We call it “The Canopy,” a formal upstairs bedroom capping the southeast corner of our home’s main block, an 1827 addition by the last of three consecutive Samuel Hinsdales to own the property. I typically sleep there when my grandson supplants me in my downstairs bed, but this was the first time we had two grandsons, with 2-year-old Arie spending his first weekend without a parent. Soon he’ll be comfy as 6-year-old brother Jordan in our Upper Meadows home, its barns and sheds, nooks and crannies, the brook babbling out back.

I never object to sleeping in the room I like to praise as “fit for a princess,” because of its Sheraton four-poster bed, lace canopy crown and natural alarm. This time of year, the first soft ray of sunrise peeks through the northeast window before 6 a.m. and, already stirred by the crack of dawn, you wake with a feathery touch akin to a nurse’s warm washcloth squeezed from a bedside bucket and placed across your forehead. I will never tire of waking in that room, always early, never unpleasant, warm, cold or in between. I typically open my eyes, shift onto my back and get lost in the white lace labyrinth above. Looking down a tunnel through the foot of the bed, a bucolic oil painting of an English setter locked on point hangs over the fireplace. On the wall to the right hang large, framed, 19th century photo portraits of great-grandmother Fannie Woodruff and older sister Mariette, priggish Victorian prudes, Fannie a teen, eventually South Deerfield neighbors on properties abutting today’s high school before it was there.

Everything in that room has a story — from the two Sheraton chests, to the Federal shaving mirror atop the more formal one, to the braided rugs, tabernacle mirror, grain-painted doors and feather-painted floorboards — but especially that graceful canopy bed, simple elegance, figured maple iridescent in direct sunlight, the illusory 3-D bands appearing to breathe. When I linger before rising, my wheels spin into overdrive, intensifying from purr to hum to scream, the white diamonds blurring into one of those whimsical fogs that cling to a summer daybreak pond, liberating me into fleece-lined reflection. Thoughts bombard me. Who else has slept in this public room? Any ghosts? How many children conceived? What lovers’ spats? Think of the devilish sins delivered by stagecoach and neighborhood lust?

I flitter into a quick review of the previous hours and days, focusing on the salient stuff. The thoughts consume my imagination. Then, suddenly, the spell is broken by bright sunlight, the figured maple almost swaying like a windswept wheat field. That’s when I rise, pick my clothes off the floor, slip into them and start the new day, glowing with inspirational energy you can’t buy at Rite-Aid. I walk down a long hall made longer by the open ballroom door, turn right atop the steep staircase, descend to the dining room, look across at old Eli Terry tick-tocking from a sturdy midriff shelf on the south wall and am always surprised by the early hour. It seems later up in that bright, cheerful canopy stitched in diamond fantasy, even under gray skies and forlorn spirits.

It was Sunday morning, my wife and grandkids were still sleeping and, for selfish reasons, I didn’t want to disturb their slumber. It would be nice to get a couple of hours of reading in before entertaining the kids. So I went quietly to the kitchen and made a black pot of coffee, Sumatran Mediterranean fresh from Coffee Roasters’ crock. As I went through this familiar routine, I was still processing my canopy thoughts about Jordi and his troubling fear of nudity. It’s hard for me to get my head around such inhibitions in an innocent 6-year-old boy, ones I can’t find comforting.

It all started Friday night when I suggested that maybe he should sleep upstairs with me and let Arie sleep with my wife in the marital bed. “Well, Grampy, I would but there’s just one little problem,” he said. “You sleep naked.” To be honest, sleeping in the raw seems so normal to me that I didn’t even know he knew. But he obviously has noticed and is uncomfortable with it. I have never hidden my body at home. When it became clear to me that he viewed nudity as unusual or dangerous or dirty, I explained to him that we all enter the world in that state. Did he find birth threatening? No answer, just a pensive, confused countenance, perplexed.

The next day, my wife and I took the boys and dogs for one of our daily walks along a secluded, idyllic section of the Green River. Because it was hot, I figured it was a great day for swimming and river exploration so wore a bathing suit. Playing later in the shallow river, Arie was encumbered by a saturated diaper and my wife, innocently enough, suggested I remove it and let him play naked as his father and uncle often had as preschoolers and, in the right place, older. Again, Jordi found the thought revolting. As I took his brother’s diaper off, he fled the water, stood on the bank and said, “I’m outta here!” No sir, he wasn’t going to swim in the same river with naked Arie.

Hmmm? I was stunned, had seen them in the bathtub together without any modesty hang-ups. What was the genesis of this strange taboo? It was tough to swallow for a man who often witnessed nude swimming in public places during the Sixties and early Seventies, never a complaint, an arrest or hassles, just total, uninhibited freedom, be it at Wellfleet or Nauset beaches on the Cape, Halifax Gorge, The Whitingham “Rocks” and Queechee Gorge in Vermont, or Chesterfield Gorge and the upper Green River right here in the Happy Valley. Back then, skinny dipping was common, not so much as a dirty look or whisper, never a second thought about kids, maybe even a little self-consciousness about being clothed where nudity prevailed.

Must be times have changed in Puritan America — not, in my mind, for the better. I preferred the social climate before Bible-thumping whack-jobs gained traction, pushed hippies onto society’s periphery and yanked us back into the Dark Ages of repression and silly inhibition. Europeans ridicule these weird American attitudes about naked bodies and sexuality, and I agree, though I do respect my grandson’s discomfort. I do hope he changes with maturity.

Hopefully, I haven’t offended anyone. I guess we must think twice nowadays before wading into such risqué discussion. I couldn’t resist. Blame that stimulating canopy sunrise and its white, diamond-laced maze that blurred into disorienting fantasy and smothered me in a mystical fog of introspection — ever elusive, and welcome