"What's a prikit?"

I experienced one of the saddest moments of realization thus far in my teaching career last week, when a student asked me a question during silent reading time.

"What's a prikit?" he asked.

Puzzled, I asked him to show me the word.

"Oh!" I said. "That's apricot. You know, like the fruit."

He stared at me blankly and shook his head. I explained, "It's sort of like a peach but it's smaller and it's not as sweet." He didn't respond.





This child had never seen or tasted an apricot. I thought about expanding into the whole tomayto-tomahto quality of the word but decided it was too much for someone who had never even cracked one open.

I was sad. If the book had the words "roach" or "prison" he wouldn't have had to ask what they meant. But an apricot? The closest thing he's probably tasted is a syrupy, mushy canned peach.

It's not just missing out on the whole concept of the apricot that bugs me. The apricot holds a special place in my childhood memories. Along with other foods like rhubarb, cherries and tomatoes in the summertime, apricots spark the goodness of youth to return to my thoughts.

Apricots remind me of my Grandma Welch, a petite, gentle but firm woman who has been gone for nearly a decade. She had two gnarled apricot trees in her yard at the old house in Fruita. Early summer brought the hard green fruits to the trees, sprouting from the fragrant, delicate blossoms.

I always trusted my mother to pick a good one for me. We both liked them slightly underripe. Grandma didn't quite understand that.

We'd crack the fruits open with our thumbs and stand in the backyard eating them. Mom would tell me about the time she caught a hummingbird in her bare hands in this same yard. And how she wished she hadn't afterward, because her hands were so bruised. We threw the apricot pits in an old coffee can and keep eating as many as we wanted to pick.

Grandma kept a flattened sandstone rock on a weathered wooden bench by her shed. It was similar to the flat rocks the Indians used to grind corn on. We'd take turns smashing the apricot pits after they had a chance to dry out, on this flat rock. The nuts were small, teardrop-shaped delights with a milky-white interior.

I can't tell you how many blood blisters Grandma soothed with tiny band-aids after we aimed badly and smashed fingers holding the wobbly pits in place on the rock.

The apricots were good. We ate them until we could eat no more. And we did the same with the nuts from the pits. And we took time to be with each other in the backyard under the apricot tree and enjoy life simply. We didn't know there was any other way to be.

But the kids in my classrom wouldn't know about these things - their lives are devoid of the habitus of savoring something they just picked from a tree.

Instead, they know a life I probably couldn't even imagine. I'm sure their apricots are things like tattoos that remind them of Mommy's boyfriend of the month, or cigarette burns on their arms or seeing a policeman and remembering when Daddy got hauled off to jail.

But they wouldn't know about apricots.