Summer Time

We have been having a string of hot weather. Temperatures have been topping out over 95 most days and have hit 100 several times. Add in our usual humidity and you have some miserable weather. I have coped, like a lot of people, by staying inside in the air conditioning. I can't help but wonder about how we coped when we didn't have central air. Don't get me wrong, I do remember those days. I just don't remember how we managed.

I can see my mother now, all dressed up, driving us to church. When she would get out of the car she would have sweated through the back of her blouse. She didn't go "Oh, I have to change. I'm all sweaty!!" She just went to church. Everyone was sweaty and hot. Cars didn't have air conditioning, churches didn't have air conditioning--you just dealt with it. Now, I wear a sweater to church because it is so cold inside that I get chilled.

I remember my dad talking about sleeping porches. Big porches, usually upstairs off the bedrooms, that everyone moved out onto in the hot summer nights to sleep. The boys would all sleep together on pallets made out of quilts and tell stories when they couldn't sleep. Sometimes grandpa would join them and tell even bigger stories. If they got too rowdy, then grandma would come out and shush them. As a kid, we didn't have porches to sleep on in town, so we made do with windows and fans. My dad was a master at air control. He would aim a big fan out the upstairs window and close all the windows but the bedroom. A cool breeze would then be pulled into the house, over the beds, and out the upstairs. Along with the breeze would come all the summer sounds. Katydids, frogs, crickets, sleepy night bird sounds, and rustling trees. It was a lullaby that few could resist.

As kids we stayed outside all day. For one thing, the houses were hot, so staying inside didn't have any benefit. While, if we went outside, then we were at least out of immediate adult supervision. One of my favorite places was the cool, damp area behind the huge hydrangea bushes on the side of the house. Once you crawled through the foliage you were in a perfect kidsized area all shady and private. It was a great place to catch rolly-polly bugs and watch them roll into perfect little gray balls. It was also a great place to hide from older sisters or share childish secrets with a friend. I don't remember ever being afraid of the creepy, crawlies that also lived in that area. Even spiders, which send me running for a broom now, didn't seem to bother us.

Even as a kid I knew that kitchens were not a pleasant place to hang around. Even with the ever present fan pushing air around, it was a hot place to work. Meals tended to be quick and cold. Cold sandwiches, fresh fruit, cottage cheese, and lots of iced tea. I swear my dad invented the chef's salad. He loved to cook and he loved salads. So he would make a huge salad with everything he could find left-over in the refrigerator. In would go the basics, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, radishes. After that might come anything. He would dice up leftover roast, cold potatoes, olives, pickles, cheese, broccoli, cauliflower, and toss it into the mix. Then he would add my mothers special Italian dressing and toss it all together. The result was never the same twice and always delicious. A whole meal. Probably the greatest moment in his life was when he saw the first salad bar and he could build his own in a restaurant.

You know, there are a lot of disadvantages of air conditioning. Yes, we are cool, but we've lost the front porch, the outdoor sounds through an open window, long, lazy talks under a shade tree and the connections you had with others who were outside to beat the heat. Now we tend to isolate ourselves in our own little cool pod. That's life I guess, you gain a little and lose a little, all at the same time. Frankly, at 100 degrees, I think it might be a fair trade-off.