Sleepless In the Midwest!

I'm hot and I can't sleep! The temperature is that perfect blend of heat and chill which renders the central air conditioning practically useless. It's just cool enough to keep it from coming on and just warm enough for me to be up in the middle of the night writing this blog. As I write, I can't help but think back to when I was a kid, living on a farm in the midwest and sweltering through the days and nights of hot August. Very few homes had air-conditioning, let alone CENTRAL AIR! But we DID have fans. Big, heavy metal things that took a handtruck to move from room to room and made conversation impossible if the day was hot enough for that fan to be turned on high! We had one of those. It was big, boxy and blue. It was supposed to be designed to make life more comfortable by violently stirring the air into a frenzy when it was place in a room. Now, I have no problems with a good, stiff breeze blowing through the house, but I prefer my breezes to be on the quiet side. I prefer QUIET when I am trying to read, write or work in various ways. And I definately prefer QUIET when I am supposed to be sleeping. Mom would haul that blue monstrosity upstairs, plug it in and turn it on HIGH so that the air would circulate through both rooms. In the upstairs, in the middle of the night, in the midst of a bad case of insomnia, that thing would roar and rumble like a bi-plane with a bad miss in the engine. Just when you thought you had caught a rythm and were about to be lulled to sleep by it, the sound would change and you'd have to start all over again. I was glad when that fan died!
My mother mourned it's loss for years. She bought another blue box fan, but it had too much plastic on it, it was too light and it made very little noise. Therefore, it COULD NOT put out a good breeze. She complained bitterly summer after summer! But I......well, I couldn't help myself.....I clapped for joy (on the inside, where Mom couldn't see) when they hauled that fan to the dump! And I climbed the stairs and went to sleep, which is what I'm gonna try to do right now if I can ever get cooled down!!!