I love a good crisp apple, a blood orange or one of those super sweet easy peel tangerines. Meyer lemons are great, and I have a great recipe for a citrus tart that is amazing and winter friendly. I love Fuyu persimmons and pomegranates. I start getting antsy around the time the rhubarb in my garden pops out because my favorite fruits are the ones of spring and summer.

I was at my local co-op yesterday, PCC, and saw the first of the glory that is a strawberry not grown in a hot house — granted, from California, but still, it smelled like a real berry. There are organic grapes available, and I picked up the watermelon I made gazpacho with yesterday. Peaches and cherries will be out soon, and nectarines and apricots — all locally grown in the great state of Washington.

There will be galia melon and the organic pineapples from Hawaii that taste as close as possible as they way they do in that lovely paradise. I’ll buy watermelon that has that crisp texture without any of the rubberiness that comes with melons grown far far away under something other than a hot sun. The blueberries in my garden will be eaten by the dog before I ever see one, as will the strawberries.

But I’ll find them, as well as raspberries and blackberries at the farmers markets in flats that will disappear into cobblers and pies and if I think with my head not my stomach, into the freezer for use during the winter. There will be fruit salads that become almost ridiculous in their variety, and I will, on several days in the next three or four months, eat nothing but some plain yogurt and a heaping bowl of that pile of color.

But what I’m really aching for are plums. Green ones, yellow ones, purple fleshed and purple skinned with yellow flesh. I like the red ones, the ones crossed with apricots known as dinosaur eggs. I’ll get every color going when they come into the market and eat half before I get home. I like the tart of the skin and the sweet of the flesh, but sometimes, I get a really hard one just because I want the whole thing to be puckery sour. I’ll make plum and ginger jam with fruit from my friend Beth’s Italian prune tree late in the season.

And then it will be over. Sure there will be late crop berries, melons, and the new crop of apples. Grapes will be good into the fall. But none of it is as good to me as a bowl of plums on the counter. While I’m waiting, I’ll succumb to the excessive expense of organic plums from Chile, then Mexico, then California as the season works its way north. But come June and July, I plan on making up for the last nine months by over-indulging in the local version of my favorite fruit.

What about you? What summer fruit makes you happiest?