A lesson from my momma

Shaving my legs is low on my list of things I regularly accomplish. It's a time-consuming process that I rarely undertake because I am so tired most nights that by the time I get a shower I just don't have the wherewithal to tackle shaving.

However, in an ironic twist, as much as I hate shaving my legs, I detest the way they feel when I haven't shaved in quite a while. Weird, I know.

Anyway, I was mulling getting up and shaving my legs the other day when I was reminded of a rather funny story about my momma shaving her legs.

It was back in the summer of 1996 when she was living with her daddy. She had moved in under the pretense she would stay for a while to help him recuperate from a recent illness, but wound up staying after the man with whom she'd been living died suddenly leaving her without a home to call her own.

During this time I was in college and had an apartment of my own, but often spent the night at my grandfather's house. It was nice being able to share meals with momma and DaddyBonds, which is what I and all his other grandchildren called him, and they seemed to enjoy my company. Also, being there meant I didn't have to deal with the loneliness that often fell over me when I was by myself at my place.

Anyway, my grandfather was stingy. Some people might call it frugal, thrifty or cheap, but regardless of what words you use, my grandfather didn't like to spend money on what he considered frivolous expenditures - like, say, air conditioning.

DaddyBonds had lived through the Depression, during which his oldest child was born, so he was no stranger to pinching pennies. In fact, members of the family, myself included, used to joke that he could pinch a penny until it melted. As far as he was concerned, air conditioning was an expensive luxury on which he just couldn't understand spending his hard-earned cash. 

There was only one large window unit air conditioner in his house, which came in at about 2,000 square feet. It was mounted in the combination kitchen/dining room. If you sat in there or in the adjacent den while the A/C was on you would freeze and thus feel the need to don a jacket in the middle of July. 

However, the A/C did little to cool the rest of the house. which is why, on the rare occasions DaddyBonds let us turn on the A/C, momma and I would shut the doors leading to other parts of the house so as to contain all the cold air in the den, kitchen and dining room.

We would be nice and cold while we watched television wrapped in our jackets or blanket, but, if we had to go to the bathroom, we had to strip down to our shorts and t-shirts so we didn't melt as we answered the call of nature. We could deal with this minor annoyance, but trying to sleep at night was a whole other level of annoyance. 

DaddyBonds, who was not only stingy, but also less sensitive to hot weather due the fact age and a bad case of diabetes had wreaked havoc on his circulatory system, was perfectly comfortable sleeping in his bed with just the attic fan running at night despite the fact it was 80 degrees in the house. In fact, on those rare summer nights when the temps dipped into the lower 70s, DaddyBonds felt better sleeping with the electric blanket on! 

OH MY WORD! I am sweating just thinking about it. 

Because DaddyBonds was still the ruler of his home and paid the majority of the bills while we were there, momma and I didn't feel right complaining to him about being hot at night. Plus, even though she was in her mid-50s at the time, momma was very reluctant to stand up to her daddy. 

So we suffered. 

Momma and I each had two fans in our respective bedrooms. We placed one in the window in an attempt to pull in cool air and another as close to the bed without actually being in it so the coolish air from it could blow on our faces. I also took to sleeping at the foot of my bed with the hope that a nice breeze might blow through the other window in the room.

One night while I was laying in bed listening to the incessant roar of the attic fan and sweating as though I'd been running laps, I heard momma get up and go to the bathroom. This was nothing unusual as she often got up throughout the night to tend to business. However, this night she seemed to be taking a conspicuously long time in there.

I got up to check on her to see if something was wrong. I knocked on the bathroom door and asked her if everything was okay. She replied, "I'm fine. I'm just shaving my legs."

I was dumbstruck by her reply because for one thing it was almost 2 in the morning and for another momma had never enjoyed shaving her legs so the fact she would get out of bed in the middle of the night to do so struck me as strange to say the least.

I opened the door and asked her why in the world she was shaving her legs at this ungodly hour. Momma said she was only shaving the insides of her legs because she was so hot lying in bed that the hair on the inside of her lower legs was irritating her and keeping her from being able to lie on her side with her legs tucked up, which was her favorite position to be in when she slept - or tried to in this case.

Momma's answer made me laugh out loud - and did again as I just typed it. I told her I was afraid something was wrong and that's why I'd come to check on her. She assured me everything was alright, and I left her to her task.

I returned to bed where I continued to be unable to sleep. Momma went back to bed a short time thereafter, but was back up again within the hour. As she passed the door to my room, momma asked, "Bran, you awake?" 

I said "yes" and she said she just wanted to let me know she was going to get some lotion because he legs were on fire. 

Apparently, dry-shaving her legs and then returning to bed to sweat irritated her legs something terrible. I chuckled as she headed down the hall to retrieve the lotion and made a mental note to always have clean-shaven legs before attempting to sleep without the luxury of air conditioning.