Fan of Fans

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Here in New England, we've had  three long months of delightfully temperate weather. Then, just as thoughts turn to new school supplies and getting the sweaters out of the cedar closet, we're suddenly faced with 90 degree days. It's as if Summer has realized she only has a few more weeks to live and has turned up the heat in retaliation. How do we combat it? 

Fans.


This will shock and amaze those of you living in more southerly climes (and by more southerly, I mean below the Massachusetts Turnpike) but I have no air conditioning. Central air is still rare in Maine, in part because we have the oldest housing stock of any state in the nation. Teachers use electric fans in classrooms. You can still find stores with slamming screen doors instead of refrigeration units.  (Is it just me, or do the rest of you get frosted when you walk out of a ninety-degree parking lot into a grocery store that's so cold you need  jacket and scarf?)

 
Lots of folks have window air conditioners, of course, and the number grows ever year, as our average summer temperatures climb and the number of degree days increase. (A chart of Maine's summer climate over the past several decades shows year-to-year variables, of course, but a steady upward trend.) However, at my house, we keep cool the old-fashioned way.


In part, I can get away with no-a/c stance because we have some advantages not shared by households in say, Texas, where Deb lives. First, of course, we reside in Maine. That means we can usually count on summer nighttime temperatures, even after a scorching day, to fall into the low sixties to mid fifties. As soon as the air begins to cool in the evening, every screened window and door is opened in our house. (I just realized another reason we can do this - living in the country, I don't need to keep the place closed up to keep out noise, pollution and overly-close neighbors.) 

 
The second advantage we have is an old house. Close to two hundred years old. The internal climate of our farmhouse changes with the speed and nimbleness of the QEII making a U turn; ie, not very. This creaky, drafty place keeps in cool in the summer and holds on to warmth in the winter (which explains the many times we've been able to carry on during a 3 or 5 or 9 day power outage in the winter.) If we lived in one of those modern tight houses you can heat with a lightbulb, we'd probably perish in our own effluvia.

So the house cools overnight. In the morning, we shut the windows. All the windows. We draw the curtains or shades wherever the sun shines in. If we get several degree days in a  row, as we've been having this week, we close off the family room and The Boy's bedroom, two parts of the house that were "shotgunned" onto the main building sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. Since they have no attic above them, they're particularly vulnerable to the sun. The temperature in the house rises, of course - yesterday it got up to 84 downstairs! - but it's livable. If you have a fan.

I love my fans. We have window fans, to suck the cool air in at night and exhaust the warm air during the day. We have a big square floor fan that we place at the head of the cellar stairs and use to bring the cool subterranean air up into the kitchen. We have fans that sit next to the computers and fans that oscillate while we're watching the television. (Those are the ones that get turned off when no one is there.) I love the feel of the air against my skin, and I love the way I'm still connected to the natural rhythms of the day and the season.


Summer's day hath all too short a lease, the poet wrote, and that's very true for both here in Maine and in the Adirondacks, where I set my books. We have, on average, twenty short weeks between last and first frost. Why spend it enclosed in an artificial bubble? And of course, if it does get Just Too Hot at home...there's always that other old-fashioned solution: go to the movies! 

How about you, dear readers? Can you remember your grandparents using fans and pulling the drapes down? And how do you keep cool in the September heat?