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Ukraine will not be ushered into NATO when President Biden and leaders of the Western alliance gather in Lithuania starting Tuesday. Sweden likely won’t either, its accession still blocked by a single member: Turkey.

For months now, negotiations have been underway that were supposed to be completed by the time the 31 nations of NATO — including the newest, Finland — meet at the summit in Vilnius, a city with a long history of Russian and Soviet domination.

The fact that none of this has been settled yet, even as frantic talks continue among the alliance, underscores how the NATO unity that Mr. Biden celebrates at every turn is getting harder to sustain as the war goes on.

The alliance works by consensus, increasingly infuriating its larger members, who supply much of the budget and heavy firepower. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who has spent the past week hopping between NATO capitals to drum up support, has threatened to skip the event if members do not make significant progress on forging a clear commitment for how, and when, it will be folded into the Western alliance.

Mr. Zelensky has attended a series of meetings critical to continued aid in battling Russia, so if he misses this one, it will be visual evidence of a breach.

In an interview broadcast on CNN on Sunday, Mr. Biden said of Ukraine, “I don’t think it’s ready for membership in NATO.” He then acknowledged a longstanding, deeper fear: That admitting Ukraine now, given NATO’s commitment to collective defense, would assure that “we are at war with Russia.” That’s an argument the president has been making for 15 months.

Germany agrees with Mr. Biden, but several former Soviet bloc nations now in NATO disagree, saying that Ukraine would bring one of the strongest and most battle-tested nations in Europe into the alliance and that it deserves entry now or as soon as there is a cease-fire.

Sweden’s entry appears far closer. But Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the NATO leader who flirts most openly with Russia and buys its arms, has barely budged in his objections, and officials of several NATO countries say they assume he is shaking down the West for a bigger payoff of aid or arms.

Mr. Biden, who arrives in Vilnius on Monday night, was on the phone with him again on Sunday, pleading the case for NATO unity. In a terse account of the call, the White House said, with some understatement, that Mr. Biden told Mr. Erdogan of “his desire to welcome Sweden into NATO as soon as possible.”

All of this would have been complicated enough to handle in a two-day summit, at the very moment European leaders are trying to to sell their publics into turning NATO once again into what it once was: a real fighting force that trains and patrols to keep Moscow at bay.

But the membership disputes may be overshadowed by new worries that the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive is bogged down, and that Kyiv could run out of ammunition — one of several scenarios that American intelligence officials say President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is thinking about to turn humiliation into victory.

Mr. Biden has authorized the shipment of cluster munitions, controversial within the alliance, to fill the gap until more shells can be produced for Ukrainian artillery — and, though it was left unsaid, to better be able to destroy Russians in their deeply dug trenches.

Mr. Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, both made the case that U.S. allies would go along with the decision, even those that have signed the 15-year-old Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans the production, sale or use of the weapons. The concern is that the munitions create a post-conflict hazard much like land mines. “Duds” that are scattered around the battlefield can explode years later, often when children pick them up.

Privately, Mr. Biden’s aides suggest that countries that signed the treaty — including Britain, France and Germany — are secretly relieved that the United States is shipping them to Ukraine because they fear the cluster munitions, despite the risks, are the only option. Mr. Sullivan noted on Friday that signatories to the treaty cannot ship them to Ukraine or help the United States in doing so, but he said that they did not vocally oppose Mr. Biden’s decision. In fact, Mr. Biden has received more criticism from some members of his own party than from the members of the treaty.

The issue of exactly what to promise Ukraine will be the most vexing question at the summit.

The final communiqué is expected to say that “the rightful place of Ukraine is in the NATO alliance,” NATO-country officials said, but there is a debate about adding, “when conditions allow” or whether to detail some of those conditions. But beyond the phrasing, how Ukraine gets there, and through what process, remains in dispute.

Ukraine and the Central European allies, especially those bordering Russia, say they want Ukraine to be promised immediate membership once the fighting stops.

The United States, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries reject that approach. They insist that Ukraine must undertake other reforms of its political, financial and judicial systems to qualify for membership. What matters now, they say, is practical help in the medium term — to commit to supporting Ukraine militarily and financially through the American presidential election and beyond.

Mr. Biden said last month that there will be “no shortcuts” for Ukraine getting into NATO, even after the war.

It may seem simply an argument about finessing the diplomatic language, but for this summit to succeed, it must demonstrate trans-Atlantic unity in supporting Kyiv’s efforts to expel Russian forces — and in deterring a new invasion if some kind of cease-fire is negotiated. Mr. Putin is watching for cracks, and Mr. Zelensky needs something encouraging to bring home in the midst of a long war and a grinding, casualty-heavy counteroffensive.

Amanda Sloat, senior director for Europe on the National Security Council, said on Friday that Mr. Biden will work with Ukraine to get them ready for NATO, but “has said Ukraine would have to make reforms to meet the same standards as any other NATO country before they join. So there’s standards that the alliance sets for all members, and the President made clear that Ukraine would need to make those reforms.”

No matter how the wording is worked out, NATO officials say another key element of the summit will be a demonstration of practical support for Ukraine. Mr. Putin, several NATO leaders have argued, believes Europe’s commitment will flag — and that, combined with an ammunition advantage, would ultimately lead to Ukraine’s defeat.

So the next two days will be filled with pledges, organized under a general pledge issued by some countries — perhaps the Group of 7, or a smaller group known as the Quad (the United States, Britain, Germany and France) — to which other countries will sign up, NATO-country diplomats said. The hope is to issue such a document with the pledges in Vilnius.

The document is meant to provide Ukraine with serious security commitments for the long run, even if it falls short of the security guarantee of full NATO membership. That means providing modern weapons and training that would ensure that Ukraine is so well armed that Russia would never try to invade it in the future.

Camille Grand, a former senior NATO official now with the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the challenge would be to avoid “simply repeating the vague promises of the past. We have to counter the notion that if you have a frozen conflict, you are not welcome.”

There will be another major, if symbolic act: Ukraine’s relationship with NATO will be upgraded to “council status,” meaning that on key issues, Ukraine will be able to sit with the 31 member states as an equal, without Hungary, for example, able to block its participation. Russia once held that status until it annexed Crimea; giving it to Ukraine is a clear message to Mr. Putin.

