Humans vs. humidity
I have this word stored in my vocabulary cache. Some words lie in wait there for years. Take the word albedo. I only found the occasion to use it for the first time 10 years ago. I used it to describe the type of shine that occurs on fabric when you use old gabardine suits to make girls’ school uniforms.
This time the word is torpid. It’s one of those twenty dollar words that you don’t have many opportunities to use. One thinks of an old black and white movie set on some excessively humid tropical aisle where a woman with long dark hair and a husky voice has interesting experiences with men who wear khaki shirts and/or leather flight helmets. There are always large ceiling fans and, if I recall, lots of rain, wind and flapping, louvered shutters in such films.
Well, this week I found a use for torpid. My house! I know, as we all do, that to mitigate the problems of heat gain in one’s home, you close the windows and draw the shades. Keep the sun and the heat out and the house will stay cooler. I’ve done this for years and, with the addition of fans placed on exhaust in the bedroom windows, I can claim a modest success. I felt proud of my ability to forgo air conditioning. I also wouldn’t have objected if an air conditioner suddenly appeared in one of those bedroom windows either. One does have guilty secrets from time to time.
None of these strategies worked. Mostly because, despite fans on exhaust and closed and covered windows, the evil partner of summer heat, humidity, crept in. How does one know to expect this over-the-top humidity without meteorological instruments? The concept of dewpoint made itself very clear. Paper stuck together. Magazines stuck to the top of the coffee table. Sticky and torpid were two good adjectives. The cats, not fond of any adjectives that didn’t describe food, simply lay around stretched out as long as they could make themselves. I tried the same thing and got a cramp in my leg, which I then blamed on the heat.
Most telling event? I left footprints on the tile floor in the family room. The floor was wet! The cool ceramic tile caused the moisture-filled air to condense onto the floor. A small Dyson and two floor fans, all on oscillate, had little effect. Humidity won out. Human and feline feet provided the global warming version of floor décor. By the way, the Spanish word for wet is humido. Just a side not.
Did I have options for relief? Beyond laying around like the cats, two came to mind: St Francis Xavier church or the beer cooler at Nojaims. Quite a choice. Since I did need to shop, I chose, not to hang out in the beer cooler, since I am not a beer aficionado, but to spend time standing in front of the frozen food coolers. I did cleverly manage to break my shopping into several trips, ice cream on one, bread on another, a small steak, etc. You see my strategy here?
I could have then stopped into church to pray for cooler weather but, well, how can I put this? Motivation counts. There are more pressing things to pray for.
My car has air conditioning, so I tried to find ways to use that besides simply sitting in the driveway with the car running. I do have some limits.
So, I decided to drive out to our camp to turn on the ceiling fans.
No matter how hot our house gets, camp will do it one better. How hot? Have your eyes ever dripped with sweat? Without insulation anywhere, this small wooden building can be on the edge of uninhabitable during such days as we had last week. Not only does the camp hold heat, it does seem, on such occasions, to lose air. Years of experience with shortness of breath and sweating eyes led to an approach different from that at home. There were no window closings – just the opposite. Open all the windows, the doors to the porch, turn on the fans and move the air. Above all, get the ceiling fans moving.
These machinations maintained the camp’s general temperature just on this side of livable for my grandsons and their parents who made good use of the nearby cold waters of the lake when being inside became a challenge. An armory of fans of every size and sort kept the air moving. Camp was an acceptable solution to the enervating temperatures of mid-July 2019. Just.
Back at the homestead, as the harbingers of climate change progressed, I adopted a more leisurely approach to survival. Large pitchers of ice tea and lemonade, maybe a cooling gin and tonic, fans to sit in front of and a good book got me through to Sunday, when I chose not the beer cooler, but St Francis Xavier church and thoughts about starting a petition to canonize Willis Carrier, the inventor of air conditioning.
Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.
