For the Love of Air Conditioning

I'm in Cedar Key for a few days and let me tell you, living here in the summer just ain't as easy as it used to be. I'm talking about the heat. It's like I can't move, my body is so heavy and sticky and blech.

See, I used to live here back when Dad was sick. I lived here for two full years, and yet I don't remember this miserable heat and humidity. I must have just gotten used to it. But I'm not used to it any more. Now I'm like a darn yankee down here.

Yes, it's hotter than something really hot in Atlanta too, but here's the difference. Atlantans have a healthy appreciation for air conditioning. Cedar Key folks seem to think its overrated. Oh, some places have it, sure. But it's like being in the shade versus the sun. It's still 95% humidity, and you still want to pull back your hair and stick your head in the freezer. Which I've done. Thank God for freezers.

My dad and I are both writers. He writes a weekly column for the Cedar Key Beacon called Trouble in Cedar Key. What both Dad and I would enjoy would be to find a place to write simultaneously, sharing the same work space while doing our own thing. But there's a problem. He loves the heat, I can't function in it.

He writes longhand so he frequently writes out on a bench overlooking the gulf. Or if he's in a restaurant (my preference for writing space), he prefers to be on the un-air conditioned porch. Which is fine with me in months of perfect temperature (March and November), but doesn't work in June.

Even when it doesn't come to writing, Dad's always trying to get me outside. I know this is unpopular to say publically, but I'm just not crazy about the outdoors. I love gazing outside through a gigantic plate glass window, but somehow nobody thinks that counts.

What's bizarre though, is that while I have been this pernickity non-outdoorsy self for most of my life, I adapted amazingly well to being outside when I lived here for two years. I became a different person, comfortable with sweat running down my back and collecting in soggy pools at clothing's edge. I could walk through a forest blanketed by 50 varieties of mosquitos on a nearby deserted island with mere annoyance. I would kayak weekly, disregarding the grunge that came with it.

But now, now I'm a city girl again. Now I need pedicures and air conditioning to function as a pleasant member of humanity.

It's true you adjust to your environment. But equally true that it does not happen in a week. So for now, I will enjoy my father's company though an air-tight wall of glass. I'm waving at him now.