This year marks the tenth that Jill and I have been working on our old house. When we took on our Queen Anne, it was a wrecked frat house — condemned property that had sat empty for nearly a year. Jill loved it at first sight. I said, “No way.” She was absolutely convinced that we could bring the house back from the brink. Never mind that we knew nothing about fixing a house. Painting — that’s all we knew. We could paint really well. Let me say it again: condemned property — no electricity in half the house, no plumbing, no ceilings in three rooms, no lights, garbage piled high in every room, and so on ad nauseum. It took three 30-yard Dumpsters and 79 industrial-sized garbage bags just to clean the place out. Still, we didn’t imagine that it would be two years before we started painting the walls.

I have always loved old houses. But I would not have bought this ruined frat house had Jill not wanted it so badly. That’s how far gone in love I was with her. We had been dating for only six months at the time. Call me impulsive. Is it remarkable that we saved the house and stayed together through all that mess? A sense of humor helps. The ability to live with chaos helps too. As we share the house with two dogs and two cats, chaos has become one of our specialties.

We have a website dedicated to our ongoing adventure: houselove.org It’s a big site because it tracks ten years of renovation. A decade seems a long time until you find yourself at the end of one. When we moved into our wreck, our new friends down the street kept reminding us that their spectacular home was the product of twenty years’ work. Twenty years? I thought. I’m not working twenty frigging years on a house. But I’m halfway there already.

Jill and I got married in our old house, by the way. That was the third year in. At the time, we thought the house was looking pretty groovy. But, the truth is, it was just starting to look livable. NOW it’s looking groovy. But you see how it goes: it’s all relative. You start with an Animal House wreck and pretty soon you’re willing to give yourself a lot of credit for living in something that looks only somewhat wrecked. There are people — a few of my in-laws, for example — who think that we live in a slum because all of the houses are old. Only in America will you get that attitude. Did you know that strip malls across the nation are being abandoned in favor of newer strip malls? We’re creating a landscape of deserted — zombie — strip malls. Something similar is happening with subdivisions.

But I digress. Is 113 years really old? Relatively, I mean. Think England, think France. Think George Washington.  Apparently, Jill and I will grow old in this oldish house, tinkering with it and improving it. I should confess that the only reason we keep working on the house is that we keep learning how to do this work better. We could have stopped years ago and the house would have been good enough. But, if you believe in progress and the advancement of humankind, good enough is never good enough. Take a peek at houselove.org and you’ll see what I mean.

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Let me put my problem simply: I puke on planes. Not frequently. Not every time. But enough to make me finger through the jetliner’s seat pocket, every flight, to make sure there’s a tidy white barf bag. Just in case. Recently, I returned from a trip that made me sick both coming and going. And I continued heaving in the car after each flight. That’s never happened before. Jill  suggests that I may be getting more prone to air sickness as I grow older. Oh, joy.

I first discovered that I suffer from motion sickness when I was nine and attempted to ride The Octopus at an amusement park. I had come to the park with my third grade class for just that kind of turn-‘em-around-and-upside-down fun. As The Octopus began its gyrations, rising and tilting and spinning, I was abruptly surprised and dismayed at my body’s reaction: my dizziness was not a fun dizzy, it was a brain-mashing, stomach-wrenching, limb-quivering dizziness whose analogue I would not discover for another nine years, when reeling with drunkenness, I would puke most of the night into the bushes at the front of my parents’ house until I was weak and weepy from the ordeal. Instead of screaming my delight, like my fellow Octopus riders, I flattened myself against the seat-back and gripped the rails and prayed for the ride to end soon, please, very soon. When the ride ended, I stumbled to the nearest bench and lay down for a good twenty minutes until my pulsing stomach, my spinning head, my trembling limbs settled at last.

I made some experiments. I was fine on the roller coaster because it moved fast in a relatively straight trajectory and its dips and rises were short-lived. I couldn’t tolerate anything that spun me in a circle. This prevented me from enjoying 95% of the rides. It was a devastating discovery not only because it stifled my enjoyment but also because it set me apart from my peers. It marked me as a weakling. On that same school, Ellen Sloan — a sickly mama’s girl — threw up in her cupped hands just as the bus arrived at the amusement park. She was notorious for getting car sick, sometimes after only a few miles of riding. As she rushed out of the bus ahead of us, her cupped hands brimming with her half-digested breakfast, the rest of us exchanged looks of disgust to confirm what we already knew about Ellen: what a loser. Little did I know that twenty minutes later, I’d have more in common with Upchuck Ellen than with my unafflicted buddies.

