January, 1976, Excelsior, Minnesota
This morning the word ‘apricity’ wafted through. Oh, hello! But it isn’t THAT chilly!
A memory must want to be visited.
Apricity means ‘the warmth of sun in winter’ and only one image conjures itself:
Entering my fourth month of my first pregnancy, living in our iced in, vulnerable to every wind off the lake, semi isolated wee cottage, on the banks of Lake Minnewashta, I NEEDED to feel warm. Upon moving to Minnesota six months earlier, I became fast friends with a slightly older woman named Jeannie, who lived an entirely different reality than I.
Jeannie’s turrety, majestic, lovely yellow house with white trim (and all the trimmings) was situated in a sunny cove of Lake Minnetonka, (the grand lake over yonder), surrounded by trees and gentle calm. Its yellowness seemed to bask in sunshine season after season. Jeannie and family vacationed in Aculpulco every winter for the entirety, hence this magnificent lightbeam of seduction, just down and over and around and through what were once meadows and woods and now solid frozen tundra, beckoned.
I adopted the sun bathed back steps, cuddled up with Sasha (our Siberian husky) and Maggie (my giant fluffball collie) while she was away every single mid day for two hours. HEAVEN. I read and knitted and thought about the life that was growing inside of me and experienced APRICITY heart and body and soul.
And now, wherever you are, if you are chilly, let this lovely word guide you elsewhere.