OK, AC is ON!
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
I've never lived in a house with air conditioning. In the Napa Valley, unbearably hot weather was so seldom and our house-building budget was so small 30 years ago that we didn't even consider putting in central air. After all, we'd come from the Midwest and we knew how to keep a house cool: You open the windows in the evening and close them during the hottest part of the day. You hope for a little breeze and plant shade trees!
In Ramona, our house was old and didn't even have central heat, let alone central air! Furthermore, we liked the open windows, the breeze that blew through, and the sound of country life, like the screen door slamming. We didn't need air conditioning. We were tough, Kansas stock!
"This isn't bad," we said to each other as the temperature climbed, "There'll be a break in the weather." And then it just got hotter. When we used to come for two weeks in August, we endured the heat as part of the Kansas package. However, once we were here for the duration, we began to wonder just how much of this roughing it was really necessary.
We did get air conditioning for the bed and breakfast — we knew other folks wouldn't tolerate the heat; but at home, in the Ramona House, peace, quiet, and hot weather reigned. We didn't like the hum of the omnipresent air conditioner. We didn't like to have the doors and windows closed in summer.
And then, that first year we gave up! It was the middle of August and so hot we couldn't breathe. Jessica started sleeping under wet towels at night so we conceded that it definitely was a little warm! "Help," we called to Tooltime Tim, "Will you help us put that old air conditioner unit in the dining room window?" He came to our rescue, we closed everything dutifully down, and basked in the semi-stale air coming through the machine. Cool at last!
Wouldn't you know it? We no more than had the AC in the window and the weather changed — it got cooler. We opened up the house again. There was the smell of fall in the air. We didn't need that noisy contraption after all.
The next year, we thought we could beat this syndrome by just lasting a little longer through the month of August; but we didn't make it. We tried fans, whirring into the night, sleeping without sheets, soaking in Herington Lake and a positive mindset. When we had so many fans going that our houses sounded like a bee-hive and the wet towels came back as a coping mechanism, we installed AC in the window AND the weather changed. It was almost as if the wind shifted to the north, the minute that AC got plugged in. That's twice! It's coincidental, but three times is a pattern, you know.
Well, this year we didn't even wait until August. It was July 27 to be exact and we hauled two old decrepit air conditioners out of the garage and stuck them in our bedroom windows. "What? You're using those old things?" Aunt Anna was concerned, "I used them on the farm for ages. Those things should have been thrown away." But, hey, they're working.
With two window air conditioners thrumming away, the good news is that Jessica can't hear the cat meowing for breakfast. I lay in front of my closed windows and imagine bird songs in the morning, dogs barking in the middle of the night, the rattle of the garbage trucks at daybreak on Tuesday — AC is not all bad; but I miss those familiar sounds of another day in the country.
And do expect a weather change! It happens every time — we're more predictable than the Doppler.
