Item: 7 grapefruits

These are a gift; they come from my mom and dad's tree. There were 8, but I've just finished eating one. They're yellow, and thick-skinned, and I can smell the juice even through the skin. They're a complex balance of sweet and puckery, but slightly more on the more puckery side most of the time. It's like eating a blast of vitamins and sunshine; it's a powerhouse of a fruit.

When I used to come back from afar to visit for the holidays, I would take a bunch of these back with me in my luggage, which tended to make it really heavy. When I lived in DC, I remember bringing back a bagful of oranges and grapefruit, and telling everyone that they could have as many oranges as they wanted. Come to think of it, that was not very cool. I should not have been hoarding all the grapefruit for myself; I should have shared. It was just that there was a limited supply, and to me it tasted like California, and nobody else would have tasted it the same way.

There was also the year, when I was living in Iowa City, that a man came around door-to-door selling fruit. He gave me a taste of a Texas grapefruit and he had me eating out of his hand - literally. I ended up buying a whole bushel of fruit from him, for some sum of money that I didn't have, but we kept it in the basement and it was enough to give me, Becky and Val our Vitamin C all that winter.

"A box comes with a mix of fruit," the guy said, "but I'll put a lot of grapefruit in it for you, since you seem to like those." They weren't quite as good as the California kind, but you know what they say, beggars can't be choosers.