Rain on a Hot Tin Roof

My mom in law is visiting so the AC is turned off since she gets cold at anything below 80, but then she’s almost 90 so she has earned a perk or two in her life. Anyway, it brings to mind when we were kids and had to put up with living without air conditioning, even though at the time we didn’t know it was all that bad. I still cannot believe that as a kid I would run all day then come home and try to fall asleep in a hot house, and sometimes that hot house had a tin roof with precious little – if any -- insulation. It was almost like trying to sleep in a toaster oven.

When I was real young I shared a bed with my brother and we always fought over the window. There were many nights we sat on the porch with all the windows and doors flung open to let the house “cool off” before we went to bed, and even then it was still pretty toasty inside, and you would lay there waiting for some breeze, no matter how slight, to come through the window.

Rain was better, even if a little of it blew in the window, but we did not want a thunderstorm, especially when we stayed with my grandmother. The world stopped at Grandma’s during a thunderstorm. The windows were closed and we were not allowed anywhere near them. No TV, no radio, no phone. We could not touch a thing, especially if it was electrical, and we had to be very, very quite. It was almost like noise was a lightening rod.

But even with all that there are times I miss it. I still love the sound of rain on a tin roof. Imagine, we had soothing sounds to lull us to sleep long before they started putting them in a radios. There was a new house built near Memphis just before we left there. It has a wrap around porch and a tin roof. I’m sure it also has about 2 feet of insulation, which probably muffles the sound a lot, but it is still a tin roof. What a lucky guy.