We hosted my childhood friends in my house shortly after we moved in last summer and we all couldn’t help but reminisce about the days when we dreamt of living in homes that had an air conditioner.
All our homes had a simple HVAC unit that was almost always calling for a visit from an HVAC professional from the local HVAC company and sometimes it was too expensive to repair so we all went to the movies or stayed outside to keep cool.
I remember when a home services rep asked me and my brother whether we were calling for Ac repair when we dialed for emergency home services and we were so confused that he’d assumed we had an air conditioning system at home that we started laughing instead of explaining what we needed. Something had broken the ductwork in our house, and that marked the start of a long season without any help with indoor comfort until my mom birthed our youngest brother. Suddenly the air quality mattered enough to even change the Ac filter and repair the air duct, but the frequent HVAC maintenance stopped once he started going to daycare. We bonded a lot as friends on the hot nights when we’d spend time finding somewhere else to be before bedtime, and during the day, we stayed away from home. It’s sad and funny to talk about it now that each of us has homes where indoor comfort matters and we can afford the services of an HVAC technician, but back then, we couldn’t stop dreaming about living in houses as comfortable as hotel rooms. Only one of us had experienced a hotel room when we were young but the description of how the room felt just right was enough to captivate our imaginations on what comfort felt like.
air conditioning