By Carol White, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener

I love summer. I live for it. For about 30 years or so I have spent the summer solstice in my garden, usually with friends, watching the sun set, the fireflies flit forth, and the pale moon come glimmering in the sky.

Sometimes we were a wild bunch. Oh yes, with cookies, lemonade and iced tea. In the years when I had hundreds of rosebushes we would walk barefoot on rose petals and have masses of roses in vases, buckets, and once or twice, we stuffed pillows with rose petals and slept on them that night. Cleopatra, eat your heart out!

At midsummer I feel sorry for people in more southern areas where night falls like a window shade. Bang-daylight's gone. In the days of the rose garden I kept thinking that it might, just might, be possible for a unicorn to appear out of the cool, blue, firefly-lit twilight. None ever did, but now I think they may prefer to make a more striking entrance from the hemlock-scented darkness of the northern forest surrounding my rather small clearing. They'd certainly be welcome.

I think anyone living at this latitude feels the same way about summer: make the most of it. When I visited cousins in Husqvarna, Sweden in midsummer (the only possible time to spend time there according to my aunt), the light lingered on until after 11:00 p.m., as families all over Sweden celebrated summer with huge meals of crayfish and boiled potatoes, eaten picnic style in yards or parks with paper lanterns shaped like suns and moons dancing overhead. (And akvavit, let's not forget the akvavit, true Scandinavian firewater.)

Oddly enough, the crayfish reminded me of home. The native Swedish crayfish all succumbed to some dread disease many years ago and were replaced by stocks from the U.S. and, of all places, Turkey. But guess where the best and strongest crayfish came from? Yep, right here in New Hampshire. I travelled how many hundreds of miles to eat New Hampshire crayfish boiled with dill?

I haven't had it since. Perhaps if a bottle of akvavit turned up?

Like many New Hampshire folks, the Swedes are mad gardeners. I know the English have the reputation as a nation of gardeners, but even in Sweden's capital city the most modern, black glass pyramid of an apartment building had pots and pots of veggies and flowers burgeoning on ultra-modern balconies.

Little red garden houses in the middle of a garden plot are ubiquitous on the outskirts of the cities. Those who can have slightly larger red houses in the countryside or on the scattered islands of the tideless Baltic. No one stays inside on a summer evening.

Just like home. On the solstice evening this year I grilled my dinner on the deck, drank something fizzy, and sat watching the light slowly fade. Here in the Lakes area I can always count on volleys of fireworks as darkness finally falls. The fishermen who stay out on the lake, where it is light long after darkness falls under the trees, call to their friends on the shore, homing in on their docks and moorings.

As the dark deepens, stillness comes. If I sit quietly enough, long enough, I often think I just might see, well, probably not a unicorn, but the bears enjoying these long summer twilights, too.