I still remember the day my parents got air conditioning in my childhood home. I don't remember being overly uncomfortable pre-air conditioning, but I do remember what a novelty it was to have a cool environment to live in during those Minnesota summers.
People not from the midwest think that Minnesota is cold all year round. When I lived in Florida, people assumed that Minnesota never got warm enough to wear short sleeves. They thought that Minnesota got to 60 degrees at the most in the summer, and only during heat waves. There were some Floridians would actually thought that there was snow year-round in Minnesota. It negated everything they thought about Minnesota (which arguably wasn't much) when I told them that it was completely plausible for Minnesota to reach over 100 degrees in the summer, and that we had days of 90%+ humidity besides. The fact that Minnesota summers could be as hot as Florida summers had their heads reeling. To this day I think that some of them thought I was pulling their leg and still hold to their belief that Minnesota is nothing but a snowy tundra. That's okay. I tried. They'll probably never go to Minnesota anyway, so no harm done.
My point in even mentioning Minnesota summers is that air-conditioning is something few people in the midwest go without. The heat itself is bad enough, the humidity is just insult to injury. I actually can't think of a single household in Minnesota that doesn't have air-conditioning of some sort. It's a novelty that most Minnesotans wouldn't consider going without.
Fast forward to my first summer in Flagstaff, Arizona. I found out that a small percentage of homes and apartments in Flagstaff have air-conditioning. Being someone accustomed to the idea of air-conditioning, I found this extremely odd. Granted, Flagstaff is cooler than Phoenix, and arguably, cooler than Minnesota during the summer. Anyone not from this area just assumes that Flagstaff is the same as Phoenix, so when I tell people that lots of home in Flagstaff are without air-conditioning, they about fall out of their chairs. "But it's like 100 degrees all the time there!" Flagstaff is not Phoenix, and thank goodness for that...on so many levels. In reality, Flagstaff is about 20-50 degrees cooler than Phoenix depending on the time of year. The temperature disparity is larger in the winter, and smaller in the summer. A google search of the average temperatures in Flagstaff in the summer have the temps ranging from the mid-70's to the mid-80's. But talk to anyone who's lived in Flagstaff for any length of time, and they'll tell you that the summers are getting hotter. They'll tell you that "back in the day" no one needed air conditioning because it never got hot enough to need it. "Wait for the monsoons," they said, "it'll cool right down," they said. And they were kind of right...a daily rainstorm does wonders to plummet the temperature. But the monsoons don't typically arrive until early-mid July. Summer temperatures arrive in Flagstaff in late May. A month and a half of warm weather doesn't sound like much, and truly doesn't sound like a good rationale for the expense of an air-conditioner...but let me tell you, trying to sleep in a house that's 80 degrees is damn near impossible. I'm a hot sleeper to begin with, and one can only get so naked.
The last few days our house has been in the low 80's inside. Like most of our neighbors and Flagstaff as a whole, we don't have air-conditioning. We have fans. We have lots of fans. We open the windows at night and button up the house in the morning to try to keep it as cool as possible. We only cook in the morning when the house is at its coolest. Forget about baking...I'd have to bake at midnight or thereabouts just to tolerate the heat from the oven. A friend of mine gave me a portable swamp cooler last summer, and once Simon got it up and running, that thing was a godsend. For those not familiar with swamp coolers, it's basically a big fan that that pulls air through some sort of moist filter, commonly called an evaporative pad...our pad looks like a flat straw bale. The mechanics are pretty simple...the fan pulls air through the water soaked pad, thereby cooling the air with moisture. It doesn't cool it a lot, and a swamp cooler wouldn't work as well in a humid environment, but here in the dry southwest, it gets the job done. Kind of. I wouldn't call our home cool, per se, as the temperature in the house right now is 81 degrees, but sit me in front of the swamp cooler in nothing but my knickers and I find myself remarkably comfortable...and the added humidity is a bonus. Seeing as our swamp cooler is a portable unit, it really can't cool more than one room at a time. But that's all right...it's on wheels, so we just move it to wherever we're going to be. There are some homes that have giant, industrial sized swamp coolers in lieu of an air-conditioning unit. You really can't tell the difference between those big coolers and traditional air conditioning. Were we home owners, we might consider a permanent swamp cooler. But alas, we are not.
So here I sit in my 81 degree house...sweating through my clothes with a big box fan blowing in the background. I find myself growing accustomed a certain level of sweating at all times. For someone who previously loathed even the idea of sweating, I've become remarkably tolerant of it. The heat's not so bad, once you get used to it, and there are ways to get away from it. Simon and I go to a lot of movies this time of year. We find ourselves lingering in Target or the grocery store longer than usual, just to spend a few extra minutes in their air-conditioning. We eat more ice cream, and take colder showers. Like anything else in life, it's doable by making a few adjustments, and thankfully we don't have to put up with it for an extended period of time. This too shall pass. The weather guys keep saying that the monsoons are due to arrive this weekend. I'll believe it when I see it. They said that for the entire month of June last year. I about drove myself crazy scanning the sky for the slightest hint of a rain cloud. The rain eventually did come, but not until July. And then it was mostly fine.
And there it is. I'm waiting patiently for the rains to come. They will. They always do.
As a side note: we will be looking to rehome our wonderful (but mechanically obsolete, per the manufacturer) swamp cooler at the end of summer...let me know if you're interested!
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