Lemonade and ice coffee day 3

We had a late start today, one of us was battling some kind of stomach flu. We arrived at 2:30 pm and set up. Since it was Saturday it seemed like more people were home, so more cars were parked on the streets, two in front of the lot, one of them directly in front of our past table location. We parked our car behind the two and set up right next to the electric pole. Not in the center of the lot, but still within its limit.

Being there today felt almost like a routine,  setting up the table, the umbrella and the signs, pouring ourselves an iced coffee, starting to read. Around 3pm, a man who was fixing cars further down the road came by and asked what we had and how much it is. He didn’t drink coffee, but he did get a lemonade, a small one for 50 cent. Since he was in the business of repairing cars, we showed him some pieces of metal we had discovered sticking in one of our back tires. He looked at them and said he could pull it out and stick a plug in there to seal it again.

The next person who inquired about the lemonade stand was a kid on a miniature motorcycle. He was interested in free stuff and took off quickly after he heard that a lemonade for kids is 50cents.

Not long after a woman on a bicycle with a trailer behind her stopped. Two of her children were sitting in the little cage. The girl was 4 years old, the boy 11 months, and he could already walk. While we were talking to the woman, our next customer had already arrived and was patiently waiting for his turn. He had parked his car further back at a spot where he could not have seen the lemonade stand yet,  so after he had left we were wondering how he had discovered us.

Not much else happened except a fender bender right in front of us. A woman in a mini van had ripped of a mirror of a car parked on the side. For some reason she wasn’t willing to share her insurance information with the guy whose mirror she had destroyed (and her own, too). The guy was pretty considerate, but at one point, when she started screaming, he lost his patience and called the police. Two police cars showed up not that much later. We packed up at around 5:15pm, to meet D.Jones, one of the long term residents of Larimer.
Mrs. Jones was still working at a big warehouse across the street from the Kingsley Association where she volunteers two days a week. The warehouse is stuffed with donated high quality furniture that is slightly damaged; big sofas, beds, tables, leather couches etc. The furniture is sold for very reasonable prices, one woman told us that she just had furnished her son’s apartment completely for $230, including kitchen, bedroom and living room. She was there to get a black leather bench that was part of the living room set, even though she wasn’t sure what this bench would actually be used for.

After the lights and the refrigerator were turned off for the week and the warehouse closed, Mrs. Jones told us about her life, her children and her 10 year old grandson who lives with her and her husband in Larimer. In a very enthusiastic way, she encouraged us to walk around the neighborhood, knock on doors and talk to people. “This is not a poor neighborhood”, she said. “People might be broke, but they are not poor”. Since she had to cook dinner for her husband, and one of us was still battling the stomach flu, we postponed our original plan, to look at her rain garden, for next week.