When I finally awoke this morning after sleeping in shamefully late, it was to the divine aroma of freshly baked bread, and underlying it was the somewhat less-appreciated smell of freshly-roasted coffee beans. I love bread, particularly seed-filled and well herbed, heavy-grained bread, of the type my husband has learned to produce in his bread-making machine.

I am quite a bit less enthralled with the fragrance of coffee, a holdover from my first pregnancy 54 years ago when I was overwhelmed by a sudden distaste for all manner of food smells, coffee chief among them and have never lost my then-newly-developed dislike for coffee since that time.

I had been aware in a sleep-interrupted way that my husband had migrated out of bed and downstairs to putter around, something he regularly does before climbing back into bed beside me awhile later. I would much prefer he remain beside me comfortingly, but his is a restless soul and he does what best suits his mood. It's he who should be sleeping in, not me. The installation of the vanity/sink he bought for the laundry room turned out to be a little more complicated than he had anticipated, requiring some plumbing alterations and changes to the vanity format, all of which he accomplished in a little more time and effort than he had foreseen. But now it's done, and he's pleased with the effort it took, yet another challenge for him.

When he peered out the glass-front door leading to the porch at the crack of dawn he saw there a neighbourhood cat stretched out on the outside portal. Needless to say there were no birds nor squirrels about as usual taking their morning victuals.

After shooing the cat away, when my husband returned to look again there were the chickadees, the doves, the juncos, and the squirrels scrabbling about in the various places where nuts and seeds had been scattered for them, as usual.

It is then, in the early morning hours, that my husband sets the breakfast table, fills up the electric water kettle and sugar containers, takes butter and cheese out of the refrigerator to come to room temperature, and does other things like roast the raw free-trade coffee beans he orders, and on the occasion when I've run out of that special bread, bakes another.

After breakfast I watched as one of our regular little red squirrel guests chaotically, compulsively rushed from the feeder on the porch to the nearby garden where it had prepared a surprisingly large hole and deposited one peanut after another, before deciding to carefully and skilfully cover over his new cache. Then turned his frenetic attention to what most occupies it usually, frantically chasing black and grey squirrels ten times its size away from their placid occupation of eating away at what the red squirrel interprets as its monopolistic feeding stations.