The summit will also approve a new defense-spending pledge for the alliance, to replace the one agreed on in 2014, which aimed for allies to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on the military, including 20 percent of that on equipment. The latest figures show that only 11 of the 31 members have reached that goal.

Still, NATO has no way to enforce those demands.

Also, and perhaps as important as anything else, the allies will give political approval to the first detailed war plans on how to defend all of NATO territory since the end of the Cold War. Those plans, drawn up by Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the American commander of allied forces in Europe, cover more than 4,000 pages and tell countries in specific terms what is required of them to defend themselves and their allies.

The two men — the American president and the British king — waited decades for their dream jobs, projecting a sense of normalcy and unity when they finally reached their thrones. They both prefer to ditch executive palaces for their respective retreats. And they share a passion for confronting threats to the environment.

The men, the 80-year-old President Biden and the 74-year-old King Charles III, are also united by their challenges. They both face a public increasingly dubious of their institutions. And they both battle skepticism over whether they are the right people to lead the increasingly diverse groups over which they preside.

“As older men in the pinnacle of their careers, they need to redefine what it means to be an older person,” said Arianne Chernock, a professor of history at Boston University and scholar of modern Britain, adding, “They need to find new ways to connect with a younger multicultural generation.”

That common ground will serve as the backdrop for the meeting between the president and the king on Monday at Windsor Castle, near London, where the two are expected to discuss clean-energy investment and efforts to combat climate change in developing nations. They are issues that Charles has been warning about since the 1970s and that Mr. Biden has made a central focus of his presidency.

Charles rallied leaders in Glasgow in 2021 to address climate change, warning them that “time has run out.” Mr. Biden has proclaimed the tax, energy and health bill that he signed into law last year as the “the biggest step forward on climate ever.”

Sally Bedell Smith, who has written numerous biographies about the British royal family, said those points of mutual interest could be useful. “Biden, I would guess, would have a lot of respect for what Charles has done and said” on the topic, she noted.

Both are also using the issue to connect more broadly with the public and, in Mr. Biden’s case, to galvanize voters.

Mr. Biden has struggled for most of his presidency with low approval numbers. A recent Reuters poll showed he had 41 percent approval, a marginal increase from the lowest level of his presidency but an indicator that voters remain unconvinced, particularly about his economic record.

Charles’s approval ratings have improved since he became king. He was viewed favorably by 55 percent of respondents in a recent poll by the market research firm YouGov. But that makes him only the fourth-most popular member of the royal family, trailing his son and heir, Prince William; his sister, Princess Anne; and his daughter-in-law, Catherine, Princess of Wales.

Mr. Biden and Charles have spent decades under the unforgiving glare of the public eye, finding respite in the familiar.

Mr. Biden flees the White House most weekends for one of his houses in the beachside town of Rehoboth Beach, Del. The king is said not to be particularly fond of Buckingham Palace. He and Queen Camilla live in the cozier Clarence House when they are in London and spend weekends at Highgrove, his countryside retreat in Gloucestershire.

They have a shared connection in struggle. Mr. Biden, who has navigated a stutter since his childhood, has said he was inspired by the film, “The King’s Speech,” which depicted the efforts of Charles’s grandfather, King George VI, to overcome similar speech problems.

Charles and the president have also faced heightened scrutiny over their complex relationships with their youngest sons. Mr. Biden’s adversaries have seized on Hunter Biden’s plea deal on two misdemeanor tax crimes to attack the president. The king’s relationship with Prince Harry has been in the spotlight since Harry and his wife, Meghan, withdrew from royal duties in 2020.

“They need to perform that job of being a father in an often public and glaring light,” Ms. Chernock, the history professor, said.

The president and the king are prone to break away from their prepared messaging. Mr. Biden recently called Xi Jinping, the top leader in China, a “dictator” even as his secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, traveled to the country to try to smooth over strained relations with Beijing.

While royals are expected to steer clear of politics, the king’s political opinions have occasionally gotten him into trouble. After Charles attended the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, a London newspaper published extracts of a diary in which the king had written about goose-stepping Chinese soldiers and described the Chinese officials at the ceremony as “appalling waxworks.”

But the two men are also different in important respects.

The president is garrulous and extroverted, while the king is more contemplative and reserved. In his younger days, Charles was awkward and shy, seemingly ill-suited to a life in public. After decades of royal tours and receiving lines, he has become skilled in the art of small talk, though he is not the natural glad-hander that Mr. Biden is.

Charles’s intellectual pursuits can sometimes seem offbeat. A voracious reader and autodidact, Charles has burrowed into subjects like architecture, organic farming and conservation. He once proudly revealed that his Aston Martin sports car ran on a biofuel made from surplus white wine and cheese waste.

In contrast, Mr. Biden has a 1967 Corvette that runs on gas and often tries to relate to the working class by recalling his days commuting to Washington on the Amtrak.

The king is expected to abide by the traditions of the British monarchy that Mr. Biden has on multiple occasions refused to follow. Mr. Biden twice declined to bow to the king’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, on the advice of his mother. “Don’t you bow down to her,” she told him, according to his memoir “Promises to Keep.” (There is no requirement that one must bow to the monarch — though many people follow the tradition as courtesy.)

During Mr. Biden’s four visits to the United Kingdom since becoming president, there has often been an undercurrent of tension.

In March, Mr. Biden made a brief stop in Northern Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement before going to the Republic of Ireland for a much more leisurely tour of his ancestral roots. (As the London papers grumbled, Mr. Biden also has English roots.)

Mr. Biden did not attend the coronation of Charles in May, sending his wife, Jill, and their granddaughter Finnegan. When he called the king to send his regrets and offer congratulations, Charles invited the president to visit Britain, setting the stage for the Monday meeting that American officials are calling a “mini state visit.”

Even the logistics for this trip have not been without some static. The White House initially questioned the need for a stop at 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, according to an official familiar with the planning, since the two men would meet at the NATO summit in Lithuania a day later. For Mr. Sunak, however, a handshake with the president in front of his residence is politically valuable, and the White House ultimately agreed to it.

The White House also yielded to the king’s request to welcome Mr. Biden at Windsor Castle, west of London, rather than at the more conveniently located Buckingham Palace. The palace is undergoing a multiyear renovation, and the official, told The New York Times that the king did not want Mr. Biden to see a construction site.

