bigmacbear (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bigmacbear) wrote2020-08-08 08:48 pm
bigmacbear) wrote2020-08-08 08:48 pm
The Old Air Conditioner
Read a story over on the Book of Face about grandmothers' aprons, and it mentioned putting pies out on the windowsill to cool (and for a later generation, to thaw).
This reminded me of one of the quirky features of the home in which I grew up. As built, the kitchen had two windows, one facing the street and one on the side, with the back door in the corner. The house, according to rumor, was expanded on by customers of the tavern down the street to pay off their bar tabs to the proprietor who lived there. So in due course, an addition was tacked onto the back door, with a brick fireplace at the far end and front and back walls composed almost entirely of banks of jalousie (louvered) windows. The new back door was offset from the old one to accommodate the exterior cellar stairs, and the window bank just above the cellar stairs was shortened to install a window air conditioner. We seldom used the device for its intended purpose, I think because it kept blowing fuses.
But the shell of the appliance was the perfect place to put anything that needed cooling or defrosting. It could hold about eight pies, which was about the number Mom would bake every Thanksgiving (except the year she came down with pneumonia and had to go to the hospital). It was also where we would put a casserole that needed defrosting before reheating, leading Mom to parody an old Corningware jingle: 🎶 From the oven... to the freezer... to the air conditioner! 🎶
That window in what was the end wall of the kitchen opened onto the new family room once it was completed. It was fairly useless in that regard, so a family friend came by to knock the window out with a sledgehammer and box in the frame with wood panels to use as a pass-through. In order to avoid breaking the "cowboy chandelier" which lit up our informal dining table, it had to be removed. It horrified our friend and my mom alike to find the light had been wired through a pipe nipple in the ceiling, then attached with wire nuts (no box!) to a cloth-covered electric iron cord, snaked through a similarly disused window into a second-floor closet, and plugged into one of those adapters that screws into a ceiling light fixture. Mom insisted that fixture not be replaced, and I think we relied on table and floor lamps for the rest of our time in that house.
This reminded me of one of the quirky features of the home in which I grew up. As built, the kitchen had two windows, one facing the street and one on the side, with the back door in the corner. The house, according to rumor, was expanded on by customers of the tavern down the street to pay off their bar tabs to the proprietor who lived there. So in due course, an addition was tacked onto the back door, with a brick fireplace at the far end and front and back walls composed almost entirely of banks of jalousie (louvered) windows. The new back door was offset from the old one to accommodate the exterior cellar stairs, and the window bank just above the cellar stairs was shortened to install a window air conditioner. We seldom used the device for its intended purpose, I think because it kept blowing fuses.
But the shell of the appliance was the perfect place to put anything that needed cooling or defrosting. It could hold about eight pies, which was about the number Mom would bake every Thanksgiving (except the year she came down with pneumonia and had to go to the hospital). It was also where we would put a casserole that needed defrosting before reheating, leading Mom to parody an old Corningware jingle: 🎶 From the oven... to the freezer... to the air conditioner! 🎶
That window in what was the end wall of the kitchen opened onto the new family room once it was completed. It was fairly useless in that regard, so a family friend came by to knock the window out with a sledgehammer and box in the frame with wood panels to use as a pass-through. In order to avoid breaking the "cowboy chandelier" which lit up our informal dining table, it had to be removed. It horrified our friend and my mom alike to find the light had been wired through a pipe nipple in the ceiling, then attached with wire nuts (no box!) to a cloth-covered electric iron cord, snaked through a similarly disused window into a second-floor closet, and plugged into one of those adapters that screws into a ceiling light fixture. Mom insisted that fixture not be replaced, and I think we relied on table and floor lamps for the rest of our time in that house.