I live across the street from my aunt, uncle, and two grown cousins (why they still live at home and pay no rent at 27 and 31, respectively, is a whole different story). And while the exposure on their house is different from mine (mine faces North, they face South) and their house does get more sunlight than mine, they do something I don’t completely understand.<\/p>\n
They never open the windows. Ever.<\/p>\n
The AC<\/acronym> goes on in March, ostensibly to ameliorate the effects of pollen on The Boy’s asthma, and doesn’t go off until the beginning of October. They spend all summer shut up and listening to the roar and bang and burble and clatter of window units, some which have been in place for 10 years or more and are none too quiet.<\/p>\n They never hear the birds chirping or the crickets singing their “Hey, baby!” songs. They don’t feel the breeze or actually hear the thunderstorms.<\/p>\n Granted, DC in the summer can be totally miserable with temperatures in July reaching 85degF<\/acronym> by 8am on a regular basis with final highs for the day even warmer. It’s sticky, too, what we natives refer to as “90\/90” weather<\/acronym>; it’s the kind of weather where you often wonder why you bother to dry off after you get out of the shower in the morning because you know you’re just going to start to sweat the minute you step out of your house even if, like my family, you’ve got your house chilled down to “let’s hang meat in here” temperatures.<\/p>\n Don’t get me wrong, there’s air conditioning in my house, we just use it sparingly, letting it blow just long enough to cool down the space and give the fans we’ve got all over the house a little boost. To me there’s something sublime about not being air conditioned all the time. Even as I type this a creaky old fan sits in the window complaining but still blowing a cool-ish breeze across the room. I can sit here and safely say, with the experience of having sweated out hot days, that today is not so bad. Yeah, it’s a bit sticky, but not as close as it was yesterday, and it’s still sort of cool which means today probably won’t be too horrible.<\/p>\n And what does being constantly temperature controlled do to your ability to relate to your environment? It seems to me, if my family is any yardstick, that it saps you of your ability to sense the small changes: They only have three temperature measures, too hot, too cold, and “this ain’t bad.” Life, and weather, are more complicated than that.<\/p>\n Me, I get the pleasure of being able to stand on the porch with my cup of decaf and feel the changes as the seasons move, knowing that Fall will really begin sometime around the end of August.<\/p>\n I’m not going to give that up because I’m afraid of a little sweat. After all, that’s what cold showers were made for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I live across the street from my aunt, uncle, and two grown cousins (why they still live at home and pay no rent at 27 and 31, respectively, is a whole different story). And while the exposure on their house is different from mine (mine faces North, they face South) and their house does get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-451","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-thoughts","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThere’s just something inorganic about air conditioning, not to mention the fact that it makes it damn hard to hear yourself think let alone hear the TV or the radio.<\/p>\n