The sunlight streams in through a little window and the open door. I notice, but I’m not ready to rise and roll instead, pulling the down comforter up around my shoulders. The air that pours in with the sun is in the 40s, delicious on my hot, turned-over face.

My wife always gets up first and walks to her studio for breakfast. What that really means is a private hour or so with the newspaper and the cat. This time of year, she leaves the back door open in the bedroom when she goes, with just the screen door closed. That’s only a few feet from the bed. She tells me softly when she leaves, and that’s when I wake up just enough to see the yellow brightness, sometimes, before I drink deeply of the coolness and burrow back down under.

That last hour is quality sleep like you wouldn’t believe. Not deep but well-deserved, satisfying in an early-Saturday-morning kind of way. (You can tell you’re an old bastard when you start discussing different varieties of sleep like vintages of wine.) The dream state is just across the divide, too. This is a good time for startling holograms from the unconscious.

When I do get up, it’s never too warm for the heavy fleece bathrobe from L.L. Bean. In a couple of hours, it’s much warmer outside in the sun. The doors and windows are flung all the way open, but it’s still not too warm for that bathrobe. Last week we had a string of two or three hot days around 90, and the warmest it got inside this old adobe was 70! That’s with a strong southwest wind blowing hot air in the windows, mind you.

To be outside in this air is an astonishing gift when it’s not blowing so hard. By 10:30 a.m. Saturday morning, I’d decided to wash the car. It was cool in the mottled shade of the old elm tree and gratifyingly warm in the sun. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and only a gentle breeze. It was 70 degrees and eight percent humidity.

Every step I took was like a blessing. The shadows on the ground were living art. I thought if I moved more deliberately, I could have more of that moment become my whole life.