The Non-Air-Conditioned Farm House

It’s hot.

How hot is it?

It’s so hot that I spend as much time hosing off myself as I do the pigs. It’s so hot that I no longer care who sees my bat wing arms, I’m wearing tank tops. (Small children beware, flapping skin may cause head injuries) It’s so hot that my husband and I lay on the couch in a very dark room and a lazy ceiling fan whirring above us all Casablanca like but there isn’t a single romantic thought between us.

Yeah, it’s hot. Steamy hot after all the rains we’ve had. If we had any sense we’d go inside our air conditioned home like the rest of America.

But then again, we don’t have much sense. Back in 1995 when we bought this old farm house built circa 1895, it had no AC, in fact it had no working furnace. So we paid to get a new one and we made sure the house had all the duct work needed for AC just in case. But since I worked in cool, temperature controlled offices all day, it wasn’t that big of deal…Keith said he didn’t need it, so I did not see it being a problem for me, at least it wasn’t until I came home at night and felt terribly ill. Going from way cool to way hot was way awful.

But then I’d sleep with a small window air conditioner and get in my car with AC and work in my AC office and all was well, until I got home again. But still central AC is expensive to run and so we (I) struggled through the summers. I could never really understand why Keith seemed to tolerate the heat so much better than I. Well sure he was thinner and healthier but STILL.

Then I left nursing and came home full time. The first summer I noticed a big difference. Apparently if one’s body is allowed to adjust slowly to heat increases rather than have to endure huge temperature variations, the body (and this midlife farmwife’s general mood) adjusts. And so we cope.

The routine goes like this. In the am our windows let in cool air. We do morning chores and then around 9am we shut up the house. Close doors, pull drapes and keep a couple ceiling fans going. We continue to come and go outside as our chores require. On very bad days (over 95) we will generally hide out inside and do office work. Our rooms are a good 10-15 degrees cooler than the outside. Around 4 pm the house heats up and we’ll have to open windows again but by 8 pm it’s cooler and with fans in the bedroom and maybe some ice snuggled under our armpits we can sleep.

If we have a kind of night that stays very warm we might run the window AC but that is becoming more rare. The noise alone is annoying (the window AC is about 15 years old )and  coupled with someones snoring it’s akin to sleeping in a jet engine. Plus we find a closed up room very stifling.

So there you have it or don’t have it. No Central Air at South Pork Ranch. Just giving you fair warning in case you come home to visit, strut into the  kitchen without knocking, plop yourself down at the table and then get the shock of your life when your mother flounces in (unaware of your presence) wearing only her birthday suit.

Yes, it happened. No, he is no longer in therapy.