Asked about Mr. Biden’s skipping the coronation, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, rejected any notion that there was tension between the United States and Britain. (Historians point out that Dwight D. Eisenhower did not attend the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth.)

“It’s important that the president is going to go out there, and he’s going to have a meeting with not just the king, but also the prime minister,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said. “That’s what you’re going to see: continuing a partnership with the United Kingdom.”

Those who have observed the relationship between the White House and the Royal family said the common ground shared by Charles and Mr. Biden would probably ensure a cordial meeting.

“They’ve both been to this rodeo many times,” Ms. Bedell Smith said.

As books go, James Clerk Maxwell’s “An Elementary Treatise on Electricity” is hardly a household name, but it has gained renewed attention after a copy was returned last month to a Massachusetts library nearly 120 years overdue.

“This is definitely the longest overdue book that we’ve gotten back,” Olivia Melo, the library’s director, said on Sunday. “And we do get some books back after, you know, 10, 15 years.”

The book, published in 1881 and written by a prominent Scottish physicist, was an early scientific text laying out electrical theories.

Its 208 pages, bound by a cranberry-colored cover, are crammed with technical jargon and medleys of elaborate mathematical equations. The library acquired the book in 1882, Ms. Melo said.

It was likely either last checked out on Feb. 14, 1904, or Feb. 14, 1905. The faded stamp makes it difficult to be certain, but a faint circular shape after the “190-” suggests the later date, she said. A prior checkout stamp clearly reads Dec. 10, 1903.

On May 30, the library was contacted by Stewart Plein, a curator of rare books at West Virginia University’s library in Morgantown, W.Va.

“We have recently received a donation that included a book from your library,” Ms. Plein wrote in a note. “There is no withdrawn information. Would you like it returned to you?”

Libraries mark books “withdrawn” to indicate they no longer own a book. The absence of such a mark suggested to Ms. Plein that it still belonged to the New Bedford Free Public Library. She mailed the book back.

Who originally checked out the book and where it had been all these years was not immediately known.

The book is in “optimal shape,” Ms. Melo said. The words are legible. The spine is sturdy.

“It was very well taken care of,” Ms. Melo said. “Whoever had the book all this time obviously had it in a controlled room. It wasn’t being thumbed through.”

The more than 140-year-old book isn’t the first to find its way back to its original lender after so many decades.

Last month, a copy of “The Bounty Trilogy” by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, published in 1932, was returned to a Washington state library 81 years after it was checked out, CNN reported. In 2021, a copy of Kate Douglas Wiggin’s “New Chronicles of Rebecca,” still in “immaculate” condition, turned up at an Idaho library after 110 years.

When “An Elementary Treatise on Electricity” was checked out, the New Bedford Free Public Library charged a one-cent fee for every day it was late.

Had that late fee rate remained without a cap, the borrower would have owed roughly $430. Without a cap, at today’s late fee rate of 5 cents per day, the balance would be more than $2,100.

But late fees were capped decades ago at $2 to encourage people to return their books, Ms. Melo said.

Though the book today does not command an astronomical price on the open market — it was mass-produced, and a similar copy is listed for sale online at $600 — “An Elementary Treatise on Electricity” does hold sentimental and historical value, Ms. Melo said.

In the digital age, it speaks to the “value of the printed word,” she said.

“This book is going to be here 100 years from now because now we’re going to continue to preserve it and take care of it,” Ms. Melo said. “For future generations, this book will be here.”

As Florida recovers from the tangled seaweed blob plaguing its coasts, nature may have something else in store for the state: dust from the Sahara.

Saharan dust is moving across the Atlantic Ocean and could reach South Florida, resulting in hotter days and less rain, meteorologists said.

As of Saturday afternoon, the dust was near the Bahamas, about 300 miles east of Florida. Satellite images also showed patches of dust over Puerto Rico, with more over the northern and western parts of the island, said Keily Delerme, a meteorologist with National Weather Service in Tampa. The Weather Service does not track the dust’s speed as it travels, she said.

The dust could arrive in South Florida by this week, said Ping Zhu, an earth and environment professor at Florida International University. However, he added, it is not a reason to panic.

“I don’t think we should worry too much of it,” Professor Zhu said. “So far we don’t see the evidence that it’s very serious.”

This is not an uncommon occurrence. Saharan dust travels to Florida periodically throughout the year, Professor Zhu said. Thunder and wind storms cause conditions that pick up dust, and certain winds blow it westward toward the United States.

It is not clear whether the dust will make it the thousands of miles to Florida, or how long it could linger, Ms. Delerme said.

“It could take a day or two,” she said. “It could dissipate. It could not make it at all.”

If the dust travels far enough, it could result in higher temperatures and less rain for South Florida. Since Saharan dust is so dry, it makes it difficult for water vapor to form in the atmosphere, limiting chances of rain, Professor Zhu said. It could also have a blanket effect, trapping heat on the ground.

Still, many Floridians might not notice much change.

People in sensitive groups or who have asthma may feel some of the effects, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service said, as dust can worsen air pollution, allergies and lung problems.

The dryness of the dust could also affect air quality, according to Miami-Dade County’s website. As of Saturday evening, the air quality level in the county was listed as “moderate.”

Meteorologists said that the haze wouldn’t be strong enough to affect visibility and threaten air traffic. However, Federal Aviation Administration officials said they frequently grappled with visibility constraints were “prepared to modify operations as needed.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Saharan dust made it out of Africa. Last summer, a dust cloud traveled all the way to Texas, and another turned the skies over Europe orange, with red dust coating cars and “blood rain” falling in certain areas.

In 2018, the dust turned snow in Eastern Europe orange, and in past years it has prompted both U.S. and international officials to issue health alerts.

Two years into their marriage, Talia and Malissa Williams were working diligently to lay the groundwork for the rest of their lives together. Both were taking online college classes that could lead to stable careers. They had taken tentative steps toward adopting a child.

The couple had talked about settling permanently in Rolling Fork, the tiny Mississippi Delta hometown that Malissa had followed Talia back to a few years earlier. But the medical billing and coding jobs they’d been studying for weren’t likely to be found within an hour’s drive. Their older wooden house — essentially their least worst option in a town with a limited supply of rental housing — gave them nothing but problems.

Then came the tornado.

