When my husband walked out on me, I had to figure out how to take care of the house on my own.
One of the biggest chores I had to do was take the window air conditioning units out of the windows before winter.
I wasn’t a little woman, but I wasn’t very strong. I had never had to remove the window air conditioning units or put them in. I considered taking some weightlifting classes, but I wasn’t ambitious either. I spent the better part of an hour huffing and puffing while trying to get the AC unit out of the bedroom window. I finally had a tight hold on the AC unit, and I pulled it forward, but it wanted to rock backward. I panicked as my mind conjured up a picture of the air conditioning sliding backward and landing on the ground beneath the window. It was a slow motion vignette that I didn’t want to happen. I pushed the window down and left the AC unit in the window. I knew that before summer began again; I was going to have central air conditioning installed, because I didn’t want to go through this again. In the meantime, I called the local home center and asked if they had a cover I could place over the AC units. They had the next big thing, and it was called shrink wrap. I knew that by next summer, I could find someone to help remove the window AC units. Of course, if the shrink wrap worked as well as the clerk said it would, maybe I wouldn’t need to purchase a central AC unit.