What Air Conditioning Took From Us

          My grandfather's house in Oklahoma, large, with whitewashed brick, was where I spent much of the summer during my pre-air conditioning childhood.
We would drive across country from our home in Virginia, my parents in the front, my sister and I in the back seat of our green '52 Ford, the hot summer air whipping through the car. Somehow we whiled away the hours and days on the road, my sister drawing, me creating imaginary cakes with imaginary ingredients dispensed from the window crank, the door handle, and the door lock's black cylinder.

          When our car finally pulled into the hotly shimmering slate-covered drive, my grandparents would come smiling out of the kitchen door into the hazy light to greet us. Granny's greeting was always warm, though never effusive, but Grampy smiled and twinkled as he asked my parents about the drive, and his big hand was always either resting on my sister's shoulder or patting my brown curly head.

          If the day's heat had set in, we would sit in the living room, the French doors to the porch closed against summer's bake. This was a house built when you had to gather up the rare cool breeze of an Oklahoma July any way you could. With the aim of catching a cool morning or evening cross-breeze, the living room had a floor to ceiling window opposite the doors to the porch.  In the dining room there were also double doors, this time to the backyard. There was always the hope that they might be opened during dinner as we drank our iced tea with the mint I’d been sent to gather from the garden.

          Best of all was the double porch that ran across the back of the house, enveloping both the living room and my grandfather's study. One floor up, the second porch ran outside my grandparents' bedroom and the next door guest room. It was here that my sister and I slept when we all came for a visit. Since its window opened to the porch, there was no screen and I was fascinated by the fact that I could climb through it onto the porch.

          The second floor porch was empty except for two plastic-covered beds, folded in half and rolled up against the wall. This was not a porch for socializing, like the one below with its green and white bouncing metal chairs and swinging glider. This was a sleeping porch, a real blessing when the night was so hot you tried to sleep with arms and legs akimbo, as though you were making snow angels on your sticky sheets.

          My grandfather was the only one I remember sleeping there regularly. 

One evening, when it was especially hot, I climbed through the window, leaving my more dignified older sister behind there in the guest room. Grampy then opened up a bed for me and pushed the head against the house with the foot closest to the screening of the porch.

He tucked me in, with a kiss and reminders about sleeping tight and bedbugs, and wrapped plastic over the sheet at the bottom half of the bed. I lay there, awake now not from the heat, but the sensations around me.  Adult voices drifted up from the porch below, the cicadas called to one another, and June bugs as big as peach pits thunked harmlessly against the screen. I could smell a new dampness in the weak evening breeze – a storm was coming.

  First came the heat lightning high in the sky as the blackness beyond the screen was filled with flashes and distant thunder. The wind picked up and soon the rain was there in earnest, throwing itself against the house in bursts. It cut through the screen, but I was dry, my top half positioned against the house, my legs enveloped in my plastic cocoon. I lay there, safe and sheltered, and storing a memory that I would keep forever.