The house, gone. Their possessions — cars, clothes, computers — eviscerated in winds that reached 170 miles an hour, as the storm, the deadliest to hit Mississippi in more than a decade, tore through on the night of March 24.

Gone, too, was any incentive for them to stay.

“My heart is in Rolling Fork, it will always be there,” Talia, 42, said as she stood outside the motel room, 45 minutes’ drive away, that is serving as the couple’s temporary home. “But now this has happened, we have an opportunity,” she said.

As powerful storms raked across the Southeast on that night in March, Rolling Fork was shredded. Sixteen people were killed in the area. Dozens of families were forced into the same position as Talia and Malissa: Their homes were mangled, their lives upended in an instant.

But just like Talia and Malissa, many people in the community had already been navigating a slower-motion crisis for years, one that has swept the whole of the Mississippi Delta over decades of disinvestment and decline.

The devastation of this other disaster is manifest in the decaying homes and abandoned storefronts in the few areas of Rolling Fork left unscathed by the tornado, as well as in the city’s neglected infrastructure, entrenched poverty, struggling schools and troubling health statistics. The population of about 1,700 has been shrinking steadily for as long as most residents can remember.

“We were struggling to rebuild the town before the tornado,” said Angela Hall Williams, a longtime resident. She ticked off some of the things that had disappeared from Rolling Fork long before the storm, including decent-paying jobs, thriving stores, and any evidence of bustle.

The Delta — a pancake-flat expanse wedged between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers in the northwestern part of the state — has long been defined by a contradiction. It is known for having some of the most fertile soil in the world, sustaining cotton, soybean and corn crops that for generations have been distributed around the world. But the bounty has rarely been shared in any meaningful way with the African American families who make up much of the population in the impoverished, hollowed-out communities that speckle the region, like Rolling Fork.

“You still see the vestiges of racial segregation, of economic segregation,” said Rolando Herts, the director of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University, in Cleveland, Miss. “We’re inheriting the decisions that were made years and years, decades and decades ago.”

The most viable solution for many Delta residents has been to leave. That was the case during the Great Migration, the mass exodus from the South of African Americans fleeing racist oppression and poverty during the 20th century. The population drain continued as increased mechanization of farming reduced the need for farm laborers and other types of industry fled the region.

Annie Lee Reed, 69, spent most of her life in Rolling Fork, but she was relieved when her children left town. The distance was difficult, but the alternative was worse. If they stayed, she said, “I knew they weren’t going to do nothing or make nothing.”

There are those who believe the tornado was not a nudge to flee, but an opportunity for Rolling Fork. In the immediate aftermath, Mayor Eldridge Walker assured the community that the city would “come back bigger and better than ever before.”

His argument was that the storm had drawn attention, and the prospect of investment, to the town. If not for the tornado, President Biden would never have flown in and promised the support of his administration. “Good Morning America” would never have broadcast live from Rolling Fork, or solicited donations for the town from viewers.

As cleareyed as Ms. Hall Williams was about what ailed Rolling Fork, she was among those who saw promise in the town. “It’s coming back,” she said confidently.

Her home was severely damaged by the storm, leaving Ms. Hall Williams and her husband to stay in a motel outside of town. But she was sketching out plans to open a restaurant serving her favorites: macaroni and cheese, catfish, brisket. She would be an employer, someone helping Rolling Fork survive, giving others incentive and resources to stay put.

“I’m not giving up,” Ms. Hall Williams said.

Henry Hood was far less sanguine. Two months after the tornado, the attention to the town had already faded. Assurances from elected officials were followed by a formal process for seeking government assistance that was so thick with bureaucratic and other hurdles that even the best of intentions were no match.

So far, he and Ms. Reed, his wife, had gotten $650 in federal emergency aid to fix a damaged car, and $1,200 from a church to repair their house, which had been handed down from Ms. Reed’s parents.

“It’s just going to be patched back up, little by little,” Mr. Hood said of his home. “There’s not going to be a remodeling and all that.”

His prediction: The same would be true for Rolling Fork.

The community was daunted by a bleak catalog of destruction: City Hall, the post office, the Police Department, both laundromats, the Family Dollar store, the convenience store that also had a decent menu of hot food.

There were also things that, while not essential to a functioning community, held deep value as the landmarks of home. Domonique Smith, who grew up in Rolling Fork, noticed the loss of the pear tree in the yard of a woman known as Miss Louise, which had long been harvested by neighborhood children.

Ms. Smith’s mother’s house had seemingly vaporized, its contents spread across the neighborhood. She found a single photograph of her father, who died when she was so young that she had no memories of him. A neighbor found a photo of Ms. Smith in her cap and gown, from when she was the valedictorian of her class at South Delta High School.

Now 35, she lives in Jackson, the state capital, almost 90 minutes away. But she said she had always found comfort in knowing her mother’s house, a safe haven, was there in Rolling Fork.

She returned to Rolling Fork on a recent Sunday because her family, at last, had something to celebrate. Her cousin, Ja’kiya Powell, had just graduated from high school, third in her class. The family gathered in another relative’s front yard, boasting of Ja’kiya’s accomplishment with a banner hanging from the front of the house.

Almost a year ago, Ja’kiya’s mother had moved to Texas, but Ja’kiya stayed behind, living with relatives. She wanted a normal senior year with her friends, something different from her school experience during the pandemic. The tornado hit the town just before her prom.

She was preparing to follow her mother and cousin out of Rolling Fork, starting at the University of Mississippi in the fall.

“There was a little taste of something before the tornado,” Ja’kiya, 18, said of her hometown. “Ain’t nothing now.”

A shadow Rolling Fork has sprouted in the collection of motels on Route 82 in Greenville, about 40 miles away, where the Red Cross is still distributing three meals a day and a shuttle bus totes residents back to town to clean up their property or just to be close to whatever is left of home.

Talia and Malissa Williams have mostly stuck to their room on the first floor of the Days Inn, which they share with Pee Wee, an ancient yet remarkably spry Chihuahua, and Bailey, a much younger pit bull.

They are waiting for government aid and possible temporary housing — a runway allowing them to save money and plot a future far from Rolling Fork. Talia still works as a home caregiver.

“It’s basically God,” Malissa, 43, said. “Wherever his direction is leading us, that’s where we’re going.”