My oldest brother, Mike, was plagued by motion sickness until he was a teenager. Every car trip we took for the family’s summer vacation guaranteed that Mike would be puking out an open window. This usually happened in the mountains, where winding roads did him in. I had no trouble with car sickness as a child. When the road got too windy, I’d lie down in the way-back of our station wagon. As for air sickness, I was thirteen when I took my first flight. When a too-bumpy flight flattened me finally and I handed my bulging barf bag to the attendant, I was humiliated. Since then, every flight has been a gamble. The worst parts are take-offs and landings. Most of the time, I can ride out the turbulence because most of the time it doesn’t last long. If it persists, I must descend into several circles of agony before I reach the frozen, black lake of absolute air sickness. I am in awe of airline attendants and their ability to work and walk about so casually on a bumpy ride.

I am discreet about vomiting. I open the bag, place it to my mouth as if to inflate it, then let go. I am not loud. I do not cough or spit or retch. That comes later, after I’m on the ground –if the flight has been particularly bad. If, upon arrival, I have to rent a car and get somewhere, I am good to go because I have focus. If, on the other hand, I must ride in a car, especially a long distance and, heaven forbid, on winding roads, I am in danger again. Those who do not suffer from motion sickness may think that this is all in the sufferer’s head. That’s why, as children, we considered the motion-sick to be weaklings. They should have more control. They should tough it out. There is in this assumption something fundamental to evolutionary biology: the sick one must be left behind if he or she cannot keep up with the tribe. That’s why the kid sitting on the bench morosely watching his classmates ride The Octopus with giddy abandon is the kid most likely to get his lunch money stolen and his pants yanked off and tosses into the nearest Dumpster. He’s one who can’t keep up. Twenty thousand years ago, he’d have been left on the veldt as the tiger’s next meal.

You may wonder at my ability to recover if I have to drive a car, for this seems to suggest that motion sickness is just a head game. The most persuasive theory about motion sickness is that it arises from physiological confusion. When the plane starts to buck and pitch, my body can’t reconcile the conflicting signals it receives in three areas: visual, aural (inner ear), and tactile (how sensors in our skin perceive movement). My inner ear — which contains the tiny gyroscope that keeps us balanced and lets us know when we are standing up or lying down — is getting signals that I’m being turned upside down. But my eyes are telling me that I’m maintaining a steady, if a bit bumpy, course. And then my body as a whole is perceiving jarring movements in a different way. The result is nausea. If you’ve ever gotten dizzy from watching an I-MAX movie of flying into a canyon, it’s the same phenomenon: your inner ear is telling you that you’re rock-solid stable while your eyes are telling your brain that you are flying. This contradiction confuses your body. As a result, you get dizzy. If the confusion persists, your body may bail on you altogether and you get sick. This theory seems to explain why I recover more quickly after a bad flight if I have to drive: driving a car realigns my senses as nothing else can.

Apparently most mammals are susceptible to motion sickness. You may have a dog that has trouble riding in a car. There are many remedies, none of them perfect. One scientific study shows that the removal of a part of the brain alleviates the ailment in monkeys. I’ll opt for something less dramatic. Dramamine and its associates suppress your nausea by depressing your senses. Essentially, as it makes you drowsy, it puts you out of your misery. My brother Mike swears by those beaded acupressure wrist-bands. I don’t believe it but I’ll try it. Ginger capsules seem promising but the medical community considers them unproven so far. Supposedly, you can train your body to withstand motion sickness by exposing yourself regularly to turbulent motion. It’s like exercise. But who would want that kind of exercise? By the way, you can go online and buy your own supply of airsick bags, some quite fashionable. The need to carry that large a supply suggests that there are some serious sufferers out there. If you’re interested in the barf bag as cultural artifact, there are many online museums: airsicksack.com

The most sympathetic response I’ve received from an in-flight seat mate after I’ve apologized for puking was: “Hey, you can’t help it.” The least sympathetic was an appalled stare from a teenager. Children are afraid of losing control and don’t want to believe that a normal grown-up like you or I could be reduced to a trembling, sweating mess as a result of a bumpy flight. It’s nothing I can explain easily to a youngster, especially under those circumstances. I can only sit there, barf bag in hand, and wait for deliverance.

