Climate-controlled atmosphere

Finally, the heat has ebbed.
After three days of blistering heat, accompanied by stifling humidity, the weather has resumed its normal late July feel. In fact, it might even be described as cool this evening.
Not that you would have felt the heat in my home. The AC has been blasting here. Even the dogs huddled on their pillows, curled tightly to ward off the chill.
I love it. I choose to snuggle under the covers on a hot summer night, rejoicing as the AC gets cranked up another notch, rather than let it get even a little bit muggy in here.
It hasn't always been this way.
Once I lived in the back half of an old house on Main Street. My half of the house (two-story) was the original house, built by a Hessian soldier who abandoned the Germans to join the Continental army.
This 1700-house had a scary dirt basement accessed by a hatch-like door on the floor of the porch. The two closets so small the hangers went in sideways. And there was no such thing as air conditioning. In fact, cross ventilation was available only in my bedroom upstairs.
With fans in windows on either side of my bed, I would carry a bowl of ice water and a wash cloth upstairs (no bathroom upstairs) and try to cool off enough to fall asleep. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't.
I imagine most young people do not know what it is like to have a home with no air conditioning. Or a car with no air conditioning. They've lived all their lives in a climate-controlled atmosphere.
Does that lack of experience make them shallow?
If you have never had to open that little triangular window and aim it at your face to keep from melting while you drive, can you truly appreciate the deliciousness of cool air cocooning you even from the Greenhouse Effect in your modern auto?
The last man I dated before I married the last man I will ever date was not a good boyfriend. He was not evil, but he was broken beyond repair. I gave it my best shot for a year and a half. I endured some things I had never been exposed to in my sheltered life - including having friends abandon me because they disliked him so intensely.
It was one of the worst times of my life - made even more horrible by a cancer diagnosis and five weeks of daily radiation treatments.
I write about this because I know in my heart that if I had not endured those horrible 15 months, I would be incapable of appreciating the life I now live as keenly as I do. Because I wandered through the marshes, I can clearly see the beauty of the mountaintop.
My life's not perfect by any means. But on those less perfect days, when my husband and I have quarreled over something inane, I have the ability to reflect on those unhappy days and compare the way I felt then with the way I am feeling now.
Oddly, it turns out, suffering has defined me. Like the black Crayon outline that corrals the colors in a child's picture, suffering makes everything a little sharper. Without it, the colors dull.
At the time of suffering, whether it is through a miserably hot night or lying on gurney while a large machine radiates body parts marked with permanent ink, there is no beauty. No apparent lesson.
But it is a joyous revelation when you understand that some good can come from those bad times. That you have experienced growth in spite of the struggles and setbacks.
I will never take for granted a climate-controlled atmosphere.