air conditioning on the hottest day of summer so far
i'm thankful for air conditioning on the hottest day of summer so far. i'm thankful, growing up in the south, that we always had central air. i'm thankful that it is summer and that summer has always been my favorite season but i'm thankful to wonder whether i would love summer so much if there was more being really hot indoors all the time.
i'm thankful that when we moved into this house, there was a working window unit air conditioner in the basement, because we moved in late july and it would have been totally miserable those first few nights without it (we were already sleeping on an air mattress without any of our stuff). i'm thankful to think, again, about the sliding doors path of our lives if the air conditioner hadn't been there, how we would have been different (i mean we probably would have just bought an air conditioner, so not necessarily that deep).
i'm thankful every time i bring an air conditioner up from the basement for the season (i'm thankful we now have 2, so we can keep one in the living room and one in our bedroom; i'm thankful k and t who we got the second one from) i remember how little upper body strength i have and am briefly terrified but always manage to get it up the stairs without hurting it or myself.
i'm thankful for the basement itself, which is naturally much cooler than the upstairs and when it was like record breaking hot last summer and the air conditioners didn't really make a dent in the waves of heat was a real saving grace, though the basement is unfinished and kind of gross and dusty and buggy and so i'm also thankful that right now the air conditioner is holding the door against the heat.
i'm thankful that the google photos memory thing gave me a seven years ago photo on friday that was of d and i sitting on the gray carpet of the floor of our apartment at the time (a one bedroom that had an air conditioner in the living room but not in the bedroom) with both of us smiling and me holding up a fork in front of her face with a bite of the wedding cake jk sent us. i'm thankful to remember how in that apartment we tried to use a fan and strategically arranged doors to funnel cold air from the living room to the bedroom.
i'm thankful to remember the first place d and i lived together, which also was a one bedroom that had a window unit in the living room but not the bedroom and had these west facing windows, because i was so used from growing up in the southeast to the heat of the day being earlier and i guess the sun is in a different position or something but i just remember the sun beaming directly into the apartment at 5 PM and feeling like i was in an oven.
i'm thankful to remember the second summer we lived together when i was doing my first newsletter where i charged $2.22 a month on a proto-substack called letter.ly (i'm thankful to wonder whether the people who ran that feel bummed that they were too far ahead of the curve (and whether i do too)) and us watching battlestar galactica like 9 hours a day like that portlandia sketch but also it being so unbelievably hot most of the time. i'm thankful to remember when we house sat for a classmate that summer and it was so hot in their guest bedroom upstairs because it was an old house and the air conditioning only really came through downstairs.
i'm thankful to remember when i was teaching in grad school how there were still dorms that didn't have air conditioning (which was insane to me having gone to school in florida) and students' homework excuses being that they couldn't focus because it was so hot and i thought this was a valid excuse.
i'm thankful to remember the house we lived in two houses ago, where as a person who was not handy at all i struggled with putting in the window unit air conditioner and then it was also really unreliable (i'm thankful our air conditioners now are reliable) which was truly the worst of like not knowing on any given hot day whether it was actually going to do anything more than blow air and we bought a new air conditioner at home depot but i really struggled at installing it and ended up with this horrible janky sealing involving cardboard and garbage bags and duct tape and i'm thankful that given her aesthetic sensibilities d put up with how ugly it looked for a long time.
i'm thankful to be "coldboxing" our bedroom now in the hope that it will be relatively comfortable by the time we go to sleep.
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