As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat, summer and winter,
day and night will never cease.
—Genesis 8:22
Those of us of a certain age remember what it was like to grow up without air conditioning. The air conditioner was invented in the early 1900s, but it was too expensive to buy during the early boomer years. Do you remember the first air conditioner in your home, or in your father’s car? But somehow, a summer without air conditioning gave us baby boomers more reasons to use our imaginations to beat the heat.
The summer heat was like a twisting dragon curling down from the sky, weaving into our lives with its hot breath and relentless power. We did all that we could to battle the heat and humidity that made our doors expand, that squeezed moisture from our skin, and that compelled the cicadas to crackle at the tops of trees.
My sister Anne and I made pitchers of Kool-Aid, pressing our cold glasses against our cheeks before drinking the sweet, colored water. We fished out quarters from the couch and from my father’s winter coats in search of just enough money to stop the ice-cream truck and buy a Popsicle or creamsicle.
Over two thousand years ago the Romans referred to the hot summer days as the dog days because this phenomenon coincided with the appearance in the low night sky of Sirius, the dog star, in the Canis Major constellation—the brightest star in the sky.
Harper Lee, in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote about the heat in the little southern town of Maycomb. “Somehow, it was hotter then. . . . Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”
I remember the smell of road tar in the heat and the wet cloth my grandmother draped around her neck as she sat on the porch and fanned herself with the folded July newspaper.
It was cool inside the railroad underpass. I’d stick my head in the freezer now and again, making sure my grandmother was in the next room for she was convinced, when she caught me once, that I would freeze my brain.
One of the best places to keep cool in the summer was in the center of the mock orange bushes that grew wild in the side lot of our house. Anne and I took garden shears and made our way into the bushes, cutting away the inside sticks and leaves until we created a summer igloo. We sat on the ground. The earth was moist. We were in the shade. I liked looking out into the garden from our little house and seeing the daylilies nearly glow in the hot summer light.
While the world seemed to stand still in the hot days of July, Anne and I hopped on our bicycles with towels around our necks and headed for the town pool: shallow on one side and deep on the other. To the right, water gushed from the filtration system’s pipe, to the left the shade of the maple tree where mothers sat with their babies in carriages as the “big” kids held their noses and bobbed underwater.
It was here that Anne and I swam like otters between each other’s legs and where we balanced ourselves underwater on our hands, sticking our legs straight up into the air. It was here we pretended that we were Olympic swimmers. The water was cool, the air fresh. The horrible monster heat was reduced to a soothing massage against our cool bodies as we stretched out on our blankets on the soft summer grass.
Roe and I, now in our sixties, decided it was time to install central air conditioning in our little house. When the work was complete and the installers left, we stood sheepishly before our small control panel, adjusted the temperature to 78, and listened as the quiet machine in the attic clinked on and cool air began to stream out of the small ceiling vents that were cut into each room.
While I marvel at the technology and am grateful for the mechanical slayer of the heat dragon, the new air-conditioning system doesn’t seem to satisfy me as much as sitting inside the mock orange bush with my sister, or swimming with her in the cool, dreamy place of our childhood when the sun was hot and our laughter cool and easy.
Let us sleep in comfort, let us sleep in peace.
Let us stretch under the coolness of the shade tree
and under the shadow and comfort of God.