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Monday, 16 August 2010

Mom's Air Conditioning

By Susan Gulliford of Hillsborough NJ Journal

With the afternoon heat of the last few days and the higher and higher electric bills, I find myself using 1950’s techniques to cool my house.

Growing up we didn’t have air-conditioning except at the local movie theaters. Remember the banners they used to hang every summer to entice moviegoers in with the promise of coolness? They didn’t even mention what the show was – just that they were “air-conditioned,” written in ice-blue with edging suggesting a dripping ice block.

At home, all the windows and doors were wide-open overnight. If you lived in a “troubled” area, you kept the first floor windows shut at night and opened them about 5AM. As the sun rose, my mother would close the shades on the east side of the house and then the windows. By about 11AM, the house would be closed up, keeping in the cool night air. Sometimes the cellar door in the kitchen would be open, letting the mysteriously cool underground air float up.

We would occasionally have lunch in the shade of a big tree in the back yard and for a treat, blow up the kiddie pool for an early afternoon splash. Moms would sometimes open aluminum chairs around the edge of the pool and dangle their feet in the cool water while they watched the kids and visited with each other.

Babies lay on a blanket in the shade with their damp hair stuck to their foreheads.

By 2PM, it was naptime with a fan in the hall to stir around the by-then warmish air. My mother would do quiet cool work – no baking or ironing. By four, with the temperature having maxed out, it was time to start stirring again.

Dinner would be cooking on top of the stove – no roasts this time of the year. As a treat, we might cook hamburgers outside or actually be decadent and have cold-cuts with sliced tomatoes from the garden and homemade potato salad out of the fridge.

By 9PM, it was time to start the cooling cycle again, opening the windows for the night. A large box fan sat on a desk in my room all night – the room at the far end of the second floor - exhausting the day’s heat out the window and pulling in the cooler night air from downstairs.

"It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming."
- Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

When an acquaintance lost their air-conditioning for almost two weeks this July, I went in on hot days to check on their pets. I pulled down the unused rolled-up shades on the sunny-side of the house to block the sun’s heat and turned off window fans pulling the early afternoon humidity into the house.

They seemed surprised.

I guess no one teaches simple, home-based, climate control anymore. It’s just easier to switch on the air conditioner, use up the environment and be shocked when the electric bill arrives.


[INVITATION: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. They can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. Instructions for submitting are here.]

Posted by Ronni Bennett at 05:30 AM | Permalink | Email this post

Comments

Loved your story and amazed at how well it matched my memories. I had not thought of them for a long time. In my house on hot nights you'd get out of bed take a pillow and blanket for a pallet and move to the floor anywhere in the house where there was a breeze. If you went to the bathroom, you'd have to be careful not to step on somebody.

I loved your story too. My favorite line was:
Babies lay on a blanket in the shade with their damp hair stuck to their foreheads.

We have recently had a week of over 90 with massive amounts of humidity. We are both in our 70s. We do have a huge window air conditioner but have not put it in for 3 years now. I hate being locked up in the winter (we live in MN) and do not want to repeat it in the summer. They are too short as it is. So far we have gotten along with some of the same old fashioned cooling tips mentioned above. Open up at night to cool the place down, close up in the morning, and pull down the shades where the sun shines in during the hot part of the day. A couple of oscillating fans work for drying up the sweat and it's a good excuse to curl up with a good book and not move around too much.

Great essay, Susan. My mother's lessons have served me well all my life,too. I look on AC as a necessary evil, only when the open windows and fans at night are just not enough to keep the apartment cool all through the afternoon. About artificial temperature control--72 degrees year-round, I would say (and have)a la Dorothy Parker, "What fresh hell is this?

When I first moved to Arizona I was talking to a native who grew up here and he said they never had air conditioning. They slept outside on the lawn at night and shut the house up as soon as it began to get hot. He told of hanging wet sheets in the windows and other tips to cool the house.

I am glad I did not have to live like that because when the temperature gets over 100* no amount of cooling methods will keep the house cooler than 90* in the afternoon.

Beautifully descriptive writing, Susan! I was right back in 1955 when Moms stayed home with the kids and we made do with what we had an abundance of...common sense.

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