The Window Air Conditioner

It’s been really, really hot this past week where I live in the northeastern US, over 100°F (and always very humid in the heat). It brings me back to my childhood in this same area, with not so much as a ceiling fan, let alone any kind of air conditioning.

Growing up, we lived in an old, poorly insulated stone house. In early summer, when the stones were still relatively cool from the winter months, the temperature inside the house was tolerable. But once those stones were heated through, forget it. They didn’t really cool off again until fall, and in the interim the house became stifling to the point that it felt nearly untenable. I remember the cat, Ginger, climbing into the sink or the empty bathtub and flattening herself against the cool porcelain. I used to relish the weekly trips to the grocery store because it was air conditioned, and so was the car ride there and back. Getting a good night’s sleep in that kind of sticky heat? Forget that too. Sometimes it was so oppressive it felt hard to even breathe.

I have a memory of myself as a tween late one night, lying in the dark (because incandescent lightbulbs were hot) on a narrow rectangle of wood floor between two area rugs, much like the cat in the bathtub, with an edited-for-network-television version of Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn playing in the background, a quickly melting frozen limeade slushy nearby, thinking that the cold drink would cool me off but that moving my body enough to drink the cold drink would heat me up, and would the drink cool me off more than the moving would heat me up? Or was moving not worth it? And oh no, now my cool-ish rectangle of wood is starting to heat up too, but I am not sure if I can ever get up off this floor.

If you know, you know.

Summers in that house could bring with them a kind of unrelenting, stifling heat that made you feel like you might lose your mind for real. It was the kind of heat that would actually kill the elderly or infirm. We’d hear local reports of this sometimes. Even without much risk of death by heatstroke to my young and able body, it was incredibly trying on a lot of levels to be that uncomfortable for so much of every summer. But it also instilled in me a kind of capacity to endure from an early age, a sense that: this is awful, but (literal) seasons always change, so it can’t last forever no matter how it feels.

Before I graduated from high school, I found an old window air conditioner in the third-floor storage room, apparently a relic from when I was little more than a toddler and my dad’s mother was still alive to come visit. Why was nobody using this?!? Well, because my parents had all kinds of stories about how the ancient house’s windows wouldn’t fit an AC unit very well, so it would be inefficient and expensive to run one. But they’d somehow made it work for Grammy, so from that point on I took it upon myself to put that thing in the guest room window where it would have gone when she visited, shoving old towels into any cracks between the AC unit and the window frame, and I moved up there for the summer. (Spoiler alert: it fit in the window just fine, and it wasn’t horribly inefficient or expensive to run.)

The summer after I graduated from college, I bought another window unit and stuck it in my parents’ bedroom when they were away on vacation. (It fit that ancient window just fine too.) I was beginning to worry about them in the heat as they got older, and I knew it was not something they would do for themselves. They slept better and took to watching most of their TV in there instead of the living room. Only a few years later, they moved into a condo with central air conditioning.

Today I have central air in the home where I live too, hallelujah. From that first summer with the window unit, I have never taken the comfort of air conditioning for granted, and I doubt I ever will. By the end of a 100-degree day even our trusty HVAC is struggling a little and the house is warmer than would be ideal. Once in a rare while I catch myself starting to think, “Ugh, it’s kinda hot in here,” and before I can even finish the thought I remember myself on that rectangle of floor with Quentin Tarantino and my frozen limeade, wondering whether moving enough to drink it would make me hotter than the drink would cool me off. I am instantly catapulted back to gratitude, not only for my struggling HVAC, but also for those hard, hot summers of my childhood and what they taught me. While just about everyone else is complaining right now, even with AC, I feel like I am somehow winning at life.

This week’s heat has me thinking about that old window air conditioner in a different way, though, too: This was actually a solvable problem all along.

The heat was real, but most of the suffering came from the stories about why we couldn’t do anything about it. We could have put in ceiling fans (my parents eventually did), and we could have at least air conditioned the bedrooms all along. The years of struggle were because of the stories that it would be too expensive, that it would be inefficient, that the windows were not the right size or shape, that the house was too big, etc. Those stories kept us from running the experiments to find out what else might be possible besides our suffering.

Looking back, that old window air conditioner was one of the first times I can remember testing a story instead of simply accepting it as true. It certainly wasn’t the last.

We so often mistake stories for truth. We inherit them from our families, we absorb them from the culture around us, and most of the time we don’t even realize they’re stories. We just take them as reality, the way I once took it as a given that summers in that house could only be very, very hot.

Until you actually run the experiment, you’ll never know what’s really possible.

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