Flashes of Panic

I have relatively few guidelines for my life, and those I do are more like biases than guidelines. One of them is that I maintain a strong bias in favor of buying beverages from front-lawn lemonade stands. (If I remember to carry cash while running, this bias begins to take the form of a rule.)

Yesterday afternoon, I bought a cup of iced tea from a pair of energetic young women (neither old enough to drive, I think, but one perhaps approaching her teens) who had thoroughly advertised their wares using sidewalk chalk for a hundred feet in either direction. They were closing up for the afternoon but were more than happy to pour me a cup and put a lid on for my walk in to town, not to mention a mint leaf.

It was sweet, slightly chilly, and very, very good. There was ball-point pen notation around the top of the cup telling me I’d done something good today.

They were donating their earnings to (I think) The Smile Train (warning: images meant to raise sympathy ahead), and though they had a little bar graph to show progress toward their funding goal, they had made woefully small progress. I think probably they were hoping to hit thousands and hadn’t made $100 on the iced tea yet.

But it was good, and I think I myself smiled more about it than the price of the beverage purchase might have warranted.

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