Maybe it will be Tupelo, a city of 37,000 outside the Delta. Memphis, three hours north, could be an option, or somewhere in Texas, where Malissa’s brother lives.

In the quiet moments, an odd thought keeps surfacing. It is uncomfortable to articulate, given the heartache that surrounds the couple and all the disruption to their own lives. But that does not make it any less true.

“To me, it’s beautiful,” Malissa said. “I don’t know what else to say about it.”

There was the Nissan sedan parked outside their motel room, which they called their blessing. There were generous strangers, like the woman Malissa had met shopping at the Goodwill store in Greenville. The woman handed Malissa $60, then pulled it back and said God had commanded her to offer a $100 bill instead.

Malissa even found gratitude for the storm that had destroyed her home. It was the shove she and her wife needed, sending them toward the possibility of something better, somewhere else.

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, five months into her first run for president, acknowledges the position she is in.

Though she was the first Republican to announce a challenge to former President Donald J. Trump, she hasn’t spent a dime on television ads, is polling well behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and has struggled at times to make a case for her campaign.

But in an interview on Friday, at a picnic table outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in the small town of Lancaster, N.H., Ms. Haley downplayed concerns about her standing in the primary. It’s early in the race, she said, and many voters have yet to tune in to the campaigns.

“I look at it like one goal after another; I don’t look at the end,” she said. “I know that by mid-fall, this is going to be totally different. Once you pass Labor Day, the numbers start to shift. And you can look at history for that. That’s not me just hoping, that’s me knowing.”

As she traversed small towns in the mountainous North Country region of New Hampshire last week, she tacitly acknowledged the uphill race, while also telling her story of overcoming long political odds to win South Carolina’s governorship in 2010, making her the first woman to serve as governor of the state and the second governor of Indian descent.

During her appearances, Ms. Haley also mixed in subtle digs at her primary rivals.

“I did not go to an Ivy League school like the fellas that are in this race,” she told voters in a North Conway community center on Thursday. “I went to a public university.” Touting her degree in accounting from Clemson University, she said: “I’m not a lawyer. Accountants are problem solvers.”

Ms. Haley’s most recent swing through New Hampshire, which holds the party’s first primary, was billed by her campaign as a grass-roots-focused trip, and one intended to introduce her to voters in this part of the state as a former state executive with roots in the rural South, rather than an establishment figure with Washington ties.

Frank Murphy, 54, who moved to northern New Hampshire from South Carolina in 2016, knows Ms. Haley as his former governor. When she introduced herself to the voters crowded into the Lancaster V.F.W. post, he raised his hand within the first few minutes of her speech to tell her he was from Charleston.

“I got to see firsthand what she did to help the economy down there,” he said, adding that he was elated to see her running for president. “To come into a small town meeting like this and to speak to people and to get them to engage and to talk and ask questions? That’s what you want from a politician,” he said.

The challenge for Ms. Haley is that her credentials might be more of a liability than an asset in a Republican primary that seems to be geared more toward personality than policy, with much attention concentrated on Mr. Trump’s legal troubles and Mr. DeSantis’s focus on social and cultural issues.

In small events and meet-and-greets, Ms. Haley spoke as much about her family and personal background as she did about the economy and foreign policy.

She complimented the scenery of the North Country, adding that its close-knit communities reminded her of her hometown, Bamberg, S.C. Her upbringing as a member of the only Indian American family in town — “We weren’t white enough to be white, we weren’t Black enough to be Black,” she said — taught her to look hard for the similarities she shared with others.

Speaking to voters at the V.F.W. outpost in Lancaster on Friday, she poked fun at the southern accents she is used to hearing in South Carolina and tested out a New England twang, asking those present if her saying “Lan-cah-stah” made her sound local.

“Somebody said I sounded like I was from Boston,” she acknowledged, to sympathetic laughs.

Ms. Haley has focused intensely on New Hampshire. By the end of this week she will have made 39 stops in the Granite State, far outpacing most of the Republican field. She is one of the few 2024 Republican contenders — along with Vivek Ramaswamy — to visit the counties in the state’s North Country region, which sits less than 200 miles from the Canadian border and has woodsy, winding roads stretching through the White Mountain range.

Her campaign says it is hanging its hopes on a growing network of supporters and volunteers in the far corners of the state, rather than spending money on radio or television ads — a longstanding tradition of glad-handing and retail politicking.

The strategy has yet to generate much momentum. Most polls of the primary in New Hampshire show her in fourth place, behind Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis and former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has also spent a significant amount of time in the state.

Ms. Haley’s supporters have expressed frustration and confusion that their preferred candidate — whose past roles as U.N. ambassador and governor prompted an event moderator to ask a crowd on Thursday to decide by applause which title he should use to introduce her — has barely polled above 4 percent in most national public polls.

“We don’t understand that because she’s doing so well,” said Beverly Schofield, an 84-year-old Republican voter, clad in red, white and blue, who drove from Vermont with her daughter to see Ms. Haley in New Hampshire on Friday. “It’s very impressive that she’s doing as well as she is. But I’d like to see her move up that ladder quickly.”

Ms. Haley’s standing reflects the challenges of campaigning in this particular primary more than it does her political capabilities, her supporters say. The Republican field has ballooned to a dozen candidates, splintering the anti-Trump vote, while his recent and prospective indictments seem to have only put the former president closer to capturing the nomination. Ms. Haley’s supporters are wondering how the campaign intends to turn things around

“That’s the question I wanted to ask her,” said Ted Kramer, 81, a retired marketing executive who attended Ms. Haley’s town hall in North Conway. “She’s got to get the profile up.”

Ms. Haley pointed to previous Republican front-runners who later fizzled out, such as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. The race so far has been painted largely as a two-man race between Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, Ms. Haley said, but voters are likely to sour on one.

“I know the reality of how quickly somebody can go up and how quickly they can fall,” she said. “The shiny object today is not the shiny object tomorrow. So it’s about not peaking too soon.”

She added, “I’m very realistic about what the benchmarks are and what we need to overcome.”

Those markers include securing the required number of donors and funds to make the debate stage in August — which she has done. She also said she would continue to focus on Iowa and New Hampshire while building on the base she has in South Carolina, another early state, where she and Senator Tim Scott, who represents the state, are aiming to leverage similar voter bases and donor networks. The two have not spoken since he launched his campaign, she said.

