Middle winter...

the movement of warm winter light.

Jan 12, 2025

Hello dear ones…

Have you a joyous mounting of bubbling emotion that spring might just be close? Call me an optimist—you wouldn’t be wrong—but there are small signs here already. Early this week I felt a head rush of lush greens and busy birds going on!

Maybe I’m a little previous…

I read a reply to my last journal letter by

Kimberly Warner

and I know, without doubt, that I am…

And! I discovered a new/old word this week: apricity - the warmth of winter light, with which your gorgeous images are filled.

because now, feeling guilty of neglecting apricity, I have a curious yearning to search out this warm winter light before the opportunity disappears into the mists of the season that awaits—like missing the end of a beautiful film. So I went in search of apricity, in the rare moments available, then wove a little into this weeks journal.

I hope you enjoy reading of the places I find it…

Apricity - From the Latin aprīcitās, noun of quality from aprīcus “warmed by the sun”.

It is easier than I think to be a cynical recluse in winter unless I consciously resolve not to be. Unless I search out the reasons for my bristling need to hibernate like hedgehog and squirrel, bat and bee I become complicit in a general seasonal bemoaning of all. I don’t believe this to be nature’s intended reaction to the cold months when, if I pay close attention, so much brings a warm glow.

I leave classes immediately they are over—it doesn’t happen often, there are days more demanding of this than others—drive above the speed limit home, throw on waterproof everything the moment I arrive, grab Wolfie and run. I find myself on the very highest point of the hill where birch meets barley just as the sun dips under an inky-black, tree etched horizon. Cold winter light is momentarily infused with a honey coloured glow pouring over tree tops and meadow and all the far hills; a last minute decision from nature to make clouds spectators rather than the lead roll before the final curtains fall.

Breathe in… a vagabond wind tenderises tension into weightless liquidity, just enough for it to vaporise entirely into dusky air.

Breathe out… Last sun beams dissolve into tired bone, warming muscle, soothing tired emotion.

‘Encore!’ I want to call back as night swallows day.

The chimney rising from the kitchen—the one warmed by stove—gives enough heat to inspire venturing up steep stairs, through dust filled cobwebs hanging from ancient chestnut rafters into a space reserved for everything that has been loved and worn but not quite gained the label of no further use. Old things. Boxes of books, read and loved, bags spilling over with wonky eyes and threadbare noses, loose springs and missing legs, clothes on hangers, draped over beams that no longer feel the touch of skin but I cannot part with. They are a rare foray into past love affairs; unforgettable moments of the days of this life. Some, many, are personal—access ordinarily restricted!

I pull out a denim smock, worn during labours of love with both children, their first shoes, a lock of hair from each of them after their first haircut. A fur coat, the dried tears, my mothers, her joy spilling over on receiving an impulsive gift from my father dissolved in its skin. A green duffle-coat, salted and torn; ‘I am cowering under its great weight on beach, a viscous sea devours all other sound on a wild Cornish coastline where I sit terrified the waves would take you, that this would be the day you never returned.’1 The orange crushed velvet catsuit I wore only once, to an ozone layer themed party which lasted three halcyon days on a Derbyshire hill, spilled over into Ladybower Reservoir2 amidst psychedelic light lit stories fuelled by homemade wine and mushrooms. ‘The way the moonlight lit up your face when it danced across fathomless water… I think I fell in love with you this night. I think we all did, we all loved each other under a moon we couldn’t agree on the colour of…’3

I leave with a handful of time-tended memories carefully heart-wrapped, the rest will wait for another day, when I need their warmth.

A quiet day happens, are wind and rain are exhausted?

I knit myself a pair of fingerless gloves to replace those I lost last winter, soft, grey merle wool knotted a thousand times over in two evenings. When I try them on, they fall straight off unless I curl my fingers around the woollen edge, regardless, I love the way they feel, they are warm, very Wabi Sabi, they will be imperfectly perfect.

The landscape is not quiet, as I step across waterlogged fields earth hisses back at me, spitting swampy bubbles of unwanted, water-filled air at my legs, those that don’t have the force bubble up and pop; wintery soup simmering. And, as I am pulled this way and that on animal tracks by Wolfie—his black and white nose-to-the-ground—through silver birch trunks, through bracken turned to polished, copper lace, I let his lead loose, wait for him to dart off on another scent, stop a while and listen to late evening light tinted by apricot, humming in the silvery bark.

Wind and rain return, I lose one soft, grey merle, woollen glove, retrace my steps trying to remember how many stitches I used. Then, when I don’t find it and can’t remember anyway, decide to use a pattern.

Mid-Winter is a day in our seasonal calendar I would happily celebrate with a hope filled ditty, or a barefooted dance in a muddy field, but, we aren’t there yet, not even really close! Nature is bombarding me with hope and anticipation in tiny snowdrop and catkin shaped fluttery signs though.

I swear my new mouse friend has blue tips to her ears this morning. She watches me while I put on the coffee, speak sweetly to cold cast iron; stove stubbornly refusing to radiate even a vague waft of warmth into the room. Not even bothering to move when I riddle the cinders or empty the ashes, her tiny mouse tail is curled around tiny, equally blue, mouse feet and her mousey furred body is trembling, she just sits and stares with pleading eyes… I know this game though, I know she wants me to knit her some soft, grey merle, woollen gloves - the right size!

Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,
to hold out a badly-knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say
we have the right to be here, to make us warm in the coldest season.

You have the right to be here.

Neil Gaiman

With love beautiful warm souls, you are all my apricot this winter…

Susie xx

PS Thank you so much for sending directions to warm winter light Kimberly.

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Share A hill and I

Something I have loved and am really excited about this week…

Julie Gabrielli

wrote an essay profiling three incredible women of science, not as a prelude to her serialised novel Flux but as a companion piece. Part one of Flux will be posted here on

Substack

on 16/01 - make sure you’re subscribed, I have a feeling her story is unmissable!

The asthmatic climate scientist Grace Evans is determined to expose the methane-leaking cracks in gas wells while hiding her own widening cracks—in her integrity, her relationships, her health, and her control over any of it.
In college, Grace took an elective on feminism and power. She wrote out this passage from Audre Lorde and keeps it in a dogeared copy of her poems. She can’t stop thinking about it. “… survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”