At that time, there was no crime of speculation and profiteering. Although the unified purchase and sale system and the joint state-private ownership system had been implemented, small private restaurants could still stay in business as long as you could get grain coupons to buy grain and meat coupons to buy meat.
In fact, Zhao Lingli and her family stopped working in the county town because they were too lazy to take the risks, but that doesn't mean they ran out of food.
Previously, all the money they earned each month was used to buy food. Now, why are people living in the old house, and why do the elderly couple avoid coming back whenever possible?
The reason is that the old house's cellar, rooms, and any place that could be used for storage were all filled with grain, including the courtyard houses in the town.
The old man used the pretext of brewing wine to smuggle a lot of grain into the house.
Even the price of houses has increased to four thousand yuan in order to have a place to store grain.
To put it bluntly, they don't want to sell for the time being. They want to weather the famine years first, since there are still a few years before the turbulent times!
Besides grains, we grew vegetables, pickled vegetables, dried vegetables, all kinds of dried vegetables, eggplants, potatoes, radishes, green beans, we dried everything that could be dried.
We collected everything, whether it was wild from the mountains or grew in the fields.
This is when the importance of food becomes apparent.
The grain stored by the Tao family was also allocated to the three sisters. Although they had moved to a new house, the place was not big, and they could only grow more vegetables. They couldn't store the grain at all, so they were not allowed to store it. However, Tang Cuihua couldn't do nothing. She went to town to earn money to support her family. Weren't her two younger sisters still in the village?
Before dawn, they would carry bamboo baskets and search for wild vegetables everywhere. If they could find any river delicacies, they would bring them home to dry or pickle.
The three sisters from the Tao and Tang families worked together to stockpile food and vegetables.
After hearing that Tang Youtian had agreed to let the three sisters move their household registration to the Wei family, the old lady of the Tang family went to Zhang Yanhong and made a scene.
Zhang Yanhong completely ignored her, didn't even open the door for her, and continued to live her own life behind closed doors.
Unable to get any benefit, the old lady went to make trouble for the three Tang sisters. However, the eldest sister was never home, and the second and third sisters were also not home. She waited for them to come to her several times, but not only did she fail to catch them, she even tried to climb over the gate to enter their house, but she was blocked by the tall wooden gate. She was also strongly condemned by the neighbors on both sides.
The old lady was unwilling to give up, so she simply brought her daughters-in-law over to make a scene that night. Tang Cuiju and Tang Cuilian were also shrewd; after dinner, they went straight to bed, closed the front door, the bedroom door, and the windows, and no matter how much they made a fuss, they just wouldn't open the door for them.
They would leave before dawn, always earlier than the old lady. After several days of this, the old lady finally couldn't stand it anymore and stopped bothering them. But that didn't mean they gave up. The two sisters would dig for wild vegetables and chop firewood, determined to get home.
The old man had just gotten smarter; he knew to give the child a benefit, let the child watch over her, and then inform her. This time, he really managed to stop her.
However, after years of being trained by Cuihua, Tang Cuiju and Tang Cuilian were determined to ruin their own reputations and never marry, rather than let the old lady gain even the slightest benefit.
So what if she blocks the door?
Tang Cuiju, relying on her strength, grabbed the old man and pushed him to the ground.
"This is my home, not yours. Why can't we go home? Who do you think you are? Do you think we're still like we were when we were kids, letting you bully us without fighting back? Go ahead and curse, let your filthy mouth do whatever you want. We've been numb to it all since we were little. Don't block our way anymore, or we'll not only push you, we'll beat you up. We've separated our family, are you afraid of your curse that we'll never get married? If we can't get married, so be it. We have hands and feet, we can support ourselves. What's a reputation? What can it put on the table?"
“That’s right, you heartless old woman! You abused us every day when we were little, never giving us a full meal. You treated the chickens in the house better than us sisters. Just because my mother didn’t give birth to a son, you’ve been looking down on us. You’re always ordering us around to do this and that, but you never give us a single thing to eat. We’ve been away for so many years, what kind of people haven’t we seen? But none of them are as bad as you. If you hadn’t been constantly threatening to strangle and drown my sisters, would my mother have been able to send them all away? You vicious old woman, you’ll get your retribution.”
