I just now, at ten minutes past eleven at night, took this picture off my front porch. With just over a month left until the solstice, we’ve already got almost twenty-four hours of daylight. It will get a bit duskier tonight than it is now, but it won’t reach full darkness, and by two-thirty in the morning it will be totally light again.

As I type this Olof is on a plane flying home from Uppsala, some 500 miles (800 kilometers) south of where we live. It was already dark there when his flight took off, and he has a window seat, which means he’ll get to see the skies become ever lighter over the course of the hour that he flies north. Lydia and I got to see that last June when we returned home from a weekend in Stockholm, and as much as I’ve been known to complain about the midnight sun, that rapid darkness-to-light progression is an undeniably cool phenomenon to see.