Gift from the Sun

The call from Mr. Napoli came on a gray afternoon that desperately needed sunshine. I was coming down with a bad case of SAD, as in "seasonal affective disorder," a bona-fide psychological condition that happens when human beings are deprived of the sunshine to which they have become accustomed. We along the Gulfshore are particularly susceptible. Let it be overcast for more than a day or two and we slip into a funk. Yeah, we're wimps. Transplant us to Seattle and we'd turn suicidal.

The call from Mr. Napoli was just what I needed.

"You come tomorrow," he said. "The fruits, they are ripe."

Years ago, when my wife and I were newlyweds, we lived in a house in the middle of a citrus grove along the Caloosahatchee River. Mr. Napoli owned the grove and lived nearby. Born in Italy, he had spent most of his life working in New York City and bought the grove when he retired to Florida. It was planted with juice oranges that were picked each year by a big concentrate company.

"Very boring, those oranges," Mr. Napoli told me. "Much juice, no character."

So he carved out a small chunk of his property and planted it with rare and wondrous varieties of citrus. He calls it his Garden of Eden. Some of the trees he bought as seedlings from nurseries that specialize in heirloom citrus. Some he grafted himself, working on trial and error. Still others he won't say much about at all. Mr. Napoli travels abroad often and, such is his passion for citrus, I suspect he might have smuggled a seedling or two from his trips to Spain or Italy.

Some of the fruit ripens as early as October. Other varieties aren't at their peak until early spring. But there is a short window of opportunity each winter when all the trees offer something. Call it the harmonic convergence of citrus. And that is when Mr. Napoli gets in touch, inviting me to partake in the bounty.

This year was like every other year. Mr. Napoli had invited some of his buddies from the Italian-American club and the sprier ones were playing boccie when I got there. Eventually we all sat down around a long table laden with citrus-oranges, grapefruit, tangerines, tangelos-20 or 30 different kinds. Mr. Napoli went through them all, telling us what was what. Every piece of fruit had a story.

"That one is the Parson Brown," he said. "Named for a Baptist preacher who lived up in Sumter County in the 1850s and first grew it. A very famous orange, so famous it is mentioned in a song, 'Winter Wonderland,' about the people who build a snowman and pretend it is Parson Brown. Very many seeds, but a very fine fruit.

"That one is called Owari. My Chinese girlfriend gave it to me. It is a satsuma, very mild and easy to peel."

"That one is a grapefruit, but see how red the flesh is? I call it blood grapefruit. Very rare and very sweet. I got it from a man in Texas."

There were knives on the table and we sliced samples as we chose. There were bottles of grappa. We sampled that, too.

Mr. Napoli said: "Long ago in Florida, the citrus it was just for eating. It was for the gourmet, the connoisseur, who treasured each variety like a fine bottle of wine. Then came the big companies and the concentrate and all the citrus, it began to taste the same. But not here, not in my back yard."

When it was time to go, Mr. Napoli told me to pick what I wanted from his trees.

"A gift from the sun," he said.

As I drove home, it was still gray and gloomy. The weather report called for more of the same. But I had a bagful of fruit from the Garden of Eden. Things were definitely looking up.