Dawn, I too often wonder how our ancestors made it. My kids were the first of our family's generation to have been born in Oklahoma, but my husband's parents were born here and raised their families here. His mother told me stories about how hard life was. She said when a grass fire got started, all you could really do was just stand there and watch it consume everything in its path. With only a well to draw water from, all they could do was dig trenches and try to beat it down with gunny sacks. They lost everything they had many times, to fire and flood. Miraculously, they were never hit by a tornado. Can you imagine how discouraging it must've been to live like that? Some of the pictures I have of my husband's grandparents show the entire family all lined up in front of a little wood shanty. DH's grandfather died of gangrene after having a leg accidentally cut off in a farming accident, leaving his grandmother with nine children. The eldest was DH's dad, who was about 18, and the youngest was less than a year old.

I remember not having air-conditioning -- or even fans! When I was little, we lived in a two storey old farmhouse not far from Humboldt, KS. We had a one-room schoolhouse about a mile away, but my siblings that went to high school rode the bus to Elsmore. When my mother would describe where we lived, she would say it was "out by Leanna". I never knew where Leanna was. Anyway, in the summer the house would get incredibly hot. We spent a lot of time on the front porch then, but there was still cooking and canning to do, and that had to be done inside. At night, we would spread "pallets" on the ground and sleep under the stars. It was OK, but I always hated it because the bugs would crawl on my ears and I was deathly afraid they were going to go inside my ears and get inside my brain! Funny what a 6-year-old will think. I would panic and start to scream and my poor mom would take me inside and put me to bed there. I remember every now and then turning the pillow over because it would be cooler on the under side.

We had rain all night last night, and early, early in the morning yesterday. Last night it just poured. It thundered so hard it shook the house. It's almost 9:00 and it's still raining off and on. It's getting to the point where I don't even look to see how many inches we have, and I almost don't even want to talk about it anymore. I sure wish we could send you some of this. HWY 123 is closed now. It always floods, as the ditches aren't very deep and it's very close to the Caney River. If it keeps on like this, little Coon Creek will jump its banks and then HWY 75 will be closed, too, which will cut us off from Bartlesville. That doesn't happen very often, or for very long, though. There are a couple of other ways to get to Bartlesville from here using country roads, but they usually close off before HWY 75 does. According to Mesonet, we have 60% chance of rain for the remainder of the day and 50% chance tomorrow.

I guess I won't be digging in the garden much today.

Ilene, I recall we at least had a water cooler - remember those? We would stand in front of them to cool off, and go "hmmmmmmmmmm" just to hear the funny noise it made.

I don't remember the heat getting to us so much. We weren't adapted to actual air conditioning yet, and people just tolerated being outdoors and indoors without any cooling system. The water cooler only helped the living room stay a slight bit cooler. At least we had a pretty shady backyard. We would take "shower baths" with the hose outside to cool off.

Do you remember that old dirt road between Dewey and Caney? OMG - it was a horror, wasn't it?

I think our ancesters were just accustomed to handling the heat. We have so much air conditioning around - at work, at home, at restaurants, everywhere, that our bodies have become dependent on A/C. As kids, we spent a lot of time at the swimming pool, too. We had season passes so we could go whenever we wanted to. But, we walked to the pool and back - no transportation.

I'm so accustomed to A/C, I'm like you, Dawn. If I can stay outside in the a.m. for 2 hours and in the evening for an hour, I'm lucky!

We are supposed to get more rain this week, and the temps are supposed to cool down into the mid-80s, which seems really nice to me. Garden is not suffering too much, but I don't grow a lot of veggies like you, and a lot of my plants are heat tolerant.

Susan

Are you talking about hairpin curve? I think it's between Caney and Wann. DH drove it some and nearly wrecked a couple of times, or so the story goes. We moved to Copan about 1954 and we only knew of one way to get to Dewey from Copan and that was HWY75. They've built a new HWY75 now that bypasses Copan, but then it used to run right through it. Also it used to run right by a barbershop and that area is now bypassed as well. There are places where the old highway still exists and man, is it ever narrow!

