It was the story that seduced her a month ago. Mark would probably go to his grave concluding that it was the peaches, no matter what she said. He’d always remember the erotic plumpness of the just-picked orbs, the squirt of nectar that bathed his tongue. But she was aroused by his lecture about early human history. Mark painted a word-picture for her, of tribes in Mesopotamia and parts north of there, three millennia before Christ, and Julie’s nipples stiffened like the air was cold. Her salivation then had nothing to do with food.

“Imagine two very differing approaches to life in the area,” he said as they ate peaches outside after lunch. They sat next to each other on a redwood bench with their backs against the attached table, beneath 3 o’clock shade. “Between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers agriculture flourished, and a matriarchal society developed, because agriculture is of course about cycles and renewal, fertility is worshiped, the productivity of the female is esteemed.

“Just to the north, grain for people didn’t grow so well. There were lots of tall grasses, but that was fodder for horses and oxen and other large animals. A society based on herding large animals favored men, with their greater upper body strength, and instead of fertility and renewal, that culture valued power and cunning.”

Julie started to comment about white hats and black ones, but Mark wouldn’t let her interrupt.

“It wasn’t quite that obvious,” he warned, but then he added, “not that you’d know it from the way I’m telling it,” and he chuckled a little.

“There was a downside to the matriarchal culture: it wasn’t friendly to strangers. A new guy in town would have to start at the bottom of a very long ladder; it took a lot of toil and a bit of luck to be fully adopted into the tribe. In the herding culture, on the other hand, a stranger could make good by winning a fight or negotiating a smart bargain. And the herders got around more anyway, which was a big advantage: interacting and getting new ideas. But it was the ease with which the culture of big bad herders absorbed strangers that made its dominion inevitable.”

And then he brought it home for her. In the soft shade of an old peach tree, Mark observed that the big boys got around more, and welcomed strangers better, and Julie stiffened with excitement as she realized that the successful men in the herder culture had to be those with the narrowest focus; it was the slash-and-burn guy who would have survived to produce the most kids. She flushed with the pleasure of discovery at the same time that she burned with the dismay of realization – suddenly she saw her own culture, westward-leaning America, at the point of a 6,000 year-old arrow, aimed at pyrotechnic self-destruction.

Mark may have misread Julie’s flush and burn. He leaned in and took a very slow kiss.

Julie may have misread Mark’s action. His kiss was so unexpected that she didn’t pull back. It was so sweet she returned it. And so it went. A month ago.

In the meantime, the dog got worse. Liz’s fury and indignation wilted into neediness. Keith and Jess bickered incessantly. Julie received an obnoxious letter from Sharon’s attorney and a demanding note from Beth.

In the intervening month, it seemed like Julie had a headache 26 days out of 30. Including today. And she had so much on her mind this morning that she forgot to watch her step, and when she stumbled and dropped her coffee mug, it shattered at her feet and soaked one leg of her khaki pants with a hot brown stain. She didn’t have other clean good pants, so she tossed them in the machine but forgot about the red hoodie. She cut her hand with a shard of the coffee mug while hurriedly cleaning the mess, and finally pulled her clean pants out of the dryer to discover permanent blotches of pink on them. At which point she noticed her headache was gone. And there seemed no other recourse but laughter. What the hell. She had dinner out tonight, at her old friend Mark’s house, and her body was telling her well.