Xu Qingzhi smiled, without stopping the work he was doing, and replied to Lin Kai neatly and quickly: "It's okay, I'm not tired, no need to rest. If you are tired, you can go sit under the tree next to you for a while."

When Lin Kai heard this, his exhausted body suddenly didn’t feel tired at all! His sister wasn’t tired, so how could he be tired!

"I'm not tired either!"

Then he started swinging the hoe again with a grunt.

In the past, when people were tired while working, they might shout slogans, or they might follow the rhythm of the hoe and say "Wow!", which would make them feel less tired.

The young people didn't know how to do that, so they started chatting to kill time.

The sweet potatoes were dug out one by one. While sorting them, Xu Yi asked, "Hey, have you ever eaten raw sweet potatoes?"

"Can it be eaten raw?" Zhang Song was surprised.

“Yes.” Lin Kai’s grandmother was also from the countryside, but his parents bought a house in the county town. Eating raw sweet potatoes was a thing of the past when he was a child. “My grandmother used to grow sweet potatoes. After peeling them, they were a little hard when you bite them, but they tasted crispy and sweet.”

"Yes, I ate it when I was a child. It was crispy and sweet," said Xu Zijun.

Xu Yi added: "If you eat raw sweet potatoes, worms will grow in your stomach. I guess you must have eaten pagoda medicine like me."

Lin Kai: “Yes, I have.”

Xu Zijun: "What is Pagoda Medicine?"

Xu Qingzhi remembered it clearly, "It was shaped like a pagoda and tasted like candy. At that time, we both fought over it."

Xu Zijun suddenly recalled some not-so-good memories, with an indescribable look of disgust on his face. "Is it the medicine that makes you poop out worms after taking it? The worms are still alive, and sometimes they get stuck..."

"Yes." Xu Yi nodded and said with a smile: "My mother said that the roundworms in my stomach were contracted from eating raw sweet potatoes, so she told me not to eat raw sweet potatoes anymore."

Xu Zijun: "Yes, my mother also said that, and she never ate raw sweet potatoes again after that."

Xu Qingzhi recalled his childhood when he had very few snacks to eat. He particularly liked to eat the pagoda medicine, just like eating candy, and he was looking forward to some worms growing in his stomach.

Looking back, children’s thoughts are always so simple and funny.

"It seems like kids nowadays don't take this medicine anymore."

“I haven’t seen it very often.”

“…”

Xu Qingzhi suddenly said, "I want to eat roasted sweet potatoes."

When I was a child, my family used honeycomb coal to cook, and we couldn’t roast sweet potatoes at home, so the children would each bring their own sweet potatoes from home and roast them in the gullies in the mountains.

After they are baked, they have to be divided. This small sweet potato is the one you brought, so it's yours. This big one is mine, and that one belongs to someone else.

Just roast and eat whichever sweet potato you bring.

There weren’t many things to eat when I was a child. You know, roasted stinky oranges could become snacks among children, and they were reluctant to throw away the sour stinky oranges and had to eat them one by one.

So roasted sweet potatoes are really one of the few delicacies, a hundred times more delicious than roasted stinky oranges.

As soon as Xu Qingzhi finished speaking, someone immediately echoed him: "I want to eat too."

"So do I."

"How about grilling a few?"

"bake!"

A few people decided to roast sweet potatoes, but they felt a little embarrassed because they were just here to help.

The ending tone of his words was always rising, light and bright, and you could tell that he was really happy to be going to roast sweet potatoes.

Xu Fuqiang said in a low voice: "This kid said he came to help..."

"Why are you saying that to her?" Grandpa yelled, and his son kept silent.

The old man wiped the sweat off his face with the back of his hand and said loudly to the children, "Go ahead, roast some if you like, there are plenty of sweet potatoes grown by Grandpa."

The mountainous terrain of Taoshui Village is mostly hills and gullies. The land where sweet potatoes are planted is flat. If you take the sweet potatoes and walk to the side, you will see natural gullies formed by the terrain over time.

He picked up firewood, hid under a ravine to avoid the mountain wind, dug a hole, and started to make a fire. Fortunately, Zhang Song carried a lighter with him, so the fire was easily started.

When the fire below has burned into charcoal, throw the sweet potatoes in one by one and bury them, then add firewood on top.

The weather is quite hot today, and I feel the heat burning my face when I am near the fire.

But several people gathered around the fire, staring at it, their eyes full of anticipation.

These baked sweet potatoes cannot be cooked in a short time; they take a long time.

After some discussion, they left two people to watch the fire while the others went to dig sweet potatoes.

Time passed by unknowingly, the disc-like sun turned orange, and gradually showed signs of falling into sunset, and the work in the fields was completed.

Grandpa only planted a few rows of sweet potatoes, not much.

After finishing the work, the sweet potatoes were almost baked.

Several people gathered around and picked them out one by one from the charcoal pile with wooden sticks.

At this time, the skin of the sweet potatoes has turned into a charcoal black color.

"This is a little different from what I imagined roasted sweet potatoes to be." Wu Bo said.

Lin Kai picked up the first sweet potato that came out. Although it was still hot, he could hold it in his hand. He blew on it and said, "This kind of roasted sweet potato is the most delicious. It smells so good."

All the sweet potatoes in the fire were dug out one by one. Just by looking at their black appearance, you could tell that they were all cooked.

Not only the children have it, but Grandpa and Xu Fuqiang also have it.

Xu Qingzhi calculated it when he was baking, one for each person, and they were all of a moderate size.

If it’s too big, it won’t be cooked through; if it’s too small, it won’t taste good after being baked.

Everyone took one and squatted down to eat the roasted sweet potatoes.

Xu Qingzhi took his own and broke it open with his hands. The outside had been burnt into charcoal, but the sweet potato inside had ripened into a bright yellow color, exuding the unique aroma of sweet potatoes roasted over wood fire.

This is different from baking it in an oven.

Xu Qingzhi took a bite and it was hot and delicious, exactly the same as the taste he remembered from his childhood. The taste that had transcended time and space was even more delicious.

When I saw other people eating, not only were their hands black, but their mouths were also covered in black food.

Xu Qingzhi just felt that they were exactly the same as the kids whose faces were stained with roasted sweet potatoes when she was a child.

And her mood is the same as when she was a child.

Baked sweet potatoes can really make people happy, and eating baked sweet potatoes makes people happier.

(End of this chapter)