks and revelations in the exact same time and place. On some level, writing is the ultimate act of manipulation – using phrases and sentences and structure to convey whatever you want to convey, and in that sense it’s a concrete version of what we do as humans. Mastering manipulation may not sound like a noble quest in being human, and maybe it’s not – that doesn’t make it any less true.
Rather than dive into that icky contemplation on humanity, let’s instead focus on apricity, something auto-correct is repeatedly insisting on switching to ‘apricot’ – a lovely word in its own right, but not the one I want to celebrate today. Apricity – the warmth of the sun in winter – must be a phenomenon that most skiers who have ever gotten sunburn around their ski goggles know and understand quite well. As a well-proven non-skier, my understanding is limited to the instinctual way my head will sometimes turn to face the sun on those colder days. Merrily squinting and smiling into its brightness, I close my eyes and let it fall on my cheeks and forehead, imagining through the icy chill and wind that it’s summer somewhere, knowing that it will come again if we’re all still here in a few months.
Apricity… like a sliver of hope in the darkest heart.
