Though summer is my favorite time of year, I have to admit that I’m no big fan of the Midnight Sun. There’s not much outside to indicate that spring, let alone summer, is on the way (it SNOWED yesterday, for crying out loud), but even in the absence of anything green on the trees, the ever-lengthening days are a telltale sign of the changing seasons.

It’s been very evident for the past few weeks that we’re rapidly losing darkness. According to today’s newspaper, sunrise was at 3:36 in the morning and sunset at 9:35 in the evening, which translates to only about four hours of true darkness in the wee hours. And it only gets worse from here — within a matter of weeks it will be broad daylight ’round the clock.

One of the more common complaints about Sweden is that it’s so dark in the winter, but I find the constant daylight in the summer much harder to handle. When we first moved into this house we bought a dark window shade to use in our bedroom in the summertime, but I’ve had to accept that it does only a barely adequate job of keeping the light out, Clearly more drastic measures were in order and a few days ago, much to Olof’s dismay, I taped cardboard over our bedroom windows in an effort to keep it dark enough for me to sleep. So far it’s an improvement, but I’m reserving final judgment for at least a few more weeks.