My downstairs air conditioner is out…specifically the air handler.  I felt it when I came downstairs first thing this morning.  For some reason, air-conditioned air at seventy-one degrees feels different than non-air-conditioned air at the same temperature.  Am I crazy? Oh yes but not because of that last statement.  I knew immediately something was amiss.

I am anxiously awaiting my rescue from the remnants of the lingering summer.  It’s not too bad…yet.  We are well shaded but I’m expecting temps in the mid-nineties by week’s end…it could be bad by Friday if my problem hasn’t been rectified by then…it could be bad tonight as inside temperatures approach a balmy seventy-five.  I don’t sleep well above seventy-two…who am I kidding?  I don’t sleep well.

I should warn you; I sweat in Biblical proportions.  Noah’s forty days and nights look like a clearing off shower.

My predicament once again has me scurrying down a pig trail that leads to those thrilling days of yesteryear.  How did we survive in the days when air-conditioning was not the norm?

I know.  You get used to what you get used to and I have become acclimated to air-conditioned air.  There was a time….

I remember an unairconditioned school building.  We never called off school because of extreme temperatures, hot or cold…but I forget we were built of sterner stuff.  As first graders, we walked ten miles to and from school, uphill in both directions, wind, rain, snow or asteroid strike be damned.

A brick building with wide and high windows.  Ceilings twenty-five feet high if they were an inch, not really but twelve at least…may be.  Unscreened, high and wide windows, I  remember the panic caused by red wasps visiting our eighth-grade history class and trying to take notes around the droplets of perspiration dripping onto my notebook.

During those wonderful years of junior high school, one young lady decided shucking her underwear might help with heat transfer…in the middle of class.   Much in the same way my wife can change clothes using her tee-shirt as her dressing room, this girl squirmed out of her slip.  Our teacher, a somewhat flustered Mister Gunter cautioned us that we should reframe from removing foundation garments due to the heat.  Somehow, we survived with most of our clothing on.

Church Sundays were the same…except for the removing of our underwear.  Tall windows open to catch whatever breeze was available.  No screens and plenty of wasps visiting, dispensing their own version of hellfire and brimstone.

Handheld funeral fans causing us to sweat more with the effort needed to keep the hot and humid air moving.  Sweat soaked dress shirts ruined when the varnish on the pews stuck to them.  I survived even if my shirts didn’t.

At home, it was ceiling box fans and window fans, sitting on the front porch until the bedroom had cooled sufficiently enough for the sandman to visit…sleeping on the front porch when it was miserably hot.  Hmm…decisions, decisions.  Sweat yourself to sleep in the bedroom from Dante’s Inferno or risk getting sucked dry by mosquitos.  I believe I’ll just lay here with a window fan installed backwards in the window at the foot off my bed.  I actually slept that way…with my head at the foot of my bed with chicken wire covering the backside of the fan so I didn’t accidentally stick a body part in it.  Somehow, we did survive…body parts and all.

I know we spent our awake time outdoors.  No matter how hot it was outside, it was cooler than inside.  A lot of the time was spent in my grandmother’s garden, playing cowboys and Indians in and around the barn or recreating World War Two in the woods or on the clay bank behind my house.  For some reason, it didn’t seem as hot then.

It’s persimmon season despite the heat and I remember running barefoot under the persimmon tree in my grandmother’s backyard.  Rotting persimmons caking on the bottom of my feet, oozing between my toes, sticking to the brown, dusty, dry dirt.  Hearing, “You chaps clean your feet before you come into this house!”  Heading to the stream that ran through the pasture trying to pry the mud off our feet.  Getting distracted with the crawfish and minnows…forgetting it was time to do my chores.  “Go out there and pick me a keen hickory!  I’m gonna switch them legs.”  No physical marks remain and eventually my feet came clean.

When my bride and I first moved to our little piece of heaven in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, we had no air conditioning and were surprised at the low ceilings our little farmhouse had…until winter hit, and we understood.  It gets cold in them thar hills.  The original owners were required to feed five fireplaces to heat their home.  Low ceilings make for a warmer house.

In the summer we never ventured onto the second floor, it was just too hot.  For seven years we survived with the help of the hemlocks, poplars and black walnuts surrounding the house along with ceiling and window fans.   Late nights sitting on the front porch waiting for the bedroom to cool down.  Just talking and rocking or swinging, holding hands, the smell of a cigar mixing with the forest smells and citronella.  Good times.  Maybe we did more than survive.

My guess is we will survive this little blip on our radar.  Still, I hope it is a short little blip.

The image is of Robert Hays sweating it out as Ted Striker in Airplane! (1980)

Further musings may be found at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM