I postponed the master bathroom sink work yesterday since it was so hot upstairs. Now the plumber is slated to be here between noon and 4:00 today. Quite frankly, I hope he is on the later side of that window since I have a lot to get done today. When I know someone is coming to my house, I am usually inclined to get a lot more done than I would if I no one were on the way. So, if he doesn't show up until close to 4:00 this house could be really close to spotless before he arrives.
Going two days without air conditioning in this oppressive heat gave me pause to think. How did our ancestors survive all of those years and actually accomplish anything back in early 20th century Texas? When I was growing up we used to go to Lovelady, Tx where my Uncle Jim and Uncle Martin lived. They were my grandmothers brothers and lived in houses on their family land. I guess my great grandparents gave each of their children a section of the land and at the time, Uncle Jim and Uncle Martin were the only ones who still lived out there on it. Lovelady, in case you don't know, is near Crockett in Houston County. It gets hot there.
I can remember going there at various times of the year to see Uncle Jim (Uncle Martin died when I was fairly young) but I remember going there in the summer most of all. You see, Uncle Jim never had running water or electricity on his land. So, when we went there, my brothers and I couldn't wait to bring the bucket up out of the well. This fresh well water tasted better to us than any other water in the world for some reason. It was also very cold water which I am sure was welcome to Uncle Jim on hot summer days as he worked his land. His light sources were lanterns and candles. He was his own entertainment. For him there was never a question of Plasma or LED. He was his own Itunes account. He played the accordion and if you were there in the evening after all the work was done, he would sit in his living room and play for you as long as you would listen. I still do not understand how anyone could learn to play an accordion. It seems like such a complicated thing. But Uncle Jim did it well.
In my grandmothers family, everybody played an instrument. Grandma played the zither. It is a stringed instrument that according to Wikipedia, is most commonly found in Slovenia, Austria and Hungary which makes sense as that is the part of the world that Grandma's family came from. This is a picture of what one looks like. I think one of my aunt's still has my grandmothers instrument.
Aunt Bessie, Grandma's younger sister, lived in Rosebud. It also was close to Crockett. They also didn't have running water or electricity in their house. When our family went to see Uncle Jim, it was always just for the day, usually on a Sunday. But I remember once there was a Meyers family reunion in which all of us went to Uncle Jim's house then later in the day we went to Aunt Bessie's house in Rosebud and we spent the night at Aunt Bessie's. I was probably about 5 years old at the time. But I remember in the evening a big galvanized steel tub was brought into the kitchen and filled with water. That is where we bathed. I really thought it was neat. I am sure that for all of the women who were hauling that tub and the pots of water around it was a lot of work. Now I can't imagine dealing with all of that each time I wanted a bath. But at the time, I thought I wouldn't mind taking a bath if I got to do it in a big tub in the kitchen every night!
That night I slept in a big bed that was really high off the ground. I thought it was great! During the night I remember waking my mother up because I had to go to the bathroom and could not wait until morning. It was the only time she ever got mad at me for wanting to go to the bathroom and I didn't really understand why she was so mad until we got to the outhouse in the middle of the night with nothing but a flashlight. All I could think about was how many spiders might be sitting out there watching and waiting to bite me!!!
For us it was a novelty to go to Uncle Jim's and Aunt Bessie's during the summer and live "like the pilgrims" for a few hours. But for them it was a daily reality. I cannot imagine living a life in which you grow you own food, working for hours each day to do so, canning it and putting it up all summer long so that you have vegetables for the winter. In addition to working in the garden and canning and preserving there were the day to day tasks of cleaning and cooking all of the meals, washing laundry with no machines and hanging it out to dry. While all of these household tasks were being done, in the summer months, it was 90 to 105 degrees both inside and out all day, everyday with no air conditioning to look forward to! I just went through two days of no A/C and you would think I was being tortured by Nazis with all the whining I did. Meanwhile, I had three fans running full blast in my living room all day each of those days. They had no fans at Aunt Bessie's house since they had no electricity! How did they survive? I guess they were just tougher than us. I like to think that I am pretty tough, but when it comes to being either being too cold or too hot, I whine like a baby!
Once when I was a kid, I broke my foot doing something that my dad had told me not to do. I was jumping barefoot on a pogo stick. The rule was you always had to wear shoes on the pogo stick. He caught me on a Saturday morning jumping on the pogo stick in the driveway with no shoes and told me to go in the house and put shoes on. When I jumped off the pogo stick to go get shoes, I heard a pop when my foot hit the ground. It hurt so bad I thought I would die, but I just continued to walk in the house because I had been doing something he had told us not to do. I limped around on that foot for two weeks without saying anything to Mom or Dad. They asked why I was limping and I think I told them I thought I had pulled a muscle or something. I would have continued to walk around in pain for as long as necessary to keep them from knowing that I had hurt my foot while jumping on the pogo stick barefooted. But one day at school Mrs. Tutt made us run laps around the playground during P.E. and I stepped in a hole. When I stepped in the hole it hurt so bad I started crying and so I had to tell Mrs. Tutt that my foot was hurt. I remember her lecturing me about why I had not told her before we ran that my foot was hurt.
That day I went home from school and had to tell my mother that my foot was hurt. But at least now I was able to say that I had stepped in a hole while running at P.E. and hurt it! Woohoo! I thought I was off the hook. My parents looked at my foot which was pretty severely swollen and decided that I needed to go to the doctor the next day. So the next morning I stayed home from school and mom took me to the doctor who took x-rays and pronounced my foot broken. He then asked my mom when I had originally hurt it. Then they both turned and looked at me...... I could practically see the question mark over my mom's head. That is when I had to admit that I had hurt it two weeks earlier on the pogo stick. Dr. Klein explained that when I had "hurt" it two weeks earlier I had actually broken it two weeks earlier and it had begun to heal until I stepped in the hole and broke it again. He put a cast on it and we went home. That night I got a lecture about not hiding injuries from my parents, yada yada yada....
The reason I tell you all of this is not to make you think I am some kind of super human with a remarkable pain threshold or anything because I am not. It is to illustrate that I can deal with discomfort when it is necessary without whining constantly unless of course that discomfort has anything to do with temperature. Then all bets are off! I cannot deal with being too hot or too cold, end of story. I am pretty sure that if I HAD to keep a secret no matter what happened, I could do so as you cut each of my fingers off individually with no anesthetic as long as the temperature in the room remained a constant 72 degrees. However, if the temperature ever fluctuated 10 degrees in either direction during the process, I would probably tell you where any hidden treasure I knew about was, the names of anyone I knew who had ever committed a crime or cheated on anything or even anything I personally had ever done wrong.
All I can really say is thank GOD for central air and heating. Climate control is our friend and I for one will not take it for granted in the future. Stay cool my friends!
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