When I was a kid, we didn’t have air conditioning until we moved from Nebraska to Missouri. People in Nebraska used open windows and fans to cool a house back in the day.

My Aunt Adeline, a resourceful woman, cooled a big house, a husband and six kids with nothing but a bowl of ice in front of a window fan. That was the Cornhusker version of air conditioning.

There were pitiful looks when people learned we were moving to Missouri, a place many considered the Deep South. It was only 200 miles south, but south is south.

From all the talk, it sounded as though the heat down South was so bad that people melted like butter in the summer. They could be sitting in their cars, at the kitchen table, going for the mail or picking tomatoes when — bam! — they melted into a large puddle of clarified butter.

We moved south in August and, as predicted, each day was red hot wrapped in a suffocating blanket of humidity. At night, we slept (more like drifted in and out of consciousness) with a large oscillating floor fan humming at the end of the hallway by the bedrooms.

That big fan went wherever we went. If we were in the kitchen, the fan was in the kitchen. If we moved to the living room, the fan moved to the living room. The fan was a constant and welcome presence.

The next summer, Mom and Dad bought a window air conditioner and the large oscillating fan quietly moved to the basement. We gave the old fan a friendly nod whenever we went down to do laundry or retrieve something from the freezer, but it was largely ignored and soon forgotten.

The new AC window unit shot arctic air directly at the kitchen table. We ate every meal with our winter coats on. To get cold air back to the bedrooms, it ran full blast at night, which meant there were often icicles hanging from the kitchen appliances in the mornings.

A few years later, Mom and Dad had central air installed. Life would never be the same. There was no hum of the fan or roar of the window AC. The entire house stayed comfortably cool without constant background noise. What’s more, we could eat meals without coats on.

Our kids have never known life without air conditioning, nor have their kids. When one of our daughters and her family moved to a different house, a friend brought lunch for the entire crew on moving day. She also brought an oscillating stand fan knowing all the traipsing in and out would heat the house.

“It’s an oscillated what?” shrieked one of the kids. The woman lugged the fan into the kitchen, set it upright, raised the pole and plugged it in.

The kids immediately put their red-cheeked sweaty faces directly in front of the blowing fan. As they talked, they realized the fan warped and amplified their voices.

They sang and screeched using all the weird voices they could muster. For the rest of the day, not one of them passed the fan without stopping to cool off and sing a few bars.

“Hey, Grandma!” one of them shouted, “Did you know about these fans?”

“I did know about them,” I said. “That’s how your grandma became cool.”

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