We bought the lemonade stand at a garage sale last summer, 10 bucks. On a heat-wave-hot Saturday afternoon in August, we followed hand-lettered signs on hot-pink paper advertising a huge moving sale. We saw the lemonade stand at anchor in a sea of green salal, moored under a tall evergreen tree.

At the plywood-on-sawhorse merchandise tables our oldest son was enthralled by an elaborately carved didgeridoo. He blew into it, peered into one end, shook it and finally handed it to me, surmising that it was probably broken. I blew into it surreptitiously and produced a vulgar foghorn noise. I looked through the didgeridoo like a telescope, wondering how one makes a crude hollow stick sound ethereal and otherworldly, not mundane and flatulent.

My wife Maria waded into the knee-high salal toward the lemonade stand. The woman sitting at the cash drawer shouted after her, offering a fantastic deal on it if we’d take it today.

Still examining the didgeridoo for missing batteries or some sort of Ethereal/Other-worldly button, I saw Maria and our daughters admiring the derelict lemonade stand. I absently passed the didgeridoo to our youngest boy and cupped my hands like a megaphone, warning that we’d probably have a lot of trouble getting that home. And we’d probably end up burning it up on the burn pile, I prophesied.

Handmade, hand painted and possibly bilingual, the stand advertised lemonade and limonida in brushed black script, with charming cartoonish yellow and green fruit outlined in black enamel on a pressboard banner, supported by a pair of weathered-pine one-by-fours. I imagined that it had been lovingly crafted by a father eager to encourage his offspring in summertime entrepreneurial enterprise.

The tabletop was inch-thick chipboard edged with black-painted pine molding, skirted with sheets of pressboard, painted a cheery buttercream. “Ice Cold!” was splayed across the front.

Maria waved me over as our youngest boy huffed tentatively into the large end of the crude wooden pipe. His older brother yanked it from his hands and put the smaller end to pursed lips, producing a damp, un-ethereal raspberry.

Up close, I saw that the buttercream paint on the lemonade stand was chipped and faded chalky-white. The tabletop was warped. Dots of dried mud spattered the sides.

Our daughters were already lining out shifts to work the lemonade stand. Maria said they were asking $20 for it, and she thought she’d offer $10. Alternatively, I proposed zero and a quick return to the minivan. Possibly with the didgeridoo.

The tabletop came off in our hands as our boys and I heaved it toward the car. I pounded the tabletop back on with the heel of my hand and we hoisted it onto the luggage rack, lashing it fast with cambuckle straps.

Our youngest girl and her best friend from Virginia had formed a lemonade-sales partnership, but at the last moment their plans fell through. So our youngest girl glumly tended the stand alone at the foot of the driveway. She didn’t sell much lemonade. She and her brothers drank most of it before she abandoned her post and set up an ultra-chintzy Walmart slip-and-slide on the front lawn with her older sister.

A week later, my wife Maria and our youngest girl sold 16 bucks worth of roadside lemonade to packs of parched bicyclists in black, form-fitting shorts and wrap-around sunglasses. Our youngest girl explained that she probably would have made much less, but the first few bicyclists were, surprisingly, great tippers.

Earlier in the summer, an enterprising neighbor set up a bike-and-boat rental stand in his front yard, with a big hand-lettered price list near a clutch of white resin chairs. With our lemonade stand semi-permanently parked two driveways away, our neighborhood must have seemed like some sort of home-business free-trade zone.

Mid-September, our youngest girl and I hauled the lemonade stand back up the driveway on a crate wagon. With nowhere else to put it, I stood it next to a gigantic redwood stump that has always reminded me of that other-worldly plateau in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

How does the lemonade stand story end? In the rain. It’s January. And the last time I saw the didgeridoo, our oldest boy was using it to blow Ping-Pong balls at his little brother. The lemonade stand still slouches in the rain, idle in the Doldrums of January.

— Kevin Pottinger lives on Vashon with his wife and three children.