Summer in the South: Is it cold enough for you?

When the temperature is around 40 degrees, a fleece vest can come in handy. I’m not talking about the weather outside; I’m talking about the climate inside my office.

I don’t have a thermometer to measure how cold it is in here, but I have to periodically wipe frost from my computer screen. My hands turn blue and grow numb from the cold, and I have to blow on them to keep the circulation going.

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The only way to find real relief is to go outside, where it’s a balmy 96 degrees. Feeling the blessed heat seep back into my bones is like being rescued from freezing in a Siberian winter.

This is life in the 21st century South: too hot outside but way too cold inside. The difference is so extreme, you feel as if you might crack as you pass from frigid to torrid.

Air conditioning is a blessing. I don’t dispute that. The booming, modern South would be impossible without it.

I sometimes find it hard to believe that I actually survived all those summers as a child without it. There was no air conditioning in houses, in cars, in stores or practically anywhere.

I remember when movie theaters advertised the fact that they were air conditioned with big blue-and-white banners showing penguins in stocking caps skating on ice floes. Who cared what the movie was? You just went in, sat down and cooled off for a couple of hours.

There were lots of fans — box fans, window fans, oscillating fans, ceiling fans, hand fans from the funeral home. They moved the air around, giving the illusion of making us cooler, but they weren’t too effective in a real heat wave.

Swimming pools or even just a run through the sprinkler provided some relief. So did shade. Sitting still helped.

But air conditioning was the savior of the South. Millions of people who said the South was just too pestilentially hot for human habitation suddenly discovered that, with air conditioning, they liked it down here.

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But a good thing can be overdone, taken too far, transformed from boon to bane. Such is the case with air conditioning.

We don’t need to recreate the climatological conditions of the Arctic inside our homes, stores and workplaces just because we can. This defies the whole concept of comfort.

It has always struck me as ironic that, in the winter, we turn up the thermostat, wrap ourselves in thermal blankets and drink hot toddies in front of blazing fires, all in the name of warmth. But in the summer, when it’s naturally warm, we want to live in the equivalent of an icebox.

It makes no sense. If you’re comfortable at 78 degrees in the winter, shouldn’t you be comfortable at the same temperature in the summer?

I need to go outside now and warm up. Icicles are forming on the edges of my desk. A cold wind is blowing from the fan in the ceiling, and I can see my breath with each exhalation.

Tomorrow I’ll bring my down parka to the office. It could be the key to surviving summer in the South.