Chapter 1 Return Home
(This article is about a slow-paced farming life. The time background of the entire article is fictitious. Please do not over-analyze it. Good words bring good relationships, while bad words hurt people's hearts.)
3033.March 30
Seeing that they were almost at their destination, Zhao Yeqing stopped the minibus driver, got off the bus with his suitcase, and stood at the foot of Meishan Mountain.
After the minibus closed its door and drove away, Zhao Yeqing put the box flat on the ground and took out a thick coat and put it on.
I couldn't help but take a deep breath. This was the long-lost fresh air after the industrialization of cities everywhere.
The temperature this month is around 17 or 18 degrees Celsius. Meishan, which has a subtropical monsoon climate, is nearly 1500 meters above sea level, so the temperature is nearly 10 degrees lower than at the foot of the mountain.
Looking up, the clouds were still flowing among the mountains, and my nostrils were filled with the smell of moist soil mixed with grass and trees.
Zhao Yeqing's grandparents were both forest rangers in Meishan. Meishan was her grandfather's home when he was a child. Later, it was planned as a protected area, so after retiring from the army, her grandfather became a forest ranger and lived in this mountain almost all his life. Since they passed away a few years ago, she has rarely come back. She walked up the mountain carrying a suitcase, and every step was filled with melancholy.
The road up the mountain is a ring road around the mountain. Although it is called a road, it is not paved with cement and asphalt. It is just a dirt road about 7 meters wide. Cars with high chassis can drive up, mountain bikes, motorcycles, tractors and small tricycles can also go up. If a car goes up the mountain, the chassis will basically be scraped every two steps. There is a signal tower at the end of the road. Usually, if it does not need maintenance, almost no one will come here.
The Meishan Mountains are nearly 400 kilometers long. The place where my grandparents guard is the southern end of the mountains. The observation towers of the forest rangers are far apart, and it is three kilometers away from the nearest village.
After walking for more than an hour to the halfway point of the mountain, Zhao Yeqing already felt that she could hardly straighten her back. She had worked in an office for four years after graduation. Even if she went to the gym on weekdays, she could not bear carrying a box uphill for an hour.
I found a big rock on the side of the road to rest my feet for a while, then left the road and walked into the woods. The end of the winding mountain road was not in the same direction as my grandfather's house, so I had to walk through the woods and take a small path to get there.
This path, which was originally used as a forest firebreak, is about three meters wide. It has become even more deserted because forest rangers are no longer posted here after planning. The road is already overgrown with ankle-high weeds, and only the original boundaries of the road can be vaguely seen.
Zhao Yeqing walked forward, beating the grass with branches. She had been prepared and wore waterproof clothes and short boots to avoid dew and leeches. About ten minutes later, she finally saw her grandfather's small house built halfway up the mountain.
She grew up here with her grandparents and rarely came back until she lived in the school dormitory during high school. Later, her grandmother passed away and then her grandfather. She locked the house after seeing the old people off. Only now, when she arrived at the door, did she feel the belated homesickness.
According to regulations, the forest ranger's house cannot exceed 60 square meters. As my grandparents got older, they could no longer climb up to the observation tower to see the forest. It happened that the area behind this place was no longer a protected area due to planning reasons. So my grandfather rebuilt the original one-story house into a two-story building so that he could stand higher and see more of the forest.
After I went to college, I talked about my hometown with my best friend. After she said that my family members were forest rangers, it was once thought to be a cabin in the forest. In fact, it is not. The house is made of bricks. For fire prevention purposes, wood cannot be used to build houses. The vegetation around the homestead also needs to be cleared and there should be a distance from the surrounding woods to prevent the fire from spreading to the surrounding areas after the house catches fire, and to prevent the wildfire from spreading to the forest rangers. So two houses were built with bricks in the middle of the open space, both of which are two-story buildings.
One room is her home, and the other is that of Grandpa's old comrade-in-arms, Grandpa Mu. The two joined the army together, retired together, and then became forest rangers together. They spent their whole lives like this. When Grandma and Grandma Mu were still alive, they often joked that Grandpa and Grandpa Mu could live on their own.
Zhao Yeqing dug out a plastic bag from the corner of the wall, took out the key from it and opened the old plum blossom lock. He pushed the door open with the box in his hand and walked in. He carefully checked the house for snakes, insects, rats and ants. Fortunately, the doors and windows were closed when he left home. After a round of inspection, he found nothing unusual. He then went to the tool room to get a sickle to check around the house.
The outside of the house is white walls, which are now a little yellow, but they match the light brown tiles on the roof. The first floor of the house is the grandparents' room, kitchen and living room. Half of the second floor is Zhao Yeqing's room and bathroom, and the other half is a terrace. The toilet and tool room are independent. The two families have a good relationship and don't care so much about it, so they share it.
