Time to get re-acquainted with an old friend
It is just mid-April and already too hot to sleep, but too early in the year to resort to air conditioning. For years, I managed to do without any air conditioning at all, even in my car — partly out of some last remaining strand of stubborn resistance to being overly pampered, but mostly because when I bought my first car and my first house, I didn’t have enough money for such modern conveniences. It is much easier to maintain excellent principles when you lack the funds to compromise them. My car had a radio and floor mats and my house had doorknobs and a kitchen. In the summers, I kept the windows down and drank a lot of ice water.
That went on for a few years until I just couldn’t take it anymore. I remember the night when I decided to give in and finally get air conditioning. It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning, and I had every window in the house wide open and every fan I owned — ceiling fans, box fans, rotating fans — whirring madly, all set to lift-off speed. I had an enormous glass of ice water on the nightstand, although the ice had long since melted and the water was about as cold as the water in your average swimming pool and even tasted faintly of chlorine.
I thrashed around on the bed until my sweat-drenched sheet twined around my leg and torso like a boa constrictor. I tried to think cool thoughts, tried to will myself into a peaceful slumber, before finally grabbing the sheet-snake by its clammy throat, ripping it from my body and hurling it into the Venetian blinds. I stumbled wearily into the bathroom, turned on the cold water, and plunged my head into the sink, scraping my forehead on the faucet in the process.
I then soaked a hand towel and applied it to my head, stumbling back into bed, and the only cool thought I had was this one: this would be the very last summer I would spend without air conditioning. Then I melted into the mattress. At some point I am sure I went to sleep, but it was not a peaceful, climate-controlled sleep. It was the sleep of cheese curling around a sizzling hamburger patty. It was the sleep of a record album warping in the backseat of a car.
I’m not sure why it took me so long to get an air conditioner. I could say I wasn’t raised that way. There was no air conditioning in my home growing up. We relied on fans and iced tea and Solarcaine and Blue Ridge Mountain breezes to keep things tolerable in our house. But those were the hardscrabble days of my youth, when a person who wanted to change the channel on the television actually HAD TO GET UP and change it by turning one of those knob doohickeys on the front of the set. If the phone rang, we had to get up and go answer it and then stand there until we were finished talking, thanks to the stupid cord.
We had relatives in Winston-Salem, which was quite a bit hotter than Sparta, and when we’d visit them in the summer I was genuinely amazed at the unimaginable difference in the temperature as we stepped into their house and out of the oppressively hot sun. It was like opening a gigantic refrigerator and taking a seat between the cream cheese and Country Crock. It was marvelous, but also a little weird and unnatural, like a February tan or tofu burgers. I guess I didn’t quite trust it. In my economy, air conditioners were for hotel rooms at the beach. Mountain folk like me could get by with hospital-grade oscillating fans and a grape Popsicle.
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Finally, I did get a car with air conditioning, and then, a few years later, we got air conditioning for the house. First, we saw an ad in the paper posted by a guy who had TWO air conditioners, both described as nearly new, so I called him up and made arrangements to go and look at them. When we arrived, we saw a pet goat, a very handsome and well-groomed gentleman, leashed up in the front yard like a dog. He even had a dog house, which he promptly jumped and perched on the minute I opened the car door. Not a bad little show. Then I looked on the front porch and saw a man in a bandana laughing at our reaction. Evidently, this was not the first time his goat had impressed strangers with his acrobatics.
We went around back and looked at his air conditioners, both of which were already plugged in and purring out delicious icy relief into the sultry early evening air. I walked around them to inspect for any obvious signs of damage, then put one hand in front of each one, to make sure there was no trick. Then I imagined them installed in my living room and bedroom, and I imagined sleeping for 10 solid hours without one trip to the kitchen to fetch ice water or a soaking hand towel. I imagined turning off my fleet of fans. I imagined icy, refreshing, delicious sleep.
“I’ll take both of them,” I said, hauling my checkbook out of my back pocket.
We put one of the units in the trunk, and the other one on its side in the front seat, where it barely fit. On the way home, I kept looking over at my new passenger, even putting my hand on it as if it were the shoulder of an old friend. Now, every year around this time, we get reacquainted like a couple of kids at summer camp.
(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
