As much as I love my life now, I miss summers from when I was a kid.

Here in North Carolina, every house (at least now) is built with central air; and although that definitely has its perks, it also takes something away.

On Long Island in the 80s and 90s, most homes didn’t have central air, so you’d either have one giant air conditioner installed into the living room wall like my grandparents did, (I can vividly hear my grandfather yelling, “Shut the door! You’re letting all the air out!”) or you’d have an air conditioner that was stuck in the window during the summer and removed for the remaining seasons.

I remember when my uncle got central air. Oh my Lord – it was Heaven. It’s where my love of 65 degree indoor temps began.

That man cranked down his thermostat almost as hard as he blasted Cousin Brucie on the radio at 7am on a Sunday morning (waking everyone up and totally not giving a crap.)

But as much as I love central air, it does take the nostalgic feel away from summer.

Back in the day, we ended up getting a giant air conditioner installed into the wall of our den, but before that, it was all open windows and screen doors.

With that, came the sound of birds and cicadas and crickets, and the scent of the outdoors. The balmy air, although uncomfortable, sometimes brought a refreshing gust of wind.

At night, we’d hear toads in the sump behind our house. To me and Teara, it didn’t sound like what toads should sound like, so we christened them “the dying cows.”

Before we got the giant den wall air conditioner, there were exactly 2 air conditioners in our windows. One in my parent’s room…(oh wow, as I’m writing this, my mind’s eye just showed me that they too had an air conditioner installed into the wall of their bedroom! I’m picturing it sticking out of their black wallpaper with birds and flowers all over it. I wasn’t a fan of that wallpaper back then but would totally put it in my house right now.) Anyway, they had one, and there was one in the window of our guest room.

Teara and I had our own bedrooms, but in the summer we’d become guest room roomies so we could luxuriate in the cold air. Man that was fun – for me anyway, Teara probably would’ve preferred not being surrounded by me, my Barbies and alll my stuffed animals.

One year I set up my stereo and hung the speakers on the wall. It was the summer of Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on Me. I played the hell out of that 45 and still can’t get enough of that song!!

When waking up to pee, there was nothing like having to trudge down the hall to the bathroom in that heat. You could cut the air with a knife. It felt like swimming through soup. But once you got back to the room with the AC, it was like entering the gates of Heaven. Sweet relief – even though the window unit sounded like 17 freight cars rolling down the tracks.

I’m lying in bed right now. The ac is coming through the vent above my head, the fan is blasting onto PJ, my air purifier is whirring. Everything is doing its job to provide us with the utmost comfort, and yet… something is missing 😕