178. Screened Windows

 

Living in the west, whether in the desert or the mountains, always brings hot dry summers. But the temperatures always drop off at night (unless, perhaps you’re on the coast where the Pacific seldom lets it get very warm anyway) and in some places like the Rockies, the nights get so cool that you can entirely avoid air conditioning in your homes just by opening up the house at night. That’s how it is where I live. Of course, you don’t want to leave things opened up if you don’t have screens on your windows.

Screened windows became a thing in North America when diseases such as yellow fever and malaria spread like fire because of those annoying little mosquitos that still irritate us (and carry diseases) in the cool of an evening. You aren’t able to shoo the pests away if you’re asleep, so getting bit by the annoying things is intense at night. Before electricity your house was likely to get super hot if you were building fires to cook, so you had to leave your windows open to just breathe, let alone sleep. So, people put screens on their windows to prevent mosquito entrance and disease spreading while cooling their homes before air conditioning was even a possibility.

It seemed like a sensible thing to do and now you never find a home in North America without screens on their windows and often times they also have screen doors. I had always thought that was just the way it was and for good reason, but when we went to Europe we found that there weren’t screens to be found on any home. In Britain that seemed all right for the most part because they didn’t seem to have many mosquitos and we were on the coast so we didn’t leave our windows open that much, but still there were flies and other critters. Italy, however, was hot in the summer, and like most of Europe no one had air conditioning in their homes. But they did have mosquitos. So now I don’t take the screens on my windows for granted, but I do wonder about the silly stubbornness of Europeans…