There is also a cellar between the two houses. Because it is located in the south, the soil in the south is not as soft and humid as that in the north. This cellar can also be said to be a basement. It is dug very deep to avoid groundwater. The four walls are sealed with stone bricks, and the feet are filled with red bricks and sand. It is moisture-proof, water-seepage-proof and breathable.
The bathroom on the second floor of the house was installed later because the grandmother felt that the little girl was old and it would be more convenient for her to have a separate bathing area in the room.
This time she came back with the intention of staying for a year or two. After working for a few years, she found that she had gained nothing except hundreds of thousands of savings and cervical spondylosis, and she was also inexplicably framed for pornographic rumors.
Only people with a kind heart will see others as dirty. Zhao Yeqing walked up to the rumormonger with a smile, pulled up a chair and hit him in the face. Then he sent the evidence of the unclear relationship between the man and his client to the company group and resolutely resigned.
It was because of this incident that she finally understood what she wanted.
Zhao Yeqing stood in the yard, looking forward to his future rural life.
Since he had decided to live here permanently, he had to take good care of it. The grass around the house had to be cleaned to prevent snakes from crawling here when the weather got hot. The sickle, which had not been used for several years, was a little rusty. Zhao Yeqing tried to cut the weeds at the door and found it still usable, so he started cleaning from the door outwards.
He roughly cleared the grass that was more than two meters wide around the house, shoveled away the moss growing in the corners, and cleaned up the cobwebs outside. The cleaning work came to a temporary end. Zhao Yeqing looked at his mobile phone and it was already two o'clock in the afternoon. It was more than ten o'clock when he went up the mountain. It took more than an hour to walk, and it would take almost two hours to clean up.
She hadn't eaten much in the morning, so she felt really hungry after finishing her work. She couldn't light the fire before the house was cleaned up, so she took out the scallion pancakes she bought outside the town station. Two palm-sized scallion pancakes only cost one dollar and fifty cents. This happy price made Zhao Yeqing order three pancakes without saying a word. The pancakes were not fried, but pan-fried with a little more oil in the pan. The crust was crispy on the outside but very soft on the inside and not greasy at all, with a slight chewiness and a strong aroma of scallions. She ate with satisfaction while looking at the cleaned house.
There is still a lot of space around the house, and Zhao Yeqing is planning to build a wall. If he lives here alone in the future, it would be safer to have a wall. There is also a piece of glass in the window of the house that was broken by a stone thrown by someone.
At that time, someone was trying to steal trees in the forest and was caught by Grandpa. Because there was no actual damage, he was not punished. However, this person later held a grudge and threw stones at the glass at night. Grandpa Mu, who happened to be using the toilet outside, caught him on the spot and detained him in the police station for five days. Grandpa found a piece of cardboard to cover the small piece of broken glass, and used it for five or six years.
The two houses were not side by side. Her house was facing the foot of the mountain, while Grandpa Mu's house was facing her sideways. Originally, the two families planned to build another house on the other side, so that they would look like a two-story courtyard house. However, after Grandma passed away, Grandpa never mentioned this plan again.
Zhao Yeqing estimated the area and planned to enclose the two houses together. She also wanted to replace the windows on the first floor with anti-theft windows and doors.
He found the brick factory in the town on the map app, called the number on it, reported the area, length and width, and got the reply that it would roughly require 4,500 bricks. Zhao Yeqing chose hollow bricks, which cost about 0.30 cents each, plus cement at 450 per ton and river sand at 180 per cubic meter. The owner of the brick factory also enthusiastically introduced the workers, saying that the labor cost was not expensive, only 500 yuan a day for four workers, and that the material cost of putty and the labor cost of painting the walls were also included, and the work could be completed in a week.
She thought it was a good deal and agreed readily. She compared the wages while riding in the car and found that the basic wage in the town was 460 a day. But after all, people had to help her transport the materials up the mountain. The small road at the back was not accessible by car, so she could only move them manually or tow them with a motorcycle.
He contacted the door and window factory again, but because there were so many styles, Zhao Yeqing finally decided to go to the factory to choose by himself.
She entered the house and turned on all the faucets for a while, and wiped all the dusty places in the house carefully. The original quilt in the closet had been there for so many years and it was definitely not suitable for sleeping. Zhao Yeqing put on her small backpack, took the necessities, locked the door again, and went down the mountain with a sickle. She planned to sleep in a hotel in the town for one night, and go to order the doors and windows tomorrow, and buy some bedding and daily necessities.
(I will write about the life details in this book in more detail, so it takes some patience to read it.
My original intention was to hope that everyone could calm down and feel the details of life in this impetuous era where you have to watch short videos at double or triple speed.
If you think it is not well written, you can correct it but please don't say bad things. Preferences are very subjective. Readers are selecting works that they like, and works are also selecting readers that suit them.
The author and readers are like-minded people, doing happy things, and hope that everyone can enjoy reading and find works that suit them.
grateful. )
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