The house I’m living in for the summer is sufficient to my needs, for the most part. It keeps desert dust out of my eyes when I sleep. It provides a bit of privacy from my neighbors and holds up a few strategically positioned water pipes.

Those pipes deliver neither hot nor cold water. The water comes out of the ground here at between 70 and 90 degrees, depending on the weather, and there is no working water heater in the house other than the fires of hell in the immediate vicinity. There was supposed to be a water heater installed on my roof when I got here, but the person who was to do the installation, my neighbor Fred, fell a little behind. He has enough work around here to keep a union crew busy, pruning trees and painting barns and rehabbing the old schoolhouse and such.

He came over about a week after I’d moved in to see if he could get up into the attic, such as it is, to reifnforce the roofbeams so the heater could sit on top of them safely. This was in a week in which the temperature reached 106 degrees by ten am every single day, and kept on going. Fred is in his early seventies. He’s tougher than I am, but I took a look at the space he’d have to work in, thought about having a fellow in his 70s up there doing roof framing with the temperature at 110 outside and probably at least 15 degrees higher in the attic, and I shook my head. I told him the hot water wasn’t enough of a priority for me to make him go up there until it cooled down a bit.

I think that’s scheduled for December. In the meantime, I take tepid-to-cold showers in supremely hard water. I have been losing weight rather dramatically in the heat, but my hair has been gaining it back. I may have a bottle of conditioner built up in there by now.

It’s not surprising the water’s hard: it’s well water in the desert. If I live here for a few years I join a high risk group for kidney stones. Fred says the well up the road taps into an underground lake, 700 feet down. He claims the drill brought up a catfish.

This house is not particularly efficient at keeping desert invertebrates outdoors, as I found out a couple weeks back when I met one of my neighbors on my screen porch. I had the bad manners to step on him in my bare feet. I’d never been stung by a scorpion before. I don’t particularly care to repeat the experience any time soon, but all in all it wasn’t as bad as a typical bee sting. I have since stepped more lightly in the house. This is good, because the scorpion isn’t the only thing roaming my floors: just the pointiest.

There are crickets in abundance, coming un through the missing weatherstripping on the screen door, and they drown themselves in my kitchen sink with some regularity. They hang out in the sink with the roaches, long thin wild-looking cousins of the scurrilous versions found in the city. These desert roaches are inoffensive and rather sleek looking, almost like mantids. The crickets have caused me to change my ways: I had the habit of pouring out my leftover coffee in the sink, and for a couple days running I accidentally doused a black cricket, which stood there after cleaning its antennae and jittering. It occurred to me that after a week I might wake to find the cricket on my bedside table, staring at me with eyes aflame, then running pell mell back to the sink when I got up so it’d be ready for the coffee cart. I dump the coffee more carefully now.

There are some dramatic visitors, like the palo verde root borers that made a sudden appearance two weeks ago, and then just as suddenly went missing again. They are perhaps the nastiest looking insects I have ever seen, four inches long on average and built like construction equipment, olivedrab and black with segmented antennae and ferocious looking mandibles. They look positigvely Devonian, and I was relieved to find out they’re relatively affable neighbors. I felt a scratching on the top of my left foot one night, looked down. A palo verde root borer had climbed up there rather than go around. I feared a sudden movement might compel it to hold on with those mandibles, so I froze. But it just ambled on over Tarsal Pass and down the other side, minding his own business.

I know some people are bothered by bugs, and honestly I’m often one of them, but this is the first time in more than two decades I’ve lived without pets, and so far the invertebrate housemates have, with that one exception, been unintrusive. They’re actually fairly good company, though I suppose if as a newly single person I decide to have what one might delicately call a social life, some random acts of insecticide migfht become necessary.

But I think the spiders have gotten to me.

I like spiders. My last house was kind of a spider refuge. And I have some big, furry spider neighbors and housemates here, reclusive (though not recluses, thankfully) and shy, some of them rather large. The one I saw tonight was perhaps the largest non-tarantula spider I’ve ever seen, stout and round and looking as though it was wearing a berserker fur. It ran almost panicked-seeming across the kitchen floor as I walked in there tonight, cornered itself by the shelves, and I peered at it to get a better look. It was wearing something very much like a fur coat, all right, a bit asymmetrical and odd-hanging, and then I realized that the big spider was wearing a cloak of hundreds of babies. I moved back a bit and the momma spider raced out of the kitchen, around the corner into my bedroom and under my bed.

It’s still there.

I may go camping for a while.