"It was HOT! I mean hotter than a snake's belly in a wagon rut! Really HOT!" She was sniffing over the phone, a sure sign of complete agitation.

"And just why was it so hot?" I asked. I thought it was a simple question.

She nearly screamed into the phone but just in time remembered who makes the absolute best pecan pie in the entire free world and that she was talking to her so her voice lowered just a tad and she explained, "Why they aren't finished with the construction and there is no AIR CONDITIONING."

Well rue-de-do, no air conditioning! I wondered if she had thought about opening windows.

"There are no windows!" she wailed.

I told her that I had this cardboard fan that I got last year at Moo-sic in the Park here in Stephenville. I told her she could borrow it but I wanted it back. She didn't hang up, doubtless remembering the pecan pie, her favorite, and so I forced her to listen to what it was like in the "good old days" when we used paper fans and there was never ever any air conditioning.

I started out with beds in the yard. Back then, before air conditioning, even before electricity in our neck of the woods, we worked or read or played all day as suited our age and position in the family, but come night, and the weather too warm for sleeping, we just took the beds apart and moved them out in the yard. As a kid I looked upon the ritual of bed moving as a very special event and was always quick to urge my parents that it was "just too hot" to sleep in the stuffy old house.

My brother and I would always put our beds close enough to each other so we could discuss the stars and all the rest of the universe before going to sleep. He would usually tell me a story about some animal he saw on a hunting trip in the shinnery or that trip the FFA boys took to the Texas Centennial in Dallas.

Nights in the yard, under the stars, were always cool and pleasant and if a rainstorm came up suddenly, we'd just jump up with our pillows, grab the sheets and run for the house. Dad would come running out to roll up the mattresses unless there were just a few sprinkles of rain. Otherwise damp mattresses would dry out fast the next day in that hot west Texas sun.

Mostly we got along just about like everybody else and complained about the heat some but generally ignored it. Dad plowed in the fields, headed maize, milked the cow, fed the stock, and read western stories at night by the light of a coal-oil lamp.

Mother cooked and moped, and washed clothes on a rub board with lye soap, and at night she played her piano, needing hardly any light at all.

Sometimes we sat out on the porch on chairs or in the swing where any breeze at all could be felt, and shared a freezer of ice cream or a couple of watermelons with some of our neighbors who didn't have electricity or air-conditioning either. Lots of visiting and conversation took place on that front porch in the summer time.

The ice-man made deliveries three days a week and a cardboard sign in the window told him how big a cake of ice to leave at our house. I remember being sent to chip up some ice for the tea and the welcome splinters of cold from that chunk of ice that splashed in my face and on my arms as the sharp pick struck a 50 lb. block of ice.

I remember the look on my daddy's face when he reached out took a glass of iced tea and took a long, long drink. I watched his sunburned face relax just a little as the coolness spread inside, making it possible to head back to the maize field where he'd already been for six hours and head another acre or so before dark.

We never knew about air-conditioning, back then, but being children of the 30's, we got by with what we had, and never thought we were underprivileged.