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Jill woke me at dawn this morning. She said, “We’ve got a house full of mice!” Our cats had already gotten two of them. As I stepped groggily from the bed, Simon chased another down the hall. Sofi had yet another cornered in the living room. Fortunately our two cats are good at catching mice. Unfortunately, mice are smart about getting caught. Instinctively, mice know that if they play dead, the cat will get bored and walk away. Our cats did exactly that. “Let’s focus!” I scolded them. Jill wasn’t exaggerating, there seemed to be a lot of mice in the house. Early morning happens to be the cats’ breakfast time and we couldn’t put off feeding them, which, needless to say, was a great distraction from mousing.

The mice got in because I had opened holes in the walls on two floors to run some new electricity. (If you’ve got an old house, you’ve got mice in your walls.) I had left the walls open for nearly a week because it’s too hot to work. We’ve stopped doing all of the chores we normally do around the house in the summer. Our window-unit air-conditioners aren’t especiallly good. They sort of keep us cool, the house temps hovering about 80-84 degrees. Outside offers no relief, even at night. Last night I was watering the front yard at 1:00 A.M. and one of my neighbors trudged by walking her four greyhounds. “It’s the only time we’re comfortable,” she said, “and even this is hardly good enough.”

Jill and I have cabin fever, I’ve decided. Sure, cabin fever is usually associated with being cooped up in winter. But it applies to a bad summer too. We got so desperate for relief that we took the dogs to the woods late yesterday and went wading in one of the Gunpowder creeks. Frieda, our basset hound loves to swim. All of us got plenty wet. Then we stopped to pick raspberries. When we got home, despite the heat — or, rather, to defy the heat — Jill and I made raspberry pies. That’s not exactly ideal food for this weather but we didn’t complain.

There’s no relief in sight for this too-hot Baltimore summer, I’m afraid. And, for the next couple of weeks, you can bet that Jill and I will be a bit jumpy in the house — until the cats evacuate all of our little visitors. Just now we caught another: I chased it into an empty tomato sauce can. Jill was going to help me bag it but then it leapt away when Jill recoiled at the sight of its tail draped over the can edge — Eek!  ”Oh, well,” I said, “we’ll get it eventually.” Jill laughed and laughed. I love a woman with a sense of humor.

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Jill and I went to Phoenix last week to see my mother, who is 83 and “still on foot,” as she likes to say – and smoking Pall Malls. She said, ,”Nobody comes to Arizona in July.” It was 110-115 degrees every day.   It’s remarkable that people live in heat like that. More remarkable that they did so before air conditioning.

We visited a couple of friends in Tucson. They live in an adobe-style house on a rise west of the city. You take a dirt road to get to their place. Their yard is a wilderness. If you haven’t been to the saguaro desert, where cacti grow twenty-feet high and the creosote bushes are as tall as you, which means it wouldn’t take but a few missteps to get lost, you don’t know how wildly overgrown these places are. It’s not just sand and rock.

Our friend’s mom was a nature-lover. She had a few dead curiosities in her freezer — animals she’d found, like the gila monster that drowned in her pool. We petted the monster and a frozen rattle snake but not the bat.

Our friends’ house has evaporative cooling instead of air conditioning. It’s old technology, patented in 1906, and consists of a fan blowing air cooled by evaporated water — a system that costs about 1/5th as much as air conditioning.

We shook our head in wonder at how our friends were living in that hot, wild, prickly place. They collect rain water in a cistern and raise chickens for eggs but they’re not anywhere close to being off the grid, though they dream of it. A bobcat got their first brood of hens not long ago. Coyotes and hawks and great horned owls will pick off incautious housecats, they told us. They had dwarf owls nesting in the car port recently.

You’ve probably seen one of those cheapo horror movies from the 1950’s that features a giant tarantula or mantis or ant. The story always takes place in the desert. There’s a reason for that. We were walking to a Tucson taco joint and encountered a monster insect on the sidewalk. It was dead but totally intact and worthy of its own horror show. Jill didn’t flinch when I placed it into her cupped hands. You go, girl!

When we returned to Phoenix, we told Mom about the critters but she didn’t seem impressed. She’s a country girl from an Appalachian mill town. She’s seen plenty of critters in her time. We couldn’t leave Phoenix without going to Pizzeria Bianco. It is, believe it or not, one of the best pizzas you’ll ever eat. Go later rather than earlier to avoid the crowd. And ignore the heat: coal-fired crust is good no matter how hot the pavement is outside. At dinner we talked about living off the grid, which seems appropriate to Arizona’s quirky inclinations. Then Mom revealed that when she was growing up she didn’t have a flush toilet until she was ten. I never knew.

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