"Want some lemonade? There were two kids selling it on that side street just before I turn on Granny White. They seemed so excited and grateful that someone actually stopped..."

I sipped it.

"How much was it? Fifty cents?"

"A quarter. I bought two cups, and gave them a dollar and told them to keep the change."

I sipped the lemonade, and remembered...

It was always in the doldrums of summer. I was very young, somewhere between five and seven. My older brother was between seven and nine, and it was always his idea. I was just his stooge. We were always going to make a killing...use the money to buy a bike, or ice cream, or comic books, or records...

(My brother had gotten MEET THE BEATLES which had started him on his album-collecting frenzy.)

We were bored, it was hot, lemonade was easy to make, although sometimes we would instead make Kool-Aid. Our air conditioning inside was those old wall units, not central air conditioning. I can remember sitting in front of the wall unit, loving every cool breeze it breathed.

Dave would fix up a little lemonade stand, sometimes with Pop's help if it was the weekend. We'd voluntarily go out there in the ninety-plus degree heat. The grass was getting dry and turned shades of brown and gold among the green.

We'd have a large pitcher, filled with ice. We'd wait.

And we'd wait.

And we'd wait.

Our house was just off Hemingway Drive, and a more suburban bit of Americana would be hard to imagine. A kindly grey-haired retired couple was next door. I had a treehouse to climb to in the backyard. On the side, an impromptu badminton court was strung.

Kids would bicycle by, whining for some lemonade sans pay. We held out, looking at the cars passing by, and pleased when some adult took pity on us and bought a glass or two of lemonade.

Probably two-thirds of the lemonade was not consumed by customers. It was consumed by two little boys under a summer sun, raising the temperature to the high nineties. The lemonade was too tempting, and we'd pour ourselves a glass or two, the ice cubes shrinking under the sun's relentless stare.

Bees would buzz by, and especially the annoying sweatbees, attracted by our natural reaction to the hot summer sun. Little girls would walk by and giggle, and boys would urge us to join outdoor games that really weren't that tempting, when it felt like we were living in the melting point of lead.

The lemonade was made with real sugar, this being before the day when artificial sweeteners were big, and imperfectly blended. Most glasses would have a small residue of sugar at the bottom of the glass, where drifted the sugar grains that were not assimilated in the lemonade.

It made it all the better. The bitter-sweet tang of lemonade would start off, but when you got to the bottom, there would be slow-moving streams of near-sugar that you could hold upside down in front of your mouth and let the liquid sugar become a final treat.

Ah, the days we sweated and waited for the customers to drop money in our laps. Usually we'd be lucky, at five to twenty-five cents a cup, to get more than a dollar or two.

Dreams of money beyond belief, killed by the narrowly resisting adults. Pre-adolescent entreprenuers, with dreams wilting in the summer sun, getting pitcher after pitcher of lemonade with ice....after consuming most of the previous pitcher.

The smell of freshly-cut grass drifting in from other yards...the tart taste of the lemonade still on your lips---the feel of sweat beads on your forehead...the cry of other kids playing or fighting...and the look down the street, looking for the next car, hoping to catch their eye, hoping to have them stop and buy all the lemonade we can make, getting enough to buy a bike or something equally glamorous...

Those were the lemonade-flavored summers of my youth. Now I'm grown, and even my youngest son is too old for such pursuits.

Yet still I remember---the heat, the taste, the hope...of summer.