nêspera growing in the land of the I-pad

My friend, Sandy, who lives in the Silicon Valley, surprised me again with luscious fresh fruit from her own backyard. A while back she presented me with beautiful purple passion fruit, which I promptly devoured.

loquat AKA nêspera

This time around she brought me a whole bunch of loquats, also known as nêspera. The fruit was completely ripe, bursting with sweet and sour flavors and hints of pineapple, peach, nectarine, and the taste of the tropics; in other words, simply delicious.

Like the passion fruit, nêspera also brings me back to sweet memories from my childhood growing up in the tiny village of Olegário Maciel, Minas Gerais State in Brazil. We had a loquat tree that grew right outside our kitchen in the backyard from seeds we’d inadvertently discarded out there. (Brazil is very lush, isn’t it?) My mom nurtured the tree until it became fully grown.

To please my mother, my dad or maybe my older brother, I don’t remember which one anymore, dug the earth around the tree to form a bench with a half moon shape. He (they?) covered it with stones that my dad had cut himself from a quarry nearby. Then, he mounted an old wagon wheel around the trunk to make a table. It was shaded by the loquat tree and became one of my favorite places to hang out after school. I’d spend time eating snacks, playing, taking naps and climbing the ‘table’ to reach for the ripe nêspera fruit.

The nêspera tree had a sad end though. It got infested with bats. My mother was terrified of them for fear that they carried rabies. She insisted that the tree must go! And that was it. Dad cut it down to right about the height of the ‘table top.’ It wasn’t a total loss as a place to rest in the shade, as a branch of an avocado tree from the neighbor’s garden covered it somewhat. But the place didn’t look the same anymore and of course, no more fruit. That was sad.

Later we learned that that type of bat is a frugivore: a fruit eater. Those bats particularly liked loquats.

So no more nêspera for me from my own backyard. But it’s cool to have some from the fertile land of Santa Clara that also nurtured Apple, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Intel, HP and so on and on and on. It seems so high-tech 😉

nêspera growing in the land of cabernet: this tree was growing on the grounds of the Beringer winery in Napa County