A Lemonade Stand

That such innocence gets soured and fructified only a vulgar originalist would trace to this or something like it.

I’ve prepared my remarks on the subject. My patronage is more personal than I let on.

Near the end of summer I pay a dollar for a solo cup of lemonade and tip the kid an extra dollar.

It’s civics and economics as I understand them, bruises left on sidewalk squares by the canting mulberry tree whose overhead shadow they’ve absorbed.

It’s on the way to the creek and does no harm to drink just a few sips before throwing the sugary stuff in the garbage can at Heather Lane Park.

Yellow jackets swarm a small hole in the ground. I’m not saying they’re remarkable, but I am remarking on them.

My cousin and I would run a lemonade stand out of a Fisher Price playhouse in front of my aunt’s and uncle’s mansion.

My cousin had what’s called “a psychotic break” a decade later. His thoughts are the occasional subject of industrial espionage and international monitoring.

At points his fear of what was to befall him had him fleeing to Zürich on my uncle’s credit card. The Swiss are safe, he reasoned, when that penultimate moment before arrest and detention comes, neutral.

Lemonade is for anyone, calming on a late summer day.

Early drug cocktails left him lethargic and dull; things seem better when we talk now. He has more energy, but not too much.

It could’ve been “The Last Lemonade Stand” but it was too definitive and loud.

The boy brays “lemonade” as I re-approach the corner. “He was already here,” the girl says.

Written in my chicken scratch, it looks like “allemande stand” and dances on the page like a mid-afternoon shadow, like a mulberry tree’s shadow on a sidewalk square.  

Let’s be honest, a lemonade stand could be construed as an illegal, unlicensed business whose earnings go unreported. But it’s innocent childhood fun rife with lessons about micro-finance, overhead, and reinvestment.

I was there on several late-summer days before our ruin waving to sedans on a sleepy dirt road in that opulent suburb just north of Detroit.