Hot House Blues
I don’t want to be one of those people who say, “When I was your age… ” then proceed to give hyperbolic history lessons. My dad did that. He’d tell me how he had to walk 52 miles to school in six feet of snow with no shoes and no coat. That kind of thing. It’s purpose is to tell the listeners how easy they currently have it.
But there’s something I have to get off my chest.
There was no air-conditioning when I was a kid. At least none that I was aware of. When homes got warm, we turned on a portable fan. School rooms were hot—but we could open the big giant windows for relief. Heat was just a fact of life.
I grew up mostly in Yankeeland, so some of you might argue that it wasn’t all that hot. But my husband grew up in Louisiana. And his father grew up in Florida. Neither of them had A/C until late in life. And my husband resisted it even then. He hated it. It clogged up his nose. He didn’t like having the windows closed. He wanted a bonafide breeze. Not recycled air.
My husband and I installed central air when I was pregnant with child #3 during a sticky Louisiana summer. I needed it. We used it sparingly because we could ill-afford it. When our summer baby turned 5, we left our A/C, relocating to the high desert of New Mexico, where A/C wasn’t really a thing. Some folks had “swamp coolers” to provide a little humidity in the heat of summer, but we did without.
Later, we invested in a little house on the Gulf Coast. It had minimal A/C—which we used the few summers we were there. But Hurricane Katrina thought we didn’t need it. In fact, she decided we didn’t need the house, either.
We moved our homestead to Arkansas, and had a window unit at first, but ultimately learned to deal with the heat by opening and closing windows and curtains to stay cool.
As our climate extremes worsen, however, I sometimes want A/C. But that’s back assward. It takes a lot of energy to use the A/C and the more energy we use the more we screw up the climate, the hotter it will get. So, I resist. Besides, I don’t want to pay the corresponding electric bill.
People survived for centuries without it. They might jump in the river to cool off, and/or make a pallet on the porch for sleeping. But they endured. Now, the more “modern” humans become, the more they’re inclined to bend the temperature to suit themselves. Some folks aren’t content to set the thermostat at one temperature and leave it. They want 65° in summer and 85° in winter—because we’ve made it possible.
Mother nature is revolting. And there’s no going back.
I understand that as a species we have bigger fish to fry. The air conditioning issue is just a microcosm of the climate problem. But it illustrates the point. We keep making things bigger, better, faster, warmer, cooler because we can. But just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Picture businessmen in suits and ties in summer. They might think they need A/C, but in reality, they need a new uniform.
It’s getting harder to live in my non-air-conditioned house. But I persist. Because I’m too cheap to pay the A/C bill, and it seems a shame to throw in the towel now.