Cute versus brave: Strawberry-basil and raspberry-mint lemonade

Last summer, my kids waded into American capitalism with their first lemonade stand. There’s one weekend a year when we get heavy foot traffic in front of our house as people walk to a big event down the block. The kids mixed several gallons of Country Time, popped up the card table, and prayed for sun.

The marketing strategy was simple: stick the six-year-old twin girls out front as sales reps and charge 30 cents a glass, a look-cute price that enticed most customers to drop a dollar on the table and refuse their change.

The sun shone, the crowds flocked, and my kids made 30 bucks in less than two hours. They could have made more, but we ran out of lemonade. This was heady stuff for their first entrepreneurial venture. They’ve been debating plans for this year’s beverage gambit ever since.

My daughters are happy to go with the proven strategy of hawking cheap product with cute girls. My son – lacking pigtails and a swishy skirt, and, perhaps, possessing a tad more integrity -- has other ideas.

He wants to go up market. Fresh squeezed lemonade. Fruit options. Herbs, too. Raspberry-mint lemonade. Strawberry-basil, if you like.

Costs more to produce, I said. You’re going to have to charge more.

You won’t know until you test it, he says.

He is brave, this one. Brave in a natural, don’t-give-it-a-second-thought way that makes me stop and stare, and think.

I want to be brave. I’m trying very hard to be brave actually. And I manage, some days. Maybe one out of three. For a few hours, when I don’t look too long in the mirror, or at the basket full of bills, or at the dust sitting on the dust balls in the corners of my living room. When I can gather the steam in my head, compress the thoughts and feelings that churn inside me, force the mush into some kind of shape, some kind of pattern and rhythm and meaning, squish and knead and pull and punch, until finally, eventually, if I am brave enough for a few hours, words appear. Words that go somewhere. That can carry you, or me, or anyone really. That’s what I’m after. Words that strong, that real, that full of sweet and bitter and tart and sunshine, and surprise. Flavors that don't come in a powder. And they’re hard to come by -- these words. It’s so much easier to sell swill, to be cute. To get anything more you have to risk something, a lot of something. Be willing to shrug, to say, hey, I don’t know if this will work, but I’m gonna try. I’m gonna go up market, make something unique, maybe even something you’ve never had before.

My son has moxie, and I’m inspired by it. I’m also hoping he will need to practice a lot, because sampling batches of blackberry lemon-limeade with a dash of seltzer thrown in – another idea, he has a lot of them – sounds like a great way to spend my summer.

Ok, I said. I’m game.