Window Is Short for Wind Opening

We only have a one-room portable air conditioner that Scott uses in the bedroom to sleep during the day to be ready for his night shifts at work. The rest of the house is cooled by air flow. We open all the windows and use a series of fans to push air through the house. We point all the fans the same direction as the wind is currently blowing outside. This means one end of the house has fans blowing air in through the window and the other end of the house has fans blowing air out through the window, or wind opening.

So, in my mind, windows are for allowing the wind to blow through and cool the house in hot weather. A neighbor recently asked if I'd seen the new paint job on the back of his house. When I told him I hadn't, he told me, "That's what windows are for." I thought to myself, "No, windows are for letting the wind cool the house off. If windows were for spying on our neighbors, then they would be called 'spyows' (spy openings)."

I imagine people shortened 'wind opening' to 'window' long before they had electric fans to help the wind cool their houses. I wonder when we lost track of why we called them wind openings, but I'd guess it happened fairly recently, with the invention of air conditioning.

That reminds me of a cool story about my family's old farmhouse. My Grandma Anna, second from the left in this photo that was taken in the late 1980s, grew up in tornado country. Her father built this farmhouse in the thick of tornado country. During tornado warnings, she would tell us to open the particular window that appears in this photo. She said that giving the wind this opening would prevent the tornado from tearing the house down.

Unfortunately, this photograph got double exposed. That used to happen sometimes, back when we needed to use film in order to take pictures. I mistook this roll of film for an unexposed roll, and I took another picture on top of this one.

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In other news, I weighed in at 156.6 this morning, and I will be dieting for the next week or so. The cheesecake our church gave us to celebrate our 19th wedding anniversary sure was yummy, though!