Hot and Cold

I appreciate a dependable source of heat — and until more things are able to be converted to solar or wind, I will respect the warming effects that gas and oil bring. Bottom line, I am grateful not to have to hunt down some bear so I can wear its skin during the winter months. Our family has experienced a lot of different heating sources, in various places over the years. We had oil heat in Wisconsin and in Maine, electric baseboard heat in Georgia, Texas and North Carolina and where I live now, our home is heated with natural gas — but we also use a pellet stove and I adore the cozy, radiant heat of our wood stove. When we first moved to Kentucky, we rented a small place with a furnace located under the house. There was a large grate in the floor of the living room, through which the heat would rise — and into which our fourteen-month old son once poured a full box of cereal. The smell permeated the house and was still evident, I suspect, when the next people moved in, a year or so later. I will also admit that I love air conditioning during the summer. Where I live now, the temperatures tend to be extremely hot for the majority of July and August. It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, people say, and the moisture in the air here measures in the low teens during those months — but when the thermometer reads nearly a hundred or more, for weeks on end………..it’s the heat.