Last summer, my kids were complaining because the air conditioning wasn’t working well.
I thought they were whining about nothing.
I had called the HVAC company, and they were going to be there in two days, unless we called and told them the air conditioning wasn’t working at all. We were sitting in the living the next day, and my son was complaining it was too hot to sit there. It was seventy-two, and the humidity was low. I looked at him and told him I remembered when we didn’t have air conditioning. He rolled his eyes and responded that I probably remembered walking ten miles to school in the snow and going uphill both ways. I walked to school, but it was less than a mile. I told him my mom and dad couldn’t afford to put air conditioning in our house. We had a coal furnace that worked really well, and that was all we had for comfort. Air conditioning was so expensive, so we had fans in every room pulling the heat out instead of blowing the heat in. He thought I was kidding, but something changed his mind. He asked how we slept. I told him it was something we were used to. We seldom had blankets over us, but the sheet helped to keep us cool. We had fans in the ceiling to pull the heat up to the ceiling and fans in the windows to pull the heat out. Dad didn’t put air conditioning into the house until the furnace died. He had a central HVAC system in the house two years after I met his dad.