Farmers are at a slack in January, with little work to do and it's cold outside.
Amian was pushing the two bowls back and forth, while Xiaojing rested her head on her hand, looking bored: "I'm not going to guess, it's not fun."
"If you guess which bowl it's in, this penny is yours!"
Xiao Jing remained unmoved: "You're cheating; you didn't put it in either bowl."
Seeing that she had been found out, Ah Mian sighed and lifted the two empty bowls.
"If only we had that 'hand chicken' to play with, we could take pictures of ourselves." As A-Mian stepped outside, Meng Chijian was busily building a wall. She ran over to take a look and thought it was no different from an ordinary house, except that the walls seemed thicker and the space was smaller.
"This is thick clay, which can keep the bathroom warm and prevent it from getting too cold. Then we moved the donkey shed next to it. We can boil water here on weekdays and use animal power to turn this wheel so that the buckets can be lifted to a high place and drip down through this bamboo pipe with many small holes." Meng Chijian led her around, explaining, "This is a drainage ditch. After washing, we can pull out this wooden plug and the wastewater can flow directly into the vegetable garden."
This was a little trick he added because he thought hot water might scald the food.
He also tried it out and found that it was more water- and fuel-efficient than taking a bath normally. Normally, a bucket of water is just enough to wipe your body, but standing and waiting for a bucket of water to drip is enough to finish taking a bath.
If someone has a lot of hair like Ah Mian, they only need to call out, and someone outside will bring another bucket of diluted warm water, and they can continue washing in the same way.
After thinking for a moment, A-Mian offered her idea: "If there were a switch so that when the bucket above is dripping water, we could stand below and turn it on or off whenever we wanted, that would be much more convenient. We don't need to rub soap on ourselves or anything in between."
Meng Chijian stroked his chin and shook his head after a long time: "I'm afraid it's impossible. Firstly, there's nothing to control the water connection when someone is taking a bath down here. Secondly, the wooden tub doesn't keep the water warm for very long. If there's not much water left, even if it stops, the dripping water will get cold."
"However, a small space has been partitioned off here, where you can put a chair and a brazier to dry your hair."
Ah Mian's family never buys hair wax or hair oil. One reason is that it's expensive; another reason is that while hair with hair oil looks clean on the surface, it's actually quite dirty inside because people don't wash their hair for ten days or half a month. Not only that, but after removing the hair oil, the hair becomes stiff and takes a long time to comb.
In winter, A-Mian washes her hair about once every four days (usually after noon when it's warmer), but she secretly cut off the ends of her hair, which were about the length of a fist.
They tied it with a red rope and quietly buried it under the tree.
And the most important reason is that they don't like the feeling of their hair sticking stiffly on their heads.
"When will it be finished?" A-Mian was very satisfied.
"It will take about ten more days."
That year was almost over, and the shop was about to reopen.
After visiting the bathroom, she went to the woodshed to see her page.
Wang Zixuan has been very quiet these days, eating only two meals a day, one thin porridge in the morning and one thin porridge in the evening, just enough to make sure he doesn't starve.
These people, you know, if you don't beat him or scold him, how should I put it... it's like raising their donkeys. Except when he needs to go to the toilet or something, he can call out and have one of the thugs come and take him there. The rest of the time, his feet are still tied to a pillar with one end of a water-soaked hemp rope.
He was so bored that most of the time he would go to the window and watch the family live.
"After school starts, you'll be my page. Either you follow me around yourself, or I'll tie you up with a rope and have you follow me." Ah Mian leaned her arm on the windowsill. "After I've been in charge of things at the academy for a month, you can go wherever you want, okay?"
Wang Zixuan nodded, "Okay, I'll go with you."
"If you dare to hurt anyone, we'll still tie you up."
"……I know."
Seeing that he seemed to have improved a lot from his madness and was no longer laughing or crying, Ah Mian told him what the pageboy was supposed to do, and then went over and cut the thick hemp rope connecting his feet to the pillar with a wood-chopping knife.
During this process, Ah Mian was very cautious. If he went crazy after untying her, she could fight back with a wood-chopping knife.
However, nothing happened, and Wang Zixuan remained seated.
He suddenly spoke up: "Actually, you didn't want to see me freeze to death outside during the New Year, so you said you wanted me to be your page, right?"
A-Mian didn't answer, got up and left.
The next stop was to see Adou. Amian brushed its fur for a while, fed it some hay, and walked around it to see if there was anything unusual.
Now there's really nothing to do.
Despite the freezing weather outside, A-Mian still ran out of the house to play.
When Meng Chijian came to call her home for dinner, he saw A-Mian strolling around the village. After looking at the spring couplets and window decorations of several houses, she stopped in front of one house.
Upon closer inspection, the couplets on that house were indeed exquisite, depicting a lifelike God of Wealth holding his belly, with a large gold ingot beside him.
Ah Mian stared intently at the gold ingot. Ten taels of silver could buy a plump gold ingot to take home.
She currently has nearly seven taels of silver, but she can almost imagine the feeling of holding a heavy gold ingot in her palm one day. The bottom of the gold ingot will be engraved with the character "绵" (mian), and she will place it next to her pillow when she sleeps...
She had never owned gold before.
"Time to go home for dinner."
Ah Mian looked at it a few more times with lingering reluctance before running home.
That evening, A-Mian told Meng Chijian to sit down and said she had something important to tell him.
"Um?"
"Meng Chijian, let's have a child to play with."
“…Lu Amian, you can’t come up with this idea just because you’ve been bored these past few days.”
"Why not? I understand everything."
Ah Mian already knew that to have a child, one had to go through the "one night of passion" described in the book, but she and Meng Chijian didn't seem to have done so, so they never had a child.
It wasn't because either of them had a health problem.
There are two rumors circulating in the village now. One is that A-Mian is a "hen that doesn't lay eggs," which makes anyone angry, since A-Mian doesn't think she is a hen. The other is that Meng Chijian is a "useless mule," but not many people say the latter. The farmers still believe that whether or not a woman can have children is her responsibility.
"What are you thinking about all day, you little kid? What do you take me for, some tool to kill time?" Meng Chijian held the person on his lap with one hand, his tone quite dangerous. "What do you know? Tell me."
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