Yes, we got a water cooler probably about 1960. We thought we had really "gone uptown" with that one! I remember standing in front of it and letting it billow out my shirt. But it sure did wet down everything. The salt would clog up in the salt shaker, all the way in the kitchen! That was about the time we got a sprinkler for the hose. I was the last kid at home, but my oldest sister had blessed my mom with grandsons by then, so they and I would go out and run around under the sprinkler. Our wet clothes would keep us cool till we dried out, then we'd just run under the sprinkler again.

When I was a kid, our house had no air conditioning (in the 1960s) but we had two water coolers....one in the girls' bedroom, and the so-called cool air would travel down the hall and theoretically cool off the parents' bedroom, dining room and living room. The other water cooler was in the den and, theoretically, helped cool off the boys' bedroom at that end of the house, the den and the kitchen. The reality? You felt marginally cooler if you stood right in front of the thing, but not really, really cooler if you know what I mean.

In the early 1970s, we got a window unit air conditioner for the den and for the living room, and we thought we moved on up to the big time! (Got a color TV in the early 70s too, so we thought we had it made.)

I still remember waking up at night throughout my childhood, just dripping wet in sweat and way too hot to sleep.

I used to go spend a week every summer with my cousins who had central air conditioning and I absolutely froze to death the whole time I was there because I wasn't used to cool air. LOL You would think it would have been a nice reprieve, but I hated it because I couldn't stand being cold.

Finally, after DH and I put central heat and air in the house we bought up the road from my parents in the early 1980s, my parents finally put in central heat and air in their home. It changed their lives. They certainly could have afforded to do it long before they did it, but they'd lived without it forever and didn't think they needed it. LOL

I know we are spoiled. I spend tons and tons of time outside and have the deep farmers tan on my arms, face and neck to prove it, but I can't handle the heat nearly as well as I used to.

It hit 101 in Dallas yesterday while we were shopping down there yesterday....the 4th earliest they've gone over 100 in June. Usually it is closer to July when they start exceeding 100 degrees. Our daytime highs this time of year are usually very upper 80s to about 90, aso we're running 8 to 10 degrees high. I hope that trend doesn't continue in July and August, because they are hot enough as it is.

DH and I bought a huge evaporative water cooler and put it in the garage to keep the dogs cool. I guess it is better than nothing, and they certainly like to lie down in the path of the "cooler" air, but I don't think it raelly helps them that much. I do take the whole bunch of dogs down to the big pond to swim at least twice a day, and they love it. I open the gate and say "Swim! Swim! Let's go swim!" and off they run to the pond like a bunch of maniacs. I have two dogs who don't especially like to get wet, but they'll wade in up to their knees. On the rare occasions that those two dogs DO swim, you know it is a really, really hot day.

All my trees, shrubs, flowers, vines and groundcovers can handle the heat just fine because I carefully chose only plants that could take this heat. The veggies, though, are a different story. They wilt and look sad and I know they are wishing they were growing anywhere else but here!

Dawn

My niece got married at 1 pm Saturday in OKC, which meant no time for much of any gardening on Saturday, so yesterday I was trying to get as much done as possible to make up. I was fine for most of the morning, but yesterday afternoon I would go out and work for 15-30 minutes, come in for a half hour or so and then go out for another mini-work session. It was kind of crazy, but I have pushed the limit taking days off to get the yard, garden and trees under control. Everything is so overgrown.

We had water coolers, too, and I had to smile when Dawn described putting her mouth up to it to hear the sound it made when she hummed. That's a nice memory. My son in Santa Fe was telling me last week that the studio where he works has a cooler. I told him they work pretty well in dry climates but not so well in Oklahoma's humidity. I think we're just spoiled by A/C. Every year I turn my A/C on more for the humidity than the heat. It makes me wonder how those coolers ever helped.

Pat,

I think they only "helped" because we thought that they did! Although, I have to say that I have been in greenhouses at nurseries that have huge evaporative water coolers built into one wall, and that end of the greenhouse does feel cooler than the other end (unless it is just that I THINK it feels cooler).

Dawn