In the chill of summer
Within a week or two the summer chill will have abated.
Already we’ve had several days where the weather has rewarded wearing pants below the knee and shirts with sleeves. As the days shorten and the ambient outdoor temperature falls, the end of America’s annual goose-bump epidemic may be in sight.
Here at the cusp of the autumnal equinox the most welcome sign of the seasons’ change isn’t the first hints of ochering foliage, the rampant extravaganza of the terminal tomato harvest or even the permeation of pumpkin spice into the very air we breathe, but the silencing of the click-growl-hmmmmmmm of the neighbor’s central air conditioner just outside my open bedroom window. After four long months of summer, I may soon, may finally, stay warm.
My entire life has been lived north of the Iowa border. No stranger to the cavalcade of seasons, I learned early on to adjust my attire to the demands of an ever changing climate in order to assure good health, salubrious comfort, equanimity of spirit and an ongoing outlook of optimism and anticipation. Unfortunately human-generated climate change has so disrupted the seasonal weather patterns as to make traditional cyclical wardrobe modifications untenable, subjecting us all to unrelenting and extraordinary levels of thermal distress. For all but those living in the most remote isolation it is all but impossible to avoid the chilblains of summer.
How ironic it is that we who live year-round here in the snowbelt, in the north country, in the nation’s deep freeze should find ourselves so disinclimated to a seasonal chill. But herein, finely honed instinct works against us. Any northern native’s closet is replete with a finely gradated assemblage of outerwear to ensure that each and every excursion into the outdoor environment will be accomplished in comfort. We know how to layer up against the cold and strip down as July warms to steamy. We learned to be one with nature and all was well in the universe.
Then along came Willis Carrier.
He’s the guy who invented the air conditioner.
Summer hasn’t been the same ever since.
All right, full disclosure here. I have an air conditioner. In fact I have four of them hanging out various windows in my house. At various times during the summer I turn them on to return a particularly oppressive interior environment to one more conducive to my animal comfort.
Let’s repeat a key word here: comfort.
A thermostat set to a temperature appropriate to preserving a fresh-cut side of beef is not conducive to comfort … especially to a sweaty fellow clad in a t-shirt, short pants and flip flops.
Willis Carrier gave us the means to moderate our interior environments, but not being the brightest of creatures, we’ve taken it to the extreme. Consequently, the only season of the Minnesota year when I can anticipate being uncomfortable in the cold is the heat of summer.
Think on it a moment. As the outside temperature drops, I generally task my furnace to heat the house to around 68 degrees and I, wearing shoes, socks, long pants, a shirt with sleeves, am quite comfortable. If I sense a chill, adding a sweater or a two-degree thermostatic tweak remedies the situation. But come summer, as I’ve pared down my wardrobe to adjust to an outside environment free of icicles and snowdrifts, being subject to icy interior drafts sends the body’s thermoregulators into a tizzy. What can we do, but suffer and shiver until the world cools down enough that we can warm up?
Maybe, just maybe, if there is a general acknowledgement that we have gotten a bit Carrier-ed away, this seemingly irreversible tide of human-generated climate change can be moderated and even reversed. Perhaps in general agreement that summer is intended to be warmer than winter and in the spirit of daylight saving time, we may bifurcate the maintained interior temperature accordingly – say 78 in July down to 68 in January?
Just enough, perhaps, to ward off the summer’s chill.