I Said 3 ½ Tons and Whaddya Get?

Another day older and deeper in debt.

Another summer in St. Louis and a new milestone in my life is occurring this week.

Hopefully by this weekend I will have a new air conditioning unit, plus furnace.

I am quite excited about the prospect of more energy efficient appliances, but there’s also a sort of melancholy that’s mixed in. Why would anyone feel any sort of sadness about an old A/C unit and furnace?

Well, part of it has to do with the fact that with the replacing of those appliances, there’s one less thing in the house that’s attached to my parents.

Living in my parents house results in many mixed emotions – sometimes within the same day. With each passing year since my parents passing, Mom in 2001 and Dad in 2004, things get easier. But as much as I have a hard time with reminders that they’re gone, so I have the same problem when those reminders are removed.

The furnace is original to the house. Dad moved into the house in 1968 and the furnace is dated 1958. A 50-year-old furnace that apparently sat around for ten years before the contractor installed the unit. That in itself is amusing, but who has a 50-year-old furnace in their homes now-a-days?

The air conditioner is only about 25 years old. I say ‘only’ like it’s a young whipper-snapper. But I remember the girl who lived across the street coming over after it was installed and how we spent hours (okay, 15 minutes) talking into the unit while it was running, fascinated with the echo the blades caused when it was running. I also remember my poor mother dragging the old ‘landing pad’ that the original A/C unit sat on – which was actually in two equal pieces – from the middle of the back part of the house to the corner of the yard and painstakingly digging out the ground to set the concrete squares into.

Damn if she didn’t get them level, too! This past summer when we were putting a patio for our wedding, several of us dug out and found them. The level was out for the retaining wall bricks we were using and someone checked the concrete squares Mom set so many years ago.

Not bad for a woman who had had two massive strokes. Team Betty all the way!

So I suppose feeling bad that I’m replacing two antiquated appliances is silly, but since I live in a house where I’m surrounded by memories I think that embracing a little nostalgia isn’t TOO bad. After all, I’ll be lucky to get 10, maybe 15, years out of these new units. To channel both of my parents, they don’t make ‘em the way they used to.

But don’t think that I’m not a little giddy about getting new heating and cooling system. It almost makes me feel like a grown up.

Almost.

Maybe I'll feel a bit more mature when the check clears.