by Dave Williams
May 3, 2018
It’s raining today in North Texas. I love rain and dark, cloudy days.
Most people I know worship the sun. They seem to like summer best of all and the hotter it gets the better. I don’t get it. I really dislike heat.
Summer was great in the 1950s when I was a kid, impervious to sweat and grime, running barefoot through neighborhood lawn sprinklers and slurping from any old hose lying around because that’s what they were for.
We didn’t have air conditioning when I was a kid. We had a swamp cooler on the roof that blasted semi-cool, very humid air through a hole in the ceiling directly into the middle of the hallway between the living room and kitchen in our house. I used to lay my bare tummy on chilly asbestos floor tiles right under the torrent of wind wearing nothing but a pair of shorts fashioned by my mother’s scissors applied to an old set of blue jeans.
I stayed there for hours on the hall floor with a stack of Dennis the Menace and Sad Sack comic books for entertainment.
Sometimes I took the pillow from my bed and put it on the floor next to my comic books. That was “the life of Riley”, as we called it in those days.
Mom had to step over me to hang wet laundry on the wooden clothes rack. She didn’t mind. Sometimes she gave me lunch there, peanut butter and grape jelly on white Wonder Bread. I had to eat it fast so it didn’t get stale from the wind.
I wish I had pictures of all these things: me, my pillow, PBJ and comics. Sometimes my collie, Rusty, would lie down with me for a couple of minutes. He liked the cool floor but I don’t think he cared for the overhead wind. He’d soon get up and wander, panting, to his water bucket.
For the past fifty or more years I’ve been able to enjoy and expect indoor air conditioning.
Now in my mid-sixties I don’t need to strip down to my shorts and lie on the floor under a swamp cooler.
That’s progress.
I still like summer for its memories of all-day baseball, ice cream trucks, Wham-O™ Slip ‘n Slides and hot days that wouldn’t end until bed time. I loved childhood.
These days I prefer old man comforts, winter and the temperate yet crazy weather days of spring and fall in Texas.
Dark skies and rain feel cozy to me. They call people like me pluviophiles.
I’m glad they have a name for it. I just thought I was weird.