The heat has finally broken. Not that I’ve been suffering
unduly, living as I now do in the blessed world of air conditioning. My Guy and
I are endlessly fascinated by recounting to each other all those years we lived
without it, and not just in our childhoods. Our first house – a 1920s Dutch
colonial – sat under massive oaks in a city lot. They helped a little, I
suppose (except for the carpenter ants that fell from them onto our roof), but
in the summer I often used to wish the entire back of the house could be hinged
up like a dollhouse.
Twenty years later we moved to a house
in the small town outside of the city where we now live. Still lots of trees,
but still no air conditioning. After several steamy summers we finally acquired
a couple of window units. Better but spotty.
Twenty years after that and we’re two
miles down the road in condoland with central air. Magical, magical.
And this is just Massachusetts people, not my
childhood homes in Virginia and Oklahoma.
Actually, I earned these golden years
of cooling when I think about our first year of marriage when My Guy was at Ft.
Benning in Columbus, GA for Officer Candidate School.
He was on base and I was in a furnished (hah!) “garden”
apartment, which meant linoleum floors, huge black beetle-like bugs that flew
across the room at the speed of light, and shaking out my shoes each morning.
I was eight months pregnant, it was
June, and you guessed it, no air conditioning. It's amazing our daughter didn't end up pink with black polka dots. I spent the final month of
pregnancy eating watermelon and reading murder mysteries while sitting no more
that one foot away from one of our very first purchases- a giant box fan.
I lived in Albany, GA in 1960 til 1962 while hubby was stationed at Turner AFB. I was kind of used to the heat, but not those damned palmetto bugs. I told everyone the genteel southern women would have clutched their pearls and fainted dead away if anyone had said hey had cockroaches, so they called them "-palmetto bugs" instead. You could hear them walk across the tile floor, click, click, click. 4ary
ReplyDeleteGood to hear from you, Ana, even if it is to be reminded of those Palmetto bugs. They were absolutely horrifying. Good thing I was younger and braver then.
DeleteWe have evaporative cooling and I love it. And this is the first home we have had with any form of cooling. I well remember lying on the bathroom floor on hot nights....
ReplyDeleteEvaporative cooling? I’m not familiar with that. . . The bathroom floor method though sounds like you’ve had some major struggles with the heat yourself.
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