Sleeping in between seasons isn’t easy.
Like now. When our forced air system stays balanced at seventy degrees. When it’s too cool for the air-conditioner. When it’s too warm for the heater. When even turning up the overhead fan to the highest setting — what my husband affectionately terms ‘hurricane force winds’ — offers no relief.
As lovely as it is outside right now, inside it’s anything but. Mild temperate evenings is a surefire recipe for staying sleepless on a stuffy second floor.
After three nights of tossing and turning earlier this week, I finally woke up to the fact that this house is blessed with forty windows! Twenty of them upstairs. I know since I stripped and painted every one of these windows, the first winter we lived here. And though most are closed off with a fixed storm window, enough can be opened to create a nice cross-breeze.
Old houses were designed to invite in every bit of wind that is within its general vicinity. And like most old houses in the area, our master bedroom was designed off of the pattern of an old sleeping porch, with our bed nestled between three sides having two windows each.
Last night, with one window open on either side of our bed, sleeping in between became suddenly easy.
an everyday life 
Nothing, but nothing is more lovely than open windows at night. I held out for a corner apartment in our complex for both mom and I – we had to wait a couple of months to move in, but now both of us have two-window bedrooms on a second floor than can be opened securely.
Sleeping porches – one of the best inventions in the world, and second only to hauling your bed out under the oaks.
Thanks so much for your comments over at my place, which I finally have responded to. I’ve been fighting vertigo for a week, and it’s taken all I had to keep things rolling on the home front for mom. I’m better now – not running into walls any longer – and hope to begin catching up with my “readin’ and writin’. The ‘rithmetic can wait 😉
Linda,
Glad to hear you’re feeling better. I hope you aren’t one to over-do, to make up for lost time.
A bed under the oaks sounded lovely — until I recalled those Gulf Coast mosquitoes!
Janell