The weather really was beautiful this week, and my mom, an avid walker, took advantage and set out around the neighborhood.
"And I saw the cutest little girl with a lemonade stand, Gina," she told me, using her sweet voice, the one she uses to talk to little kids. "She must have been about six or seven, and she had her two front teeth missing. And she was just a-sittin' there, swinging her legs in her little chair."
"So I asked her, 'How much for a glass of lemonade,' and she told me 50 cents. Then I noticed that she only had three glasses out. Glass glasses, not paper cups. So I asked her how many customers she'd had and she said three, but that she'd wiped off the glasses with paper towels she had sitting there. But still all the glasses had been drank out of. I thought, 'Oh no. What am I gonna do?'
I, too, wondered what she was going to do. My mom is quirky in the sense that she won't eat things from other people's houses unless she can vouch for their cleanliness.
During carry-ins at the factory where she worked, she'd always bring a dish but would only pretend to eat what other people brought, not knowing where and under what circumstances the food had been prepared. She's maniacal particularly when it comes to animals in the house. If she knew a coworker had a cat or dog that lived in their house, under no circumstances would she eat the food, regardless of whether or not she was starving or missing the best brownies on Earth.
She even has a hard time eating at my house, because of Cassady and Cassius. (And for good reason, there's freakin' cat hair everywhere!) And she refuses, absolutely will not, touch a dog or cat with her hands. (She pets my cats with her foot.)
Faced with the decision of hurting the feelings of the cutest little girl in Marion selling lemonade and being forced to drink after someone else, I was curious how this would go down.
"Well, of course I wasn't going to hurt her feelings," she said. "So I gave her 50 cents and had her pour the tiniest amount of lemonade into one of the glasses, and about that time her mom came from around the side of the house and said, 'Thank you so much for stopping! She's been sitting out here all day.'"
"Awww, well that's so nice that you stopped," I told her.
"And the lemonade was really good. So I walked home and got your dad and told him we were going up the street to this little girl's lemonade stand. Then I grabbed a couple of paper cups. You know your dad - he won't drink out of a dirty glass. He's funny about stuff like that."
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