A few years ago, my wife and I decided to try a summer without air conditioning. Really, the decision had already been made for us: the two-bedroom starter home we were renting in Arlington was built to house federal employees during the Roosevelt administration and had not been significantly updated since. It had no central A/C, only two old window units which emitted more noise than air. We hated them. It didn’t help that they were huge, hideous. So we stashed them in the basement and abandoned ourselves to the breeze.

It only took a few days before we realized our mistake. Washington, D.C. is often called a swamp, and rightly so. It was built just at the spot where the Potomac ceases to be a clean mountain river cutting through the foothills of the Appalachians and becomes a broad, brackish estuary that dumps itself lazily in the Chesapeake Bay. There’s a lot of water flowing around the city: some of the excess seeps into the ground, and when the ground can take no more, it saturates the air. Eventually, the air, too, is filled with water, and the rest has nowhere to go—except, it seems, airborne into the houses of those poor people without air conditioning.

There is nothing pleasant about this experience. When my wife and I started our experiment, we had high-minded ideas about how our bodies would soon adjust to the humidity, and we would be able to live more in tune with the natural rhythms of the mid-Atlantic climate. We had both read Laudato si’ and took to heart Pope Francis’s argument that air conditioning is one of those “harmful habits of consumption” whose widespread usage is due more to invented than actual need. (We had not yet lived in Rome, where such an argument is common sense.)

But the reality is that in most cities south of the Mason–Dixon—and, in truth, many cities in America—life is unbearable without air conditioning. If you leave your window open, the hot, wet air pours in unabated. If you run a fan, that only makes it worse; the sticky mess whirls around the room, and it gets no cooler. Soon, everything becomes measurable in terms of sweat. All day your skin sweats; your house sweats; and all around you, the air sweats. And it is no better at night. I remember lying on the floor one evening reading The Heart of the Matter and being shocked to find myself in its pages (never a good sign with Graham Greene). “He lay coiled like a watch-spring on the outside of the bed,” Greene writes of a husband trying to keep away from his wife. “Wherever they touched, if it were only a finger lying against a finger, sweat started. Even when they were separated the heat trembled between them.” That was our life for three months in 2020.

One night, my wife could bear it no more. She stumbled blindly down the stairs to the basement where we kept the old A/C units. I was upstairs in the bed, fitfully drifting in and out of sleep. I felt that I was alone, and before I could piece together exactly what was happening downstairs, I was jerked into wakefulness by a loud crash, followed by my wife’s weeping. I rushed to the basement and found her crumpled on the floor next to a broken window unit. She had attempted to lug it up the stairs herself and, just as she had reached the landing, her grip had slipped. The whole thing had come crashing down on top of her.

At this point, any sane husband would have picked up the window unit, taped it back together as best he could, and installed it on the second floor. But extreme heat induces madness in even the coolest heads. I calmly told my wife that summer was almost over; surely she could make it a few more weeks. After all, we had come this far. She nodded feebly. But as those last few weeks of summer passed, the madness spread from me to her, and we became zealots about maintaining our discomfort. I wrote about it at the time—in words that seem totally foreign to me now—and it is still the piece of work about which I get the most comments. Or rather, my wife gets the comments every time June rolls around. “How are you holding up? Are you okay?” some well-meaning friend will ask her as he casts a worried look in my direction.

I can only chuckle when I look back on those miserable few months. We were such fools. But I don’t regret any of it; the Summer of No A/C D.C. is one of the animating myths of my marriage. Its effects have been lasting, and, I think, on the whole, good for us. One of the things about living in an extreme manner—so long as it is only temporary—is that it conditions your attitudes when you return to a more normal mode of life. The stuff in Laudato si’ about air conditioning is actually quite sensible, in the same way that fasting regularly is salutary. These days my wife and I have window units installed in our house, and we do use them, sparingly, only on the hottest days of the year. We have found that we don’t need artificial cool air washing over us all summer, but nor do we need make an idol of Washington's fresh air. As anyone who has lived here well knows, it is not the kindest of deities.