By the time you read this, the longest day of 2008 will be behind us. I cannot help feeling a rather sharp wave of melancholy to realize that the longest day of the year is already over, that the shortest night has come and gone. Now begins the long, slow slide toward those weeks in December, when we become a people huddled inside against the darkness and the night.

Winter weather I don't much mind, but I live for the light. I do not like that moment when I realize it must ebb.

At its best, North Dakota offers the finest light of the American West. At its best. So far this year, I have not witnessed a single endless dusk - when the engorged sun actually seems to hesitate before it sets, and then, from below the western horizon, it illuminates high scattered, elongated clouds in charcoal, V8 red, the purest golden orange imaginable, and then various intensities of pink with tracery all the way around to the east.

Add to this 10 p.m. lightshow on the far western horizon, a slowly gathering thundercloud with some squibs of heat lightning, and you have paradise. OK, as long as we are at it, throw in the day's last pure call of the meadowlark and maybe the first tentative yips of the clustering coyotes, and then, you discover, Venus quivering above the horizon.

I live for those nights. They are rare enough that we Dakotans never take them for granted. It's not like Southern California or Hawaii, where great evenings are a dime a dozen.

Ask yourself this. How many evenings have there been so far this year when you could linger on the deck or the porch drinking in the spring freshness, hearing the muted, not disagreeable drone of a lawnmower somewhere far down the street? You know those evenings, when you actually say to your companion or even out loud to yourself, "Isn't this a splendid North Dakota evening?" And you take deep breaths and stretch into the dusk and wonder whether you should go in to get a jacket, but don't, because you realize that the slight chill is actually agreeable.

By the time of the solstice, we usually have experienced just enough such evenings to take off the edge of the melancholy of knowing that the solar pendulum has turned.

It's hard not to feel cheated this year.

We had what can only be described as an icky spring. It was bone dry. It was unusually windy. This spring was therefore a source of anxiety for everyone who understands what drought means, from the farmers who feed us to those who cannot bear a Fourth of July without fireworks and saturnalia. We longed (and some prayed) for rain. We finally got it, but we got it just when we were ready for those glorious early summer days, days that are calm or just enlivened by a light breeze, days sunbathed with harmless pillowy cumulous clouds. Just when our children thought they could celebrate the end of the school year at the swimming pool - they couldn't. People with cabins, eager for that long-anticipated first weekend at the lake, canceled the first weekend and then suffered and hunkered through the second.

I planned nothing for the summer solstice this year: no Druidic rites, no sun salutations, no fatted calf. That means that I observed the solstice in the wimpiest possible way - by facing it as a mere statistical blip on an abstract Gregorian calendar, but without letting it percolate in any meaningful way into my abstract Gregorian life.

We need to be more rooted than that. That's what's wounding the planet and wounding the human spirit.

My garden, except for the tomatoes and peppers, which look frail and meager, is still a stark black rectangle - at the summer solstice! A lonely bean has popped up here and there. A few cucumber shoots have begun to reach into the light. Almost nothing else has even broken the surface, including my four long rows of corn. So much for that knee-high business. How about visible by the Fourth of July? A pessimist would despair.

Ah, but I know three things. First, you have to take nature however it chooses to present itself to you. If you want your North Dakota to be the North Dakota of the glossy calendars and the tourism department Web site, you are going to be disappointed as often as not. This is a raw place, thank goodness.

Second, there is going to be plenty of summer. Patience, patience. And when summer comes, as it has at last begun to come this last week, it is going to be intense. We are going to appreciate whatsoever we get with special satisfaction because of the delay and because of the foreshortening. Because we live in a sub-arctic climate, we pack our summers to the hilt: reunions, picnics, camping trips, barbecues, vacations and lazy Huck Finn days on the river. This summer's going to be even more hyperkinetic than usual.

Third, the garden will catch up. I planted 71 tomatoes over the plaintive advice (actually, it amounted to a veto) of my friend and trainer and garden partner Melanie Carvell. And yet, she claims she has a recipe for salsa. We'll see.

Last night, after arriving home on an evening flight, I left my suitcase on the front porch, entered my house only to open windows and put on better shoes, and then went for a long walk. Perfect temperature, perfect breeze, perfect light, perfect time of night. I read for part of the walk and just gazed off at the beauty of the prairie for most of it. It did not quite feel like a 100 percent summer night - something in the air still felt unsettled - but I was in shirtsleeves at 9 p.m. That, here, has to serve as the definition of summer.

I glanced over to the east. The full moon had just risen. It was a kind of watermelon orange and it was glorious.

Make hay and make the most of every day.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@aol.com.)