I have been drinking the first coffee of the morning on the back step, not in the kitchen and not in the chair by the window, but on the step itself, which is concrete and slightly cold and faces east. The change is small. It has made a much larger difference than I expected.

The back step is not a destination. It is just the slab between the kitchen door and the lawn, with two old terracotta pots on it and a small braided rug nobody uses and a place where the dog likes to sit when he wants to be outside but not committed to it. I had walked past it every morning for years without thinking of it as a place to sit. Then one morning in early May, when the kitchen was still dim and the porch was on the wrong side of the house to catch the dawn, I took my coffee out the back door instead of the front, and I sat down on the step, and the day reorganized itself.

Why the Step Beats the Porch in May

The reason has to do with the angle of the sun. The back step faces directly east. At five-thirty in the morning in May, the sun is just above the neighbor’s roof and the entire step is in soft direct sunlight. The temperature on the step is at least ten degrees warmer than the temperature on the porch on the other side of the house, which does not see the sun for another two hours. Sitting on the back step at five-thirty is sitting in the warmest spot in the immediate area, which is exactly what you want at that hour when the rest of the air is still cool.

The other thing is that the back step is closer to the yard than the porch is. The porch is elevated, and from the porch you look out at the yard with a certain remove, the way you would from any window. The back step is at ground level. The grass starts within arm’s reach. The dog can sit next to you and the small creatures that work the yard at first light are doing their work three feet away. A robin came within two feet of my coffee mug on a Tuesday last week and stood there for ten seconds before moving on.

At the Level the Yard Is On

I have started to think of the back step coffee as the warm-weather version of the porch coffee, which I have written about before. The porch is for cool mornings, when I want the comfort of a chair and a roof and a clear view of the feeder. The step is for warm mornings, when I want to be in the yard at the level the yard is on, drinking coffee on a concrete slab the way someone in a different century would have sat on the steps of a small house at dawn because there was no other comfortable seat outside.

The other thing the step has changed is the time. I get up earlier when the destination is the step. The porch I can sit on at any hour. The step is best at first light, and best for about an hour, and by seven the sun is well up over the roof and the angle is gone and the porch becomes the better seat. First light at this latitude in May is around 5:15. I have been outside on the step by 5:30 most mornings this week, which is earlier than I would normally be vertical.

A Seasonal Rotation of Seats

Whether this becomes a year-round habit, I do not know. The step is a fair-weather seat. It is going to be too hot to sit on by mid-July if the surface goes into direct sun before I have had coffee. It is going to be too cold to sit on by October. The seasonal rotation of seats is part of what I have come to like about how the yard works. The porch in early spring, the step in late spring and early summer, the porch again in early fall, and the chair by the window in winter. Four seats for one year.

It has become the seat I look forward to every morning this week, and the week is not over yet, and there is no part of this trade I would undo.