Women’s winter is not about climate change

Everyone knows that with global warming, summers are getting hotter. Heat domes hover over entire time zones.

My family used to summer at our cottage on Rodney Street in Dewey Beach back in the 1950s and ‘60s. It was never really baking hot in our brown cottage with red shutters and a screened porch that wrapped around the front. Cool breezes from Rehoboth Bay negated the need for fans, and I awoke on the blue-and-yellow Van Gogh mornings to the sound of motorboats and the scent of sea spray.

The Atlantic Ocean crashed to shore right across the highway, which wasn't nearly as busy as it is now. A trip to Wilson's Variety Store promised a frosty ice cream soda just like in the movie "Summer of '42." Sometimes we would make the journey down Cave Neck Road to check on our house, inhabited mainly when Milton Consolidated School was in session. The air would be heavy with the sugary scent of hollyhocks and the squashing sound of mulberries under my bare feet, unshod for most of the summer and leather-hardened from running down to the marina on Rodney Street.

On one of these trips home, I discovered the store of candy I’d hidden behind my father's bookshelf was all melted. I hoped my mother didn't see that trail of ants. Oh! I stepped on a yellow jacket and it felt like a lit cigarette. I had stepped on one at the McCabe Family Reunion at Trap Pond. Maybe it was because I had picked out a black-and-yellow-striped bathing suit that mimicked a bumblebee, but the tables loaded with fried chicken made it all worthwhile. That, and treading the brackish water there, which was so different from the Atlantic Ocean. Riding the ocean waves was the only athletic thing I had ever done except for roller skating.

I wondered how the people in inland Milton could brave the summer heat, because fans were unknown to me then. However, I would soon find out, since my parents traded the beach house as payment to the contractor for a large addition to our house in Milton. Somehow, I survived!

My father installed an air conditioner in my bedroom window when I returned from college in mountainous northern New Mexico. I opened the windows in my bedroom anyway, and he took it out. My mother later sold it to a friend. Surprisingly, it was always cool at night in the El Fidel Hotel near my college where I took a room, pretending to stay there to pass the hated algebra in summer school.

Since then, I've always tried to avoid fans, but it's impossible when you have a man in the house, in my case my husband. It's been said that women are biologically colder than men. At dinnertime, while we’re eating on TV trays in front of the set, Jeff employs the overhead fan even though the room is air-conditioned. It's right over top of me, of course, like a helicopter. He gallantly turns it down to a lower speed while I finish my soup, but not for long. I consequently employ an old grandmotherly lavender sweater to throw on for these evenings. I can even see the rotating fan blades reflected in my soup spoon.

I thought maybe I was one of the few people suffering from a dislike of fans, but I learned otherwise while watching a late-afternoon TV show called “Coast Life” on channel 9 WRDE. It airs from a Draper Media studio right down the street from me in Milton. It is hosted by two clever young women, Paige Marley and Leah Rizzo, and sometimes Lauren Hitch joins them. They seem young to me, anyway, but they are very insightful for their age. They are filled with helpful information, even for an old fox like me.

Once they warned their audience to be watchful for "the office wife," meaning don't let yourself, "the housewife," go, as my mother would say. Another time they made tea sandwiches of buttered bread and thinly sliced radishes. I tried this myself, in spite of the fact that their reaction was to exclaim, "I don't think so. It needs a protein like chicken!"

One of their greatest pronouncements, however, was on "women's winter," meaning that offices and even your home will be freezing with air conditioning at the will of men. You could embroider this on a sampler, as far as I'm concerned! Fashion shows advise investing in light shrugs to wear to the office or in movie theaters, and this is good sartorial advice indeed.

My mother was one woman who loved fans and collected a hoard of them. They were purchased mainly to have an excuse for a visit to the Milton Hardware Store of the past and see her best friend Ann Johnson, who worked there. There were small tabletop fans, large square floor fans, and ceiling fans everywhere! She would sit in front of them, head tilted back, hair bow coming unraveled, patting her face with a paper towel.

She should have invested in a clothes dryer instead, which she never did. Her inside clothes dryer was a metal rack sitting in her former carport. The towels and clothes were attached with clothespins and dried stiff as cowhides. Meanwhile, more and more fans joined her collection.

A big, empty doghouse joined the melange, along with a baby crib where her two miniature black poodles, Renee and Jenne, writhed around. She often employed the tap of a fly swatter for their discipline warning, "Don't double up!"

I often think of this advice when I have felt like doubling up after a bad day. I pick myself up, dust myself off and go on, even when I'm being blown away by an army of fans!