Wednesday, July 9, 2014

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.

          

12 comments:

  1. I remember my childhood- running around and playing in the hot summer heat..climbing trees, riding my bike, playing dolls with my sister- I rarely see a child playing outdoors now. Sad.

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    1. Trust me, I suffered plenty in Virginia and Oklahoma summers (and springs and falls, for that matter!) but we've lost our connection with summer when we're all huddled inside like there's a snowstorm out there.

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  2. Ah, yes, the sleeping porch.Windows open on three sides. We never dreamed the icy interior of the movie theater could come home with us. Never dreamed our grandchildren would spend their summers slouched on the sofa, exercising their thumbs.

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    1. Hi Joanne - yes, sad to think that we're the last generation to really appreciate all those summer saviors - like getting your face as close as you could to the ice cream man's freezer in his truck.

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  3. Beautifully described those years and pleasures before A/C. We all did it and never complained. We had no comparison. In the Keys, we use to go the the officers club across the street and raid their ice machine that was outside to cool off I was a real ice cruncher. It is a wonder I still have my own teeth.
    You make me want to go flip the switch right now. Well maybe later tonight---

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  4. We still only turn on one of our few window ACs when it's absolutely unbearable. (Although even though it reaches 90 here on occasion, it doesn't happen often. We live in Massachusetts up against the cool woods.)
    I still don't sleep well with it on.

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  5. I felt like I was right there with you. Anytime the temperature drops below 70 we turn off the AC and open the windows. I love hearing the sounds of the night. The frogs on the pond. It is such a good feeling.

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    1. I do have to admit that with a bedroom next to the woods, night sounds aren't alway magical.
      When we first moved here, and I had to get up at 5 to go teach, I actually opened the window and yelled "Be Quiet!" The wild turkeys must have been mating and they sounded exactly like a herd of Three Stooges, calling out loud 'nyuck, nyucks'. I would have thrown my shoes if I'd known where to aim.

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  6. Wonderful story. I like the title and what you get when you don't live by airconditioning.

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    1. Thanks, Red. I enjoyed being able to put one of my favorite memories into words.

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  7. That read like a book. Is it from one of yours, perhaps? :-)

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    1. Not yet - maybe I could work it into one. . .?

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