In the olden days

We never locked the door when I was a teenager. As a matter of fact, when my parents got divorced, my mother had to go out and buy new doorknobs for the doors, because the locks didn't even work.

One snowy day in high school, I got home to find that everyone was gone. No problem. I knew the door was unlocked.

Except that it wasn't.

So I went to the basement door.

That was locked, too.

OK, that was weird. Luckily there was one other option, and I knew that door would never be locked. I climbed the juniper tree next to the deck, stepped over the railing and walked up to open the patio doors that opened into the living room.

Yup. You guessed it. Locked. I couldn't believe it. It's the only time every door in the house was locked. Mom felt terrible when she got home.

In Idaho, when I lived there, you left the door open at night in the summertime, to catch the cool desert air after the sun went down. You'd close the door when you got up in the morning, to keep the cool in against the heat of the air.

Air conditioning was something for the rich and frivolous, a waste of money. At my parents' house, high on a hill, there would be snow as early as the end of October and, one year you could still see snow in protected areas under the junipers as late as June. Who needed AC? A better furnace, that was what you needed.

I was thinking of all this today, playing outside with my daughters. It's been so hot, for weeks now, that we really couldn't play outside very long. If I didn't decide to go inside, the girls would start asking to go in. Today, though ... today was like being back in Idaho. The air was cool, with enough of a wind to keep you aware of what you were breathing. The sky was light blue, dotted with a few fluffy white clouds. We opened the windows, and let the sweet scent of the outdoors wash through the house while we played outside. I sat on the steps, enjoying the weather and reading a book while they ran races back and forth across the front yard, screaming and squealing.

Across the street a group of boys played football, while two girls watched them from the sidelines (which bothered the feminist in me.) A few families walked past, moms pushing strollers, dads striding ahead, an electron cloud of older children spilling around and between them. Old men followed sniffing dogs, pulled along by their leashes. Teens and tweens rolled past on skateboards and bicycles, doing stunts in the middle of the street.

A flock of Canada geese flew overhead, honking, which stopped the girls in the middle of their race. They stared up at the sky, then ran to show me, pointing urgently at the sky.

It was a really good afternoon.