Ms. Haley also admitted to feeling underestimated in the race. She is often included in conversations about vice-presidential contenders, though she has emphatically said she is not eyeing the position. She also said that many, particularly in the news media, failed to recognize “the street cred that I have,” listing political wins and averted crises seen during her tenure as South Carolina governor and as United Nations ambassador. “I mean, these were no small jobs,” she said.

Republicans longing for an alternative to Mr. Trump made up a large portion of the crowds at Ms. Haley’s events, along with moderate Republicans and independent voters. Few who attended Ms. Haley’s events this week said they were fully committed to supporting her, and many said they wanted to test the political waters, a signature of campaigning in New Hampshire, where most primary voters can expect to hear from every candidate in person, usually more than once.

Ms. Haley, eager to sway some of those who were on the fence, made policy points on the stump and condemned Democrats on race, education and inclusion of transgender athletes. She criticized both Democrats and Republicans for the handling of Covid-19 and chastised Congress, asking voters if they could point to anything their representatives in Washington had done for them.

She also drew on her foreign policy background, saying that the biggest threat to the United States is China and repeatedly criticizing the Biden administration on its approach, folding in terse words for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is visiting the country this week.

Joanne Archambault, an independent voter who lives near North Conway, said she liked Ms. Haley’s message and saw her as an authoritative speaker on policy issues. Still, she said that Ms. Haley’s talk of foreign policy distracted from domestic priorities.

“I think there’s too much focus about overseas stuff, too much talk about the border and about China,” she said. “Let’s talk about the problems we are facing — you know, gun violence, abortion, let’s talk about those things. Let’s focus on this country and not what other countries are doing.”

Kawsar Yasin, a Harvard sophomore of Uyghur descent, found the Supreme Court decision last week banning race-conscious college admissions gut-wrenching.

Jayson Lee, a high school sophomore of Taiwanese descent, hopes the court’s decision will open the door for him and others at competitive schools.

And Divya Tulsiani, the daughter of Indian immigrants, can’t help but think that the decision would not put an end to the poisonous side of college admissions.

Asian Americans were at the center of the Supreme Court decision against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In both cases, the plaintiffs said that high-achieving Asian American applicants lost out to less academically qualified students. In Harvard’s case, Asian Americans were docked on a personal rating, according to the lawsuit, launching a painful conversation about racial stereotyping in admissions.

But in the days following the court’s ruling, interviews with some two dozen Asian American students revealed that for most of them — no matter their views on affirmative action — the decision was unlikely to assuage doubts about the fairness of college admissions.

“I don’t think this decision brought any kind of equalizing of a playing field,” Ms. Tulsiani said. “It kind of did the opposite.”

Lower courts found that Harvard and U.N.C. did not discriminate in admissions. But the Supreme Court ruled that, “however well intentioned and implemented in good faith,” the universities’ admission practices did not pass constitutional muster, and that race could no longer be considered in deciding which students to admit.

The court noted that the two universities’ main response to criticism of their admissions systems was, “essentially, ‘trust us.’”

The universities said they would comply with the ruling. Harvard added that it “must always be a place of opportunity, a place whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed.”

In a community as large and diverse as the Asian American community, opinions on affirmative action were wide ranging. A recent Pew Research Center poll conveyed the ambivalence of Asian Americans. Only about half of Asian Americans who had heard of affirmative action said it was a good thing; three-quarters of Asian respondents said that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admission decisions.

A few students found hope in the Supreme Court’s decision.

Mr. Lee, the Maryland sophomore, is interested in studying science and technology and supports standardized tests and other traditional measures of merit.

“Before the case, yes, I did have worries about my ethnicity being a factor in college admissions,” he said. “But if colleges implement the new court rulings to get rid of affirmative action, then I think that it will be better, and more even, for every ethnicity.”

Others had more mixed feelings. Jacqueline Kwun, a sophomore at a public high school in Marietta, Ga., whose parents emigrated from South Korea, said she has felt the sting of stereotyping, when people assumed she was “born smart.”

Even so, she said she believed the court’s ruling was wrong.

“Why would you shut the entire thing down?” she asked. “You should try to find a way to make yourself happy and make other people happy at the same time, so it’s a win-win situation, rather than a win-lose.”

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that colleges could consider mentions of race in the essays students submit with their applications if they could be tied to, for instance, overcoming discrimination through personal qualities like “courage and determination.” But many Asian American students had doubts about that prescription.

Students already feel pressure to write about hardship, said Rushil Umaretiya, who will go to the University of North Carolina in the fall. He wrote in his essay about how the women in his Indian immigrant family were the breadwinners and intellectuals, and how his grandmother rose through the white male-dominated ranks at the Roy Rogers restaurant chain to become a regional manager.

Even before the decision, he had seen anxious classmates at his selective high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Alexandria, Va., making up stories about facing racial injustice.

“I think college admissions has really dipped into this fad of trauma dumping,” he said.

Ms. Tulsiani, who is studying for a master’s degree in sociology and law at New York University, is a veteran of the application process.

She wrote an application essay for Georgetown about her family — her father worked his way up from deli worker and taxi driver to owning restaurants — in response to a prompt about diversity.

“You accept that you have to sell some kind of story in order to appeal to this audience,” she said.

She was glad the court preserved the diversity essay option, but felt sympathy for the applicants having to spill their most intimate secrets and speak with moral force. “It’s a huge burden on a 17-year-old child,” she said.

She thinks the stigma of affirmative action will persist. “The narrative will be, instead of ‘you got in because of affirmative action’, ‘you must have gotten in because of your class,’” she said.

Some Asian American students believe, contrary to the dominant narrative in the court case, that they have benefited from affirmative action. Evidence introduced in court showed that Harvard sometimes favored certain Asian American applicants over others. For instance, applicants with families from Nepal, Tibet or Vietnam, among other nations, were described with words like “deserving” and “Tug for BG,” an abbreviation for background.

“I do believe I was a beneficiary,” said Hans Bach-Nguyen, a Harvard sophomore from Camarillo, in Southern California. He said he was not sure until he requested his admissions file and found that one of the two reader comments in it concerned his Vietnamese heritage.

He was happy, he said, to be recognized as a member of an underrepresented minority in higher education. But he wondered whether he was fully deserving. His parents came to the United States as refugees at around his age, and got college degrees at state universities.

