There’s a line in the movie Dogma: “No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater—than central air.” Ain’t it the truth?

I think I am of the last generation that didn’t take air conditioning for granted. I know my kid has no idea what it’s like to live without it. I have unpleasantly vivid memories of having heat rash for 3 days every time I visited my grandparents. When I was 12, my mom was still opening all the windows at night and then closing them up tight and pulling the curtains at sunup to keep the house cooler.

There was a brief interim when I lived in Florida where air conditioning was a given—and it was lovely. We moved to Florida from Illinois in February, and I remember throwing off my winter coat in southern Georgia and feeling liberated by the wonderful weather. I remember an equal pleasure starting in June the same year every time I would walk into a building from a mere ten minutes in the swampy outdoors and have that blast of blessedly dry, blessedly cool air hit me in the face.

My freshman year of college, my dorm at USC was not air conditioned, so I had a box fan in my window. But my room was directly above the dining hall, so it alternately blew in cool air and smoke from the grill. I spent a lot of time that year craving burgers, and in May when I moved out I spent 2 hours taking that fan apart and scrubbing it from greasy black back to white. I honestly can’t remember if my subsequent California housing had air conditioning. I assume it did, but I also know I preferred leaving the windows open as much as possible. The next time I remember having air conditioning was when I moved back to Florida in 1998. This time it was from California and in May, so the warm weather was not the joy it had been the first time around, and air hitting me in the face like a wet rag was an unpleasant welcome home. At that point, the air conditioning in my rented house was a necessity not only for me, but for my two dogs and cat.

And I’ve gotten progressively wimpier with every house I have lived in since then. Guess what? Zero regrets. Climate control is civilization!