Love in the Time of Climate Change by Brian Adams

going through the options. Some may be ones you don’t want to hear. But hey, how about this one? Reason Four: she’s been waiting, waiting, for what is it, three weeks now, for you to make the move. Her slipping you that condom is about as Freudian as it gets. She was flashing you the green light, dude—go, go, go! She would have taken you right then and there in your classroom if you had just had the balls. I could see her right now, bending over the table, hiking up her skirt.…”
    I put my hands tightly over my ears.
    â€œ
La-la-la-la-la-la-la!
You can stop talking now because I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”
    I went to my room, shut the door, and for the fourth time that evening, took the condom she had handed me out of my wallet, closed my eyes, and rubbed it counterclockwise three times.

8
    Factoid: Incandescent lightbulbs use four times the electricity of a compact fluorescent and five times that of an LED for comparable light. Switching over to compact fluorescents or LEDs means that you will release 75–80 percent less CO2 into the atmosphere from lighting.
    W E WERE AT THE FARMER’S MARKET , Jesse and I, doing the right thing, buying local. It was the height of harvest and everything was fresh, good-looking, and yum, yum, yummy. We bought all the veggies and fruit for our week: potatoes, summer squash, lettuce, broccoli, apples, pears, onions, tomatoes, carrots, and loads and loads of purple pod beans. All of that plus a chicken, a free-range, happy-as-a-clam-till-its-head-got-lopped-off chicken, born and bred in our very same town, now dead and frozen and ready for our Sunday night fiesta.
    The farmer’s market was the place to be and be seen. Granted, the ultimate was growing your own, but Jesseand I had had limited success with that one. Try as we might, our backyard plot had turned into a desolate, neglected tangle of weeds and rocks, our beans decimated by Mexican bean beetles, our cucumbers stalks whacked off by leaf-cutter worms, our tomatoes all leaves and no fruit. Even our zucchini, which friends had said that even the green-thumbless could grow, had some sort of fungal infestation that turned them black and stunted and mushy and very, very scary.
    So Saturday mornings we did the farmer’s market. I went out of my way to look conspicuous, making sure my students, whom I often saw there, saw me. Mostly I liked to chat it up with the garlic lady, an old hippie in her seventies with braided gray hair, a wide brim Mexican sombrero, a flouncy skirt and a button-down hot-pink cardigan.
    Back in the day I had assumed that garlic was garlic, that one bulb was the same as any other. Silly me! How could anyone be so wrong! With the help of the garlic lady I had turned into something of a garlic snob, and I could now delightedly talk garlic talk with the best of them, waxing eloquent on the difference between softnecks and hardnecks, Elephant, Porcelain, Rocambole, Silverskin, Creole, Turban and, my hands-down favorite, Purple Stripe.
    â€œYou know he’s got a thing for you,” Jesse said, pointing at me and winking at the garlic lady.
    â€œMost people do,” she grinned. “It’s the garlic. The sweet breath of life. Even the smell is an aphrodisiac. You can’t imagine how many offers I turn down every market. Too bad I’m a one-man woman.”
    She glanced over at her hubby, offloading a crate of Purple Stripes; a poster child for hippiedom, he wore overalls, big clunky boots, a shirt with “Make cheese not war,” and a red bandana tying back his wild gray ponytail. They were clearly two peas in a pod.
    Or was it two cloves in a bulb?
    â€œHalf dozen of the usual?” she asked.
    â€œYou got it,” I replied, slipping a sample sliver of an Elephant into my mouth.
    â€œAnd we’ll see you and your class in a few weeks?”
    â€œLooking forward to it,” I said.
    Shopping done, I was set to head back