Lemonade, Get Your Lemonade!

I was leaving the house this morning for a late morning meeting and three little neighborhood girls had a lemonade stand set up across the street from my driveway. As I pulled out I had to stop and ask if they'd still be out in about 45 minutes. "Yes ma'am!" they replied. Wow, kids with manners, how refreshing!

I got to thinking about how lemonade stands were once a summertime staple. Now-a-days they seem as rare as... . Or is it just the difference of city life vs. rural life?

I grew up in Los Angeles and you can't get much more citified than me. Neither my friends, nor I ever ran a lemonade stand. After high school I moved to New Orleans for college, another big city. I spent almost 16 years living in NOLA and don't recall seeing children run a lemonade stand there either. The last 5 of those 16 years were spent living in a double shotgun house that had been converted to a single. We lived in a old neighborhood called Bywater near the French Quarter downtown. Bywater is located in the 9th Ward (locals still refer to parts of town by their voting wards) or the Upper 9th Ward if you wanted to distinguish it from the Lower 9th Ward (an area obliterated by Katrina). When children play outside in NOLA, it's usually a football game in the street or something similar, but never far from Momma's watchful eye on the front stoop. It's just not safe otherwise.

Two years ago we moved to Lafayette, Louisiana. Lafayette can be described as a big town or a really, really small city. I personally think of it as a town, too small to qualify as a city- no skyscrapers. Here, we live in a subdivision with neat brick homes and nicely manicured lawns. Most of the neighbors have their 2.5 kids and I'm pretty sure they wonder what's wrong with me as I walk around with 2 dogs and no children. It's different here in a lot of ways. One that I've observed is that the neighborhood kids play outside a lot. They ride their bikes and play ball in the field between my house and my next door neighbor. And they set up lemonade stands. All without the watchful eye of Momma. *Gasp!* I think to myself.

To my husband this is all very normal. He grew up in similar neighborhoods in Florida. For me on the other hand, the watchful Momma's of New Orleans were my normal. I had several moments of panic when I saw small children running around unattended. My husband assured me this was all quite normal and that the children were fine. I had another shock when those same children came running up to us one day when we were walking our dogs. We're strangers! What happened to "stranger danger"? Don't these parents teach their children not to talk to strangers?! Even if those strangers do live in their neighborhood? Again my husband seemed to find this pretty normal.

I always thought this was a way of life that died out sometime in the middle of my childhood. I had no idea that it still existed in some areas. I guess I always figured it probably still existed somewhere in Small Town USA. You know, that place somewhere in the middle of the country with a total population smaller than my neighborhood? Yeah, it might still exist there, but nowhere I'd be living.

After I got over my initial shock, I found it kind of comforting to know that I lived in an area where three little girls could set up a lemonade stand without Mom hovering close by. So now I wave at the kids as they pass me on their bikes and even talk to them without worrying what their parents will think. So when I got back home from my meeting, I went out to buy that glass of lemonade. And talk to the little girls with manners. Both were quite refreshing.