Spring Cleaning: A cool story

Sometimes we tend to place emotional attachments to inanimate objects – most notably for some, automobiles. But an air conditioner? I’m not saying I shed a tear over this old, beat-up AC that now has a final resting place in our Dumpster. But this old AC definitely has a unique story in our family lore.

The year was 1999. A special year, as that was when our first child was born. That spring and summer, Heidi was in her later trimesters of pregnancy. The fog of memory recalls only the very hot and stifling moments of that summer. The marathon in Vermont, where the temperature in Burlington on that Memorial Day weekend was warmer than in Miami Beach. At the time, it was my PW (personal worst), but I did finish on a day when the dropout rate was extremely high; you don’t go to Vermont expecting hot and humid weather. Heidi was there, nearly seven months pregnant and miserable in the late spring heat.

Maybe we should get an air conditioner, I said upon returning home. Nah, she said. I’ll be fine. Our old Cape Cod style house does not have central air. Like most Capes, the upstairs bedrooms are like the attic of most houses – very, very warm. We had a ceiling fan and window fans going during that summer of 1999. But some nights, it was so warm that we would have to sleep on the den couch.

Maybe we should get an air conditioner, I repeated a few weeks later. Nah, she said. I’ll be fine. The summer heat persisted. June. July. Her pregnant belly got bigger as the boy grew inside her. Maybe we should get an air conditioner, I said as August loomed. No answer. The fans whirred on the ceiling and in the window. Maybe we should get an …

Finally, she had enough. OK, she said. Get an air conditioner. It’s now the second week of August, of what was a hot and stifling summer. No one’s got air conditioners. I make calls to every hardware store in a 20-mile radius. Finally, I find a store that has an AC. One left. Put my name on it, I say, I’ll be right there. I paid the overpriced tag on it (bargaining power = zero at this point), bring the AC home. You know those energy efficiency rating scales? This one’s off the charts – on the low end! It is not energy efficient. But boy, does it pump out the cold air.

Happy wife = happy life, and a bursting at the seams mom-to-be needs to be cool. Just a few weeks later, the baby is born. A few weeks after that, the chill of autumn comes in, and the AC goes back in the box until next summer. That little bundle of joy now towers over me, a headphone-wearing/dad-ignoring honor student and track athlete who is rapidly becoming a pretty neat adult before our eyes. That old energy inefficient AC moved around our house, room to room as needed, but kept pumping out ice cold air for summer after summer after summer. Until finally, it stopped conditioning the air to our liking. It went from energy inefficient to just plain inefficient. It stopped working. It lived a good, long, electric-bill draining life.

On this Throwback Thursday, we shed no tears for an old and now useless household appliance. But we do recall some fond memories from a loud and rattling machine that has finally run its course.