At our house we play seasonal games with ourselves. I’m not talking scrabble, or monopoly, or even poker. This is the game of “How long can we go?” In the fall, it’s “How long can we go without turning on the heat?” A few days ago, we lost the game of “How long can we go without putting the air conditioners in the windows?” This year it was July 7 for downstairs, and July 8 for upstairs. I think that was later than last year. It would be interesting to look at trends over time… but did I write those dates down? No.
Our house, a boring rectangular two-story 80’s house, does moderately well in the heat. Especially downstairs. The house is built on a cement slab that helps hold the coolness for a while. When it starts getting hot, we manage the heat by closing-up the house during the day, and opening windows and doors at night. We especially open every upstairs window since leaving downstairs windows open overnight doesn’t quite feel safe. Then, in the morning, we shut windows, shut curtains on the sunny side of the house, and hope the house stays cool. But there is a limit to this passive cooling system. (Is it really passive cooling if I am running up and down the stairs opening and closing windows and curtains and strategically deploying fans? That feels like active cooling to me.)
But after about three days of 90-degrees or above weather, we need the air conditioners. Since we don’t have a central heating or cooling system in this house, we use those heavy, awkward, ugly, window air-conditioners. One in the kitchen/dining room downstairs. One in the office upstairs. We used to suffer gamely with the heat upstairs, using only the window opening/closing method, until COVID forced some serious teleworking on my part. I definitely needed cooling in the upstairs office. So the old air conditioner moved upstairs, and we bought a new quiet one for downstairs. The quiet one is lovely. The noisy one is functional.
We also play the “How long can we go?” game with watering lawns and gardens. That explains why newly transplanted trees often don’t do very well in my yard. Only the fittest survive. Last year I finally installed a drip irrigation system that reaches some of the perennials and bushes and trees in and around the garden area. Did you know that raspberries and volunteer sunflowers try to take over the world when they get adequate water? I didn’t know this. Now I do.
We bought a couple of apple trees this spring and set up a sprinkler system near them. We really want them to grow, rather than die, given that they produce more fruit when they are alive. Now that area is getting lots of water. But the rest of the yard? We’re kind of hoping some of it goes dormant. This spring the weather was perfect for growing grass, resulting in the need for near-constant grass mowing. We do try to keep the yard immediately around the house green, but further out our goal is simply to keep the grass short. We even mow part of the pasture because the fjord horses don’t eat it fast enough. They tell me they are willing to try to eat everything down, but then they would turn into marshmallows with pony legs. I wish I could let them graze the pasture hard, since we are in a wildfire prone area. Now that the grass is drying in the heat, the horses can graze more, but still not as much as they wish.
With the significant warm-up this week, we begin the flip flop season. And I don’t mean the plastic shoes. I mean the flip-flopping of chore time and outside recreation time to the morning; and indoor computer, TV, writing, or craft time in the afternoon. I don’t like this schedule as much; I prefer to do writing and computer work first, and outside activities later in the day. I am trying to adjust. The horses are adjusting well to their longer grazing in the morning, then spending their afternoons in the shade of their stalls. They do spend a lot of time staring out at the pasture longingly, or staring at the kitchen windows, mentally urging us to come out and feed them again. I understand. In this heat I wish someone would bring me ice cream every hour of every day.
[I tried to get a good photo of the air conditioners, but they were just too darn ugly. Instead, I included a picture of the well-watered sunflowers and raspberries that are discussing how to take over Spokane, as a first step on their path to world domination.]
Michelle Eames 