“I think my guilt comes from that I did not grow up low-income,” he said.

Echoing a common criticism of the university, he noted that many Harvard students, “even if they are from minority backgrounds, are from financially stable or more affluent families.”

In California, affirmative action has been banned since 1996, but even so, a few Asian American students there seemed suspicious of what they thought of as a secretive admissions process.

Sunjay Muralitharan, whose family is of Indian origin, was rejected or wait-listed by his top five college choices, a mix of public and private colleges in California. He believes his race was a factor. He ended up at the University of California San Diego, where he is a sophomore.

“I know people are saying, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be merit-based, merit-based, merit-based,” he said. “No, it’s not.”

Still, he said, he has gotten over his initial resentment. “I grew up middle-class, I never had to worry about where the next meal was coming from,” he said. “Like it or not, I was put into a bunch of tutoring programs. It’s understandable to give an opportunity to someone who didn’t have the same amount of opportunities when they were younger.”

Colbi Edmonds and Anna Betts contributed reporting.

When the torrential rain stopped on Friday afternoon, Laura Lowry could see the steam rising off the wet pavement. She was on her front porch in the Fifth Ward neighborhood of Houston, desperate for relief from the 91-degree heat. The air-conditioner in her house worked, but she and her husband, reliant on disability checks, couldn’t afford to run it.

The lack of cool air wasn’t simply a matter of discomfort for Ms. Lowry, 73. It was dangerous. Just a few weeks ago, there had been a terrifying moment when she was so taxed by the heat after waiting outside a food pantry that she had slumped into her porch chair as soon as she got home. “I couldn’t make it inside,” she said. “I felt like I was passing out.”

Another wave of dangerous heat sweeping across the South and into the West this week has posed particular perils for older people, who are among the most vulnerable to such extreme conditions.

Forecasters expect the scorching spell to continue through next week, with heat indexes rising to well over 100 degrees across a vast swath of the South, reaching from Texas, across the Gulf Coast and into Florida.

It has created misery, and has also underscored a recognition that the health risks stand to intensify as a changing climate brings higher temperatures that will likely endure for longer periods.

“This can be deadly, especially in these vulnerable populations,” said Natalie Christian, an assistant professor of geriatrics at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans.

“I certainly don’t think it’s a problem that is going to go away,” she added. “It’s something we’re going to have to respond to, and we’re going to have to respond to in a bigger way.”

The aging process makes older bodies generally less capable of withstanding extreme heat, doctors say.

“They’re at extremely high risk of heat stroke and death,” James H. Diaz, a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at Louisiana State University’s School of Public Health, said of older people. “When we look at what happens with these heat waves, most of the deaths occur in the homebound elderly.”

In many communities, including in New Orleans and Houston, officials have opened cooling centers and shelters in recent weeks, with air-conditioned shuttle buses meandering through neighborhoods, picking people up. Programs are also in place to provide or repair air-conditioners or help people struggling to afford their electricity bills.

But in some of the South’s hottest places, there was a sense on Friday that the heat was inescapable.

“There’s nothing we can do about this heat, only God can do something,” said David Flores, 81, who lives in an apartment in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. The temperature there approached 90 degrees on Friday, and the heat index — a measure of what the temperature actually feels like — ranged from 105 to 109 degrees. With a single wall unit in his apartment, he said, “I leave the bedroom door open so that it cools down my little living room.”

Victor Hugo Grajales, 66, said he was trying to avoid leaving his air-conditioned home in Miami. “Young people can handle this, they have the energy,” he said. “But seniors are suffering.”

Older bodies tend to hold more heat than younger ones, and as people age, they produce less sweat, making it tougher to regulate body temperature and dissipate heat. “It can be harder for even healthy older adults to tell if they’re dehydrated or overheated,” Dr. Christian said.

Common health issues — including heart problems, high blood pressure and diabetes — put older people more at risk of consequences from heat stress, medical experts said. Medications also have an effect: Certain drugs can increase the amount of heat generated in a person’s internal organs, influence the amount of heat that a person can tolerate or interfere with sweating.

Signs of heat stress include feelings of exhaustion and possibly a headache, dizziness and flushed skin. “Your skin may be moist and clammy, your pupils are dilated,” Dr. Diaz said. “You may be sweating a little bit but not enough.”

If a situation is progressing to a heat stroke, a person’s body temperature will spike, reaching 103 degrees or higher. “The patient is going to stop sweating entirely,” Dr. Diaz said, and could lose consciousness.

“That’s a 911 emergency,” he said. “You’re now dealing with heat stroke. Your mortality rate is now approaching 50 percent.”

Euradell Williams, 71, underwent a triple bypass surgery last year and has diabetes. She knows the heat affects her blood pressure. She tries to be cautious, but living on the south side of Houston means the heat is unavoidable, especially as she takes the bus most days to a community center more than an hour away, where she does crafts, swims in the indoor pool and socializes.

“By the time I leave here I’m drained,” she said at the center on Friday. “I’m just slumped over on the bus after just a minute of being out there.”

Familiarity with the heat has led to strategies for coping. Nati Guerrera, 88, of Miami, only emerges from her house at night. Virginia Rivera, 77, monitors the palm trees at her retirement community in downtown Orlando, Fla.

“You see the trees blowing in the breeze, you can go out and enjoy it,” said Ms. Rivera, who has a heart monitor and recently suffered a stroke. “If you open the door and the trees aren’t moving, stay inside.”

This year’s especially intense heat “causes aches and pains,” she noted, adding, “It just cuts your air and you can’t breathe.”

In another neighborhood of Orlando, Veronica King, 67, said she keeps her air-conditioner running even if she can’t afford to. “I have to figure out how to cover that bill,” she said, adding that she relies on machines that help her breathe. “When it’s hot, I can’t breathe.”

In Houston, where the heat index could reach 107 degrees on Sunday, Ms. Lowry and her husband, Jasper, 72, have come up with a compromise. They have two cars, neither with working air-conditioning. But they figured they could at least spare the money to repair it in one of them.

“I used to get out here and work in the yard, and trim the grass and work on the car,” Mr. Lowry said, sitting in the wheelchair he has needed since having a stroke. “But I can’t do it no more because it’s too hot.”

He stayed outside, watching over the man he had hired to fix his car, waiting for the chance to turn it on and — at last — feel a blast of cool air.

