Summertime is heavenly for local fruit aficionados

Summer arrives for most people without need for a calendar.

The official mark of the season in the northern hemisphere, as determined by celestial timekeepers, was June 21, give or take a few hours.

For children, however, summer begins when the last bell rings on the last day of school, give or take the few hours when young minds fidget through their teachers’ final lessons, anticipating liberation from classrooms.

For tourism industry bosses and workers, dissipation of "shoulder" periods, those intervals between cold and hot weather elsewhere that draw vacationers, the high season bridging June to September has them busy readying rooms and taking reservations.

Surfers and other wave-riding buffs check the shorelines, websites and weather reports eagerly awaiting the south swells.

Then there are the local fruit lovers who count the days until the season delivers lychee, plums and the best mangoes money can’t buy.

Independence Day inaugurated the month, give or take a few days, when Kokee State Park welcomes pickers of plums along its roads and trails. The Methley plum came to Kauai by way of California. In the 1930s, cuttings were planted in the cool, misty uplands, eventually producing groves of 18,000 trees, give or take a few.

Plum-plucking became so popular a pastime that the government had to declare a season, set up a permit system and limit the amount of fruit to five pounds per person per day in an attempt to curb profiteering.

Like many wild-growing fruits, some are sweet, others are sour, but they are a juicy reward for hikers and free for the taking.

Not so much for lychee. Unless they have neighbors deft at pruning and cultivating and who generously bestow on them some of their bounty, lychee lovers are out of luck.

This particular band, whose craving for the fragrant, white-flesh globes borders on obsession, will spend about $5 a pound — $7.99 at designer food markets — to get their fixes. They must also beware the fake stuff with dyed skins imported this time of year to fool them.

Then there are the mango fiends. This group is generally separated by buyers and non-buyers.

Members of the first have given up on the expectancy of days past when in certain neighborhoods mango trees were plentiful and sap-sticky paper bags of fruit would magically appear on doorsteps.

The second faction refuses to pay cash money for the golden-green globes. To them, buying farmed mangoes violates the sense of sharing that prevailed in their youth, and season after season, they stubbornly suffer deprivation. Some even entertain the idea of rescuing the ones that have fallen in the H-1 freeway’s breakdown lane in Pawaa.

But hope springs eternal. A friend of mine, definitely in the non-buyer category, waxed lyrical about a rare gift of Hadens she recently received.

This year, I also was favored when my father brought over a flat of blush and orange-gold fruit that the widow of his friend had given him. Though I coveted each of them, I shared them with a friend who had brought me the first of the summer’s peaches, another who concocted a lemon cake especially for me and a third who had allowed me one her auntie had given her. I still have some left in the give-and-take of the season.

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Cynthia Oi can be reached at <@Tagline -- email1>coi@staradvertiser.com<@$p>.