A dreamy midsummer's night

I almost feel like Puck in a Midsummer Night's Dream wandering amidst fairies and confused lovers roaming around the night in these crazy days when darkness hardly descends upon us and everything takes on a rosy, blushed and confused hue of this early month of summer. Bees, beetles, mosquitoes, and other bugs fly fantastically and without aim through the sunny breeze, and we humans do much the same in slower fashion beneath their harried watch.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act ii. Scene.1

With the seeming magic of Mendellssohn's poetic piece floating through the midsummer night sky, we hover continuously between lightness and the cusp of darkness in Estonia, as if stuck in a strange twilight trance waiting for the onset of darkness. Length of visible light at the moment in Tartu is 20 hours, 51 minutes, with small increases until midsummer, locally known as Jaanipäev, next weekend.

After surviving the rather dark and gray winter, everyone feels a bit giddy in this dreamy light. I am reminded of Garrison Keillor's News from Lake Woebegon on last week's show of A Prairie Home Companion in which he warned Minnesotans of the infectious feelings floating around in the month of June. I admit to have not heeded his advice to stay indoors and away from windows; instead, I have embraced the dizziness of this wonderful, dreamy midsummer time. After all, it only comes about one time a year!

... and, in the great writer's words, this brings me to "the true beginning of our end"(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act v. Scene.1).