Daylight lasts till nearly 10:00 p.m. as we near summer solstice. While my children are still asleep, I rise in the early morning. Already there is light to the east. I pull half and half from the fridge and watch the sky while my coffee brews. I am waiting for that moment, just before sunrise, when light and dark merge and dawn could be dusk.

When I was a girl, my family drove north each summer from Southern California to Washington State, where both my parents had their roots. Summer evenings were long in Edmonds and Tacoma, with salmon dinners served late out of doors and the light holding as my cousins and I twirled and dizzied ourselves until we couldn't walk straight, couldn't stand, couldn't tell east from west. We lay on our backs in the grass and watched the tops of the trees spin and settle until a mother or uncle or grandparent told us it was time to come in and sleep.

I am nearing fifty. Each night's sleep means less time left. These long days before solstice are not enough. I need light and more light; I want a land where solstice hovers ever ahead never arriving. Though summer stretches before me, I know her warm days will soon shorten until, in sultry August, I feel the very moment when autumn steps into the breeze.

But today is long and tomorrow, longer. The sun rises, and I throw my windows open to gather, while I can, the light and cool of morning.