Neither rain nor heat keeps girls from selling lemonade

By Barbara J. Woerner

Correspondent

Lynnhaven

Briana Lynch and Rachel Harrell sat under a small red screened tent inside the Emerald Point apartment complex off Laskin Road in Virginia Beach.

A light rain made pattering noises on the tent but customers still visited Briana and Rachel's Ice Cold Lemonade Stand.

"We get our ice from Food Lion and almost everything else from Sam's Club," said Briana, 8, as she filled a tall Styrofoam cup with ice. "Our lemonade is hand-squeezed and we add the water and sugar."

Rachel, 9, her business partner and best friend, filled the cup with the cool yellow liquid.

"We each have our own way of squeezing the lemons," she said. "I do it like this."

"And we always take out the seeds," Briana said.

Briana estimates they have squeezed more than 100 lemons by now. The stand opened almost three weeks ago and is open from about noon to 6 or 7 p.m. every day.

"We started talking about it before school was out," said Briana Lynch. "We wanted to set up a lemonade stand."

It was Briana's mother, Sherise Lynch, who got the ball rolling by giving her daughter a gift of $75 to cover startup costsd.

"I wanted to teach her about the real world," Sherise Lynch said. "I felt she would learn something about the value of a dollar and how a business gets off the ground through this experience."

Originally from Harlem, Sherise Lynch said she'd never seen a lemonade stand anywhere in the city.

"I was just hoping they'd do it a couple days," she said. "One morning, Lydia Hallmark,, Rachel's mother, called me and said 'look outside, their doing it.'"

And they have continued to do it, setting up shop day after day.

"We've learned what to do when it gets really busy," Briana said.

The stand serves churchgoers on Sundays, swim club staff, apartment maintenance staff and neighbors. So far, the profit has totaled more than $100.

The two girls plan to sink some of it into helping others. They will make a donation to Judeo-Christian Outreach Center, a nonprofit group that feeds and provides services to the area homeless population.

Neighbor Dottie Holcombe and her son, Hilton, 9, rode up on their bicycles to make a purchase.

"We've been wanting to stop and finally have time today," Dottie Holcombe said.

"It's good," Hilton said as he took a swallow.

Jerry Halsey also stopped for a quick purchase.

"I think it's great their doing this," he said. "It keeps them busy and as young entrepreneurs they could go somewhere with this."

Barbara J. Woerner, Bjwz2cool@cox.net