Apricity
Katie Noah Gibson
The January our boiler went out was unusually cold.
Cold winters in Boston are nothing unusual in themselves, but this one pushed the boundaries of what was normal: daily highs stuck stubbornly below freezing, biting wind chills in the teens, a few nights where the mercury dropped to single digits. When the ancient boiler in the basement of our harborside brownstone stopped working, I spent three nights sleeping at a friend’s house down the street. I walked home, shivering, two or three times a day to check on the space heaters I’d left blasting in all five apartments (my neighbors having also decamped to warmer houses) and the taps I’d left dripping, just in case the pipes froze (they didn’t).
I kept thinking of E.B. White’s 1943 Harper’s essay “Cold Weather,” where he wrote about “firm, business-like cold that stalked in and took charge” of the Maine hamlet where he lived for many years. Certainly, our experience of cold in the modern-day city isn’t quite as brutal as White’s: I shivered when I reread that essay and came across White’s casual mention of a thermometer reading of 12 below zero. But some of his descriptions rang perfectly true: we, too, had weeks of “clean, hard, purposeful cold, unyielding and unremitting.” Even after a bright blue Monday with calmer skies, the winds kicked up again at night, howling across the harbor nearby, masts clanking in the shipyard just down the hill. It felt colder when all I could hear, even from my cozy studio apartment, was those relentless gusts of icy winter wind.
In the midst of these frigid nights, we had abundant sunshine: clear, rosy mornings and bright blue afternoons, when the bold rays hit your face even as the wind stung your cheeks (and nose, and fingers) red. Sometimes, when I took an afternoon walk around the block or to the post office or down to the harbor, the sun even delivered a bit of warmth along with all that light. And it made me think of an old but relatively new-to-me word: apricity.
Apricity, says Merriam-Webster, is an archaic word for the warmth of the sun in winter: that surprising sensation when, even through your layers of clothing (and that frigid air), the sun’s heat seeps into your bones. It’s unexpected, and delightful, every time; I’m always surprised by the contrast between the sun’s heat and the ambient cold air, and how the one pushes back against the other, even when it’s 18 degrees. But—equally surprising—those rays can actually melt the snow, given enough time and the right conditions. I’ve watched sheets of snow melt off my back patio and heard chunks of ice fall off my roof even when it was well below freezing, due to that apricity (and the south-facing angle, and maybe a well-placed gust of wind).
This physical contrast made me think, too, about metaphorical apricity: surprising warmth that can nourish us in cold, uncertain times.
Those chilly months coincided with the dawn of Trump’s second administration in the U.S., and its attendant terror and cruelty. My neighborhood of East Boston, full of immigrants, braced for raids under new executive orders designed to sow confusion and suspicion. We feared for our neighbors; even those who held citizenship seemed unsure that their status would protect them (and they turned out to be right). The small community nonprofit where I work, which provides music and other creative programming for young people, started holding discussions about what to do if immigration agents showed up at our bright red doors.
My friend Mike, now a minister in Houston, noted on social media that a few things would be necessary to survive this tumultuous time: “perseverance, camaraderie, wisdom, community, and defiant joy,” among others. As I moved from work to home to my friend’s house, checking space heaters and answering emails and listening to others’ questions and fears, I repeated his words to myself like a mantra, or like a magic spell. I knew that words alone, however comforting, wouldn’t get us through. They had to be backed up by action: lists of helpful resources, a hug for a frightened child, a listening ear for teenagers who wanted to vent or just talk about something else, all the ways we show up to be a source of warmth and light—indeed, apricity—for one another. Hope and idealism, yes, but backed up by courage and action, and a quiet determination to take care of our own.
Mike’s words, and others I’ve come to rely on, are a vital form of apricity in shadowed times: bold, bright rays cutting through the cold and dark to remind us of cheerier days to come. To remind us, as Bishop Mariann Budde bravely did at the National Cathedral, that mercy and compassion are not only possible, but necessary. To remind us that small actions, daily kindnesses, do make a difference. To encourage us to keep going: if the sun, however faint and far away, can still have an impact in the dead of winter, then so can we.
Katie Noah Gibson
Katie Noah Gibson is a writer, runner, flower fiend, cyclist and Texas transplant based in Boston. She does communications work for a small nonprofit by day and reads all the books by night.