Before Air Conditioning

When I was 5 years old, we moved from our home in New Haven to Madison, a house down on Neck Road. I looked at it on Google Earth the other day, and what stood out was the pine trees. We had a tradition of of getting live Christmas trees and planting them along the property line to the north of the house, Scotch Pines mostly. Now, they're huge, pushing 60 years old. Amazing what you can see on your computer these days isn't it?

When we moved to Madison, hardly anyone I knew had air conditioning, so you slept with your windows open. Since I was small I loved sleeping in a chilly room, so I kept mine open late into the fall, only closing them when the first snow rolled into town. I remember the sounds that came through those open windows, the booming and cracking of the ice on Neck River in the spring when the ice broke up and the night was again filled with the sound of running water, the rifles under the bridge behind our house. I remember hearing the geese flying south in the fall at night, the faint music of their soft honking as they flew to some golf course in Mexico, Cuba or Florida rather that freeze their tail feathers off in Canada.

When the wind blew in the fall, and the brilliant maples leaves had lost their color and turned the dull brown of death, you could hear the leaves falling from the trees, swirling noisily into piles in the wind eddies of the trees and the house and garage. I remember one night, sitting bolt upright, terrified as the screams of a rabbit caught by one of the red foxes rolled through the night. Rabbit scream like a small child when they're being bitten to death and unless you know what the noise is, a childs mild fills in the blanks with imaginings of demons and devils racing through the night.

But the finest sounds came from across the street, late on a Friday night when Augustine Duques, head woodwinds instructor at Juliard, returned home for the weekend, to spend it with his wife Emilou, a former Rockette dancer. Sometimes he would sit out in his yard and play classical music, and it would come through the window and fill the room with the most beautiful sounds.

Now, the night is sealed off, the music dulled behind dual thermapane windows and the constant low hum of the central AC. No more do children hear the geese honking, or the tree frogs singing, or the soft bark of a red fox, or the crunch they make when eating the apples beneath the tree in back. The only semblance of music is the intrusive annoying bass of some young person trying to sound cool and chill. All those beautiful songs, and all that wonderful music is lost and I think it's passing is something we should consider.