There is a very specific kind of weather that only seems to happen this time of year.
You wake up and it’s cold enough that you briefly consider turning on the heat.
By lunch, you’re wondering if the air conditioner needs to come back on.
By dinner, the windows are open.
And sometime around bedtime, somebody in the house is asking why it’s freezing in here.
Welcome to late September in Indiana.
This is the season when the thermostat becomes less of a household appliance and more of a negotiation.
Nobody wants to be the first person to turn on the furnace. That feels like surrender.
Turning on the heat in September somehow seems wrong, even if it’s 48 degrees outside and you’re standing in the kitchen wearing a sweatshirt.
Of course, when I was a kid, we didn’t have this problem.
We didn’t have air conditioning.
If it was hot, you opened the windows.
If it was really hot, you got strategic.
We’d put a fan in the living room window pulling air into the house and another fan in the kitchen window blowing it back out. That created a pretty decent cross breeze through the whole place.
That was climate control.
And if that still wasn’t enough, everybody just wore fewer clothes.
Simple.
Winter wasn’t much more complicated.
We had a wood-burning stove for heat.
If the house was cold, you put another piece of wood on the fire.
If the room with the stove got too hot, you cracked a window.
Think about that for a second.
We were literally heating the house with fire, then opening a window because the fire was working too well.
And somehow, nobody thought that was unusual.
There was another drawback to the summer system.
Back then, people actually showed up at your house without warning.
No text.
No phone call.
No “Are you home?”
They just came up the driveway.
More than once, I remember my dad spotting a car coming toward the house and making a mad dash to put on a pair of pants before whoever it was made it to the door.
That may have been our version of a smart-home alert system.
Times have changed.
Now we’ve got central air, programmable thermostats, weather apps, and probably enough technology to keep the house at exactly 72 degrees every minute of the day.
And yet somehow we still can’t agree on what to do in late September.
Turn on the heat?
Absolutely not.
Turn the air back on?
That seems ridiculous.
Open the windows?
Sure, until the house gets cold again.
Close the windows.
Find a blanket.
Put on socks.
Repeat tomorrow.
There is probably a perfectly sensible way to handle all of this.
But part of fall is this little dance we do every year.
The cool mornings.
The warm afternoons.
The windows opening and closing.
The debate over whether it is officially time to turn on the furnace.
And honestly, I kind of like it.
Because pretty soon, there won’t be any debate.
The windows will stay shut, the furnace will run, and we’ll start complaining about winter.
For now, I’m willing to negotiate.
And at least nobody has to sprint for their pants when a car comes up the driveway anymore.