The Playground Behind the Church

The notebook

Josie came home from school two summers before with a flyer about a playground matching grant, which turned out to be for towns over five thousand. Elm Prairie has 1,140 people. I read her the fine print at supper and told her I was sorry.

She was quiet for a minute, forking up her green beans. Then she said, “How much does a playground cost?”

I laughed, because she was eight. I told her around eight thousand dollars, if you wanted a good wooden one with a slide and a climbing wall and swings that did not rust.

“Then I’ll make eight thousand dollars,” she said.

I told her that was a lot of lemonade. She said she knew.

Josie set up her stand the first Saturday of June on the corner by the grain elevator, where the trucks stop for the scale. She had a card table, a pitcher, a hand-lettered sign, and a metal cash box for the money.

Lemonade was fifty cents. The first day she made four dollars and sixty cents, and she wrote it down in a spiral notebook with Hello Kitty on the cover.

She wrote down every sale after that. Every single one, with the name of the person if she knew it, and the amount. She did that for two summers.

Farmers stopped their trucks. Men in seed caps drank her lemonade standing up and said keep the change. A trucker from Nebraska gave her a twenty and asked what the money was for. When she told him, he sat in his cab a minute and came back with another twenty.

She worked the Fourth of July parade from a wagon behind a lawn tractor, and the county fair for three days with a sunburned nose. By the end of the second summer she had raised three thousand four hundred and twelve dollars.

But the lemonade was not the only money. The spring between those two summers, the fire department found out.

Chief Larry Moeller stopped by the house with his truck keys still in his fist. The volunteers held a pancake supper every spring for new turnout gear, he said, and the boys had voted to give Josie’s playground the whole take this year.

Two hundred sixty-five plates at eight dollars apiece. That is $2,120. The firemen flipped pancakes in the bay with the engines pulled out, and Josie stood at the door with a cigar box, and she thanked every single person who walked in.

Then the Lions Club gave her a check for fifteen hundred dollars. Then there were the jars: a pickle jar at Casey’s, a lard pail at the feed store, a mason jar by the register at the cafe on Main Street. They added up to nine hundred sixty-eight.

I sat at the kitchen counter the night she totaled it. She had a calculator and I had a cup of coffee, and neither of us said anything while she ran the numbers twice. It came to exactly $8,000.

“That’s the whole thing,” she said.

“That’s the whole thing, baby.”

She had two hundred twelve names in that notebook. Two hundred twelve people, and she had thanked every one.