Best place to catch a breeze

This is another topic that Creative Memories recommended I "journal" during the summer. Well, I think I've written on this topic before.

Our Runnemede house (pictured here) was a wonderful place to "catch a breeze". The front porch was especially breezy -- all the time. Even when there was barely a stir of wind in the air, there was just something about that porch that caught the breeze and if you sat on the eastern side of the porch, that was where the best breeze could be felt.

As I reported a couple of days ago, if the front door was left open, and dad had the fans positioned just right, there was a good stiff wind that came through that door and cooled off the whole living room.

The back porch was not as breezy as the front porch, and I suppose it was because it was only half open, the lower half being completely shut off due to the way the room was constructed. Also, the back porch had permanent windows or screens. In other words, if it was winter the windows were in, but you couldn't open them or shut them. They just fit in their frames and kept the porch warm on a sunny day. So, in the summer there were screens put in where the windows were in the winter, but not every window was replaced with a screen.

I'm not sure whether this was because it was a lot of trouble to replace all those windows with screens and then reverse the process in October, or whether there weren't enough screens to replace all the windows. I think it was the first scenario, because in the recesses of my mind I recall several times the whole back porch and everything one it got soaked during thunder storms. Since we used the back porch as a playroom and there was real furniture out there, I think it was decided that certain windows would be left in, mainly those on the western side of the porch, since that's where storms came from (the west).

Another great place to catch a breeze was in the back yard under the shade of my "climbing tree." That tree has long-since been removed, but it was located about half way between the back door of the house and the back door of the porch, not too far from one of the chicken coops.

Mom had set up some chairs out there, and in the evening that was the best breezy place we had. Lots of lightning bugs, too. Mom had a great part of her garden growing near there so we had to be careful when we were collecting the lightning bugs, but I do remember the breeze.

Fast forward to today. Not in Runnemede, but where Alan and I have our home. The best place to catch a breeze, of course, is my wonderful sun porch. It's also the best place to die of heat stroke on a hot, summer day. So, while the positioning of screens is not a problem, nor is catching a breeze a problem, my thermostat has changed and I can no longer tolerate a HOT breeze as I could when I was growing up.