The A.C.'s

  We bought our first air conditioner one day in July, a few months after we were married and living in an upstairs apartment in Schaghticoke.  The weather that summer of 1968 might have set some kind of record because that apartment was so stifling hot it was intolerable.  After a miserably sleepless night, we drove to some store in Albany where they were having a truck sale of air conditioners in the parking lot.  It was the window inset type and and made life tolerable for the rest of the summer.   I think it ceased to work after a while; I don't remember what happened to it.  If memory serves, we also had, for a while, an air conditioner from Kingston when the folks down there installed central air.  That air conditioner may have gone to Don first and then here, or maybe it was the other way around.  Some summers in our house were hotter than others, but we always installed them, using them frequently or only occasionally.  When my uncle's wife died, she kindly bequeathed to me her 2 air conditioners.  Some years we installed all 3.
   One feature all those air conditioners had in common was their weight; they were pretty good sized and they were heavy as all get-out.  But every year Dave faithfully brought them up from the basement and then back down for the winter.  That was the procedure for many years until about a decade or so ago.  Those old A.C.'s refused to die, but they were so darn heavy that it was getting tedious to handle them.  One day we bought a new, lightweight one, I think at Rite-Aid.  That worked out so well that we bought a second one the next year, and left the monsters in the basement.  I know one of the guys at Dave's office said he would like one of the older ones, for what reason I can't remember, something about the cooling agent.  So we still had 2. I think Dave brought another to a recycling center some years ago.  I know we had the last behemoth until last summer when I put a sign on our lawn offering it and a dysfunctional dryer for free.  A man responded and while he hoisted the clothes dryer with no difficulty,he said the A.C. was the heaviest he's ever encountered.
     So we had the 2 later-model white units, and when Dorothy's friend Gwen was moving back to the city, she  offered her brand new AC to Dorothy to give to us, as she knew Dorothy had central air.  That accounts for three air conditioning units, but I can't explain*why there were four in the house.  At least one too many, for our present purposes, with  only 2 people living here now.  I got rid of one of them today.  It looked quite new, was in the original box, though I don't know its origin.
* In addition to the 2 modern AC's we had bought in recent years, at Rite Aid and such, plus the one from Gwen via Dorothy, the newest of all, just a few months old, was a gift from David to his father.  It has a remote control for easy temperature and fan adjustment.  Thank you, David.