Abigail Geiger contributed reporting from Orlando, and Verónica Zaragovia from Miami

Those who sweat and suffer through June and July in South Florida are rewarded with mangoes blushing from trees in yards, streets and strip malls.

WHY WE’RE HERE

We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. In South Florida, mango lovers turn to fruit to build a sense of community during the grueling summer.

The air gets thick with humidity as summer arrives in South Florida. Evening thunder murmurs. The tropics begin to stir.

Then, something magical happens: The mango trees bear fruit. In good years, they produce so much that strangers give away mangoes on their lawns. Neighbors pack them in boxes to mail to loved ones. Friends offer homemade pies.

This has been a very good year.

During the month of June, Zak Stern, the founder of Zak the Baker, his bakery in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, invited customers to bring in six local mangoes in exchange for a loaf of bread. He started taking in about 200 a day.

“I think we’ve got enough mango jam for, like, the next five years,” he said.

The Miami summer scares off tourists and part-timers who only care to experience the glorious winter. The roads get emptier. The days get slower.

The reward for hardy locals who remain year round, sweating and suffering through hurricane season, comes in the form of the seductive mango, blushing from trees in yards, streets and strip malls.

“This,” said Mr. Stern, who grew up in suburban Kendall, “is a gift to the folks who stay.”

What he and other South Florida mango evangelists cherish most about the peak June-to-August season is how sharing a beloved fruit brings people together in a relatively young, multinational city with few widely shared traditions. Mangoes remind immigrants of the places they left — and help them feel like Miami, with its hodgepodge of cultures and languages, is home.

“For people who are originally from tropical countries — say, Southeast Asia, or the Caribbean, or Latin America — they grow up with mangoes,” said Jonathan H. Crane, a tropical fruit crop specialist at the University of Florida’s tropical research and education center in Homestead, south of Miami. “So there’s a connection with mangoes from their childhood.”

I grew up with mangoes in Venezuela but did not fully appreciate their succulence until I moved to Miami two decades ago. Without a yard of my own, I trawl the suburbs for fruit residents put out for sale, saving some for my mother’s mango ceviche. A friend hosts an annual mango daiquiri party that has become one of my favorite ways to celebrate the start of summer. Inevitably, it rains.

Most everyone has mango stories. Mr. Stern likes to eat them over the sink, juice dribbling down his chin. Xavier Murphy, who is from Jamaica, has gone through such lengths to try to protect his East Indian mango tree from hungry wildlife that one year he used his children’s life-size cutout of a Jonas brother as a scarecrow. (It worked, for a while.) Natalia Martinez-Kalinina, was born in Cuba and raised in Mexico, bakes mango pies in honor of her grandmother, who would give away buckets full of mangoes every summer in Cuba.

“It’s become this really lovely communal exchange,” Ms. Martinez-Kalinina said. “People text me and say, ‘I have mangoes — do you need more for mango pie?’”

Mangoes originated in Southeast Asia and were spread by colonists across the globe — including, in the mid-19th century, to South Florida, where wealthy landowners cultivated them as a potential moneymaking crop. But workers from the Bahamas and Cuba also brought seeds in their pockets because the fruit reminded them of home, said Timothy P. Watson, an English professor at the University of Miami who is working on a book about the history of mangoes in Florida.

“They literally mix here in Miami,” he said of the varieties from around the world. “The combination produces mango culture, which is now one of the very few things that joins people together in this incredibly fractured metropolitan area. It’s a complicated story, and a bitter story in many ways.”

Florida mangoes dominated the commercial market in the United States until Hurricane Andrew destroyed nearly half of the state’s groves in 1992. International trade agreements then made it cheaper to import mangoes that had once grown in Florida from Latin America and the Caribbean. Perhaps 1,500 acres remain in Florida’s mango industry, Dr. Crane estimated.

Cold weather hurt the crop last year, but a more typical winter and spring led to a bountiful harvest this year, with no biting temperatures to threaten the fruit or the flowers that precede it.

Though commercial operations have mostly withered, mangoes still thrive in backyards and in the small specialty market, Dr. Crane said, as mangophiles demand varieties that cannot be found in grocery stores.

“I like anything but being bored,” said Walter Zill, 81, who sells mangoes from the roughly 40 varieties he grows with his wife, Verna, in the Palm Beach County city of Boynton Beach. “A person can eat a lot of mangoes without ever getting tired of them.”

His brother, Gary Zill, grows some 90 varieties to sell in nearby Lake Worth, including nearly two dozen of his own cultivars with names like Coconut Cream and Pineapple Pleasure. In the 1960s, his father’s nursery sold a mere 16 varieties.

In the upscale Miami suburb of Coral Gables, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden has 550 varieties of mango, one of the most diverse collections in the world. Bruce W. Greer, the president of the board of trustees, helped start an annual mango festival. Now in its 30th year, it is expected to draw as many as 8,000 visitors this weekend.

A few months ago, Mr. Greer’s sister came to town and wanted to take her daughter to see the house where she and Mr. Greer lived as children. The two mango trees their father had planted in the early 1960s — a Haden and a Kent — were still there, thriving.

“I literally remember my dad putting them in when I was 6 years old,” said Mr. Greer, who has 22 trees of his own. “They went through I don’t know how many owners. They went through my whole life.”

That inspired Mr. Greer to envision a new “Million Mango Project” for Fairchild to promote tree plantings across Miami, with the goal of bringing people closer to the prized fruit and shade to neighborhoods with limited tree canopy.

“We’re going to reintroduce these mangoes into the landscape,” he said.

Two years ago, shortly after moving into a historic home in Coral Gables, Catalina Saldarriaga found herself inundated with fruit from two big mango trees on her property that she thinks must be at least 60 years old. This year, she is again collecting 70 to 80 mangoes each day.

“It may be my favorite fruit,” said Ms. Saldarriaga, 64, who grew up in Colombia with much smaller mangoes. “But you can only eat one or two a day.”

She gives the rest to friends, family, her cleaning lady, the contractors fixing her pergola. The mangoes that fall to the ground, uneaten by iguanas, birds or squirrels, she leaves out on a grassy patch by her driveway for passers-by to take for free.

One man stopped on his bicycle to thank her. Someone left flowers.

“What a delight,” she said, “that someone else can also enjoy them.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.