Especially in early spring, when the sun offers a thin treacle of warmth, I love to sit outdoors and eat sense-ravishing apricots.
Born on sun-drenched trees in Morocco, the apricots have flown the Atlantic like small comets, and I can taste broiling North Africa in their flesh.
Somewhere between a peach and a prayer, they taste of well water and butterscotch and dried apples and desert simooms and lust.
Sweet with a twang of spice, a ripe apricot is small enough to devour as two hemispheres. Ambiguity is its hallmark.
How to eat an apricot: first warm its continuous curve in cupped hands, holding it as you might a brandy snifter,
then caress the velvety sheen with one thumb, and run your fingertips over its nap, which is shorter than peach fuzz, closer to chamois.
Tawny gold with a blush on its cheeks, an apricot is the color of shame and dawn. One should not expect to drink wine at mid-winter, Boethius warned.
What could be more thrilling than ripe apricots out of season, a gush of taboo sweetness to offset the savage wistfulness of early spring?
Always eat apricots at twilight, preferably while sitting in a sunset park, with valley lights starting to flicker on and the lake spangled like a shield.
Then, while a trail of bright ink tattoos the sky, notice how the sun washes the earth like a woman pouring her gaze along her lover’s naked body,
each cell receiving the tattoo of her glance. Wait for that moment of arousal and revelation, then sink your teeth into the flesh of an apricot. |