Before the aunts and uncles could speak, Tang Cuiju and Tang Cuilian immediately turned their anger towards them.
"And you all, you look respectable, but your hearts are more venomous than anyone else's. Don't think we're stupid enough not to see how my grandmother has treated us all these years. Every single time, it was you who stirred things up. You look down on my mother, and you look down on my father even more. As a result, my sisters and I have suffered because of your whole family. Even your youngest child dares to step on our heads and call us a good-for-nothing!"
"Aren't you women yourselves? Aren't you yourselves a waste of money? Why do you have to look down on yourselves? Are women born with a lowly fate? No, it's because you think we sisters and our mother were born lowly and worthless, while you are noble. Haha, that's laughable. Don't you even look at yourselves? Aren't you just country bumpkins? What's there to be so smug about?"
"Get out of here right now! We've already severed ties with your Tang family. Don't bother us anymore. From now on, we'll keep to ourselves. Every grain of rice we've eaten since we were little has been our right, and it has nothing to do with you. Stop yelling about eating your food and drinking your water. Bah! Your clothes were washed by us sisters, and the vegetables you eat were grown by us sisters. What have you done? Who are you trying to boss around like that? You think you're something special? Don't you even know if you're worthy?"
After the two sisters finished their barrage of words like machine guns, they slammed the gate shut with a bang and bolted it in.
After the people outside the door reacted, they stood outside with their hands on their hips and started cursing. The two sisters climbed the wall using a ladder and poured water directly from the inside out, drenching them thoroughly.
"Are you getting out of here or not? If you don't, we'll go to the outhouse and scoop up your latrine water, making you stink for a week without food!"
Tang Cuiju looked down at him, her face obscured by the darkness, but her words were utterly devoid of warmth.
Even though the Tang family was powerful, faced with the threat of excrement, no one dared to take another step forward and ran away indignantly.
After descending the ladder, Tang Cuilian's chest heaved with anger.
"Second sister, why can't they stand to see others do well? Why are they so mean? Luckily, they've developed some courage over the years, otherwise..."
Who knows how badly they've been bullied!
Tang Cuiju patted her shoulder: "This is nothing. You'll have plenty of trouble later. No matter what, just do as your older sister says. The tough are afraid of the stubborn, and the stubborn are afraid of the reckless. When dealing with these scoundrels, you have to be tough. Only if you are more shameless and scoundrel than them can they do nothing to you. If you are thin-skinned and afraid of this and that, then you deserve to be manipulated without any chance of fighting back."
The ending in the eldest sister's dream was one that none of them wanted to experience again.
By the way, once winter comes and there's nothing left outside, they should go out and find other sisters.
Xiao Jiu was completely unaware that while she was living a blissful life, her sisters were suffering terribly.
After half of August, my second, third, and fourth brothers all started school and came home for lunch, where Zhao Lingli took care of them.
Xiao Jiu stayed in Xihe Village with her grandparents.
Since he had no business to do, Zhou Yue went to work as a carpenter's apprentice and also helped out at his master's house.
These days, nobody wants to take on an apprentice unless there's some benefit to it.
Even so, Grandpa Zhou specially asked someone he knew for help, and it cost him a lot of money to buy the gift.
There was nothing we could do. The eldest son had already joined the army, and the second son was still young. We wanted him to study, but he felt that he had the energy to learn more and could learn something else.
So, in his spare time, he became an apprentice carpenter. With plenty of free time, he didn't think about anything else.
As for the work in the fields, the old couple could still do it themselves and didn't expect Zhou Yue to be of much help. It would be good enough if he could learn his studies and carpentry well.
As September arrived, the weather gradually turned cooler, only getting warm for a short while at midday. Xiao Jiu started going with his grandfather to collect firewood.
Since there are not many wild vegetables left on the mountain, everyone has started to busy themselves with the work in the fields.
Eggplants, tomatoes, and cucumbers have stopped growing; we pulled them out a long time ago and planted radishes and cabbages instead. Chili peppers, however, are still growing, so we haven't pulled them out yet.
Grandma usually stays at home tending to the vegetables around the house, whether drying them or pickling them, each vegetable has its own ultimate fate.
This year, two seasons of potatoes were planted at the old house, and Grandma plans to dry them all into potato chips for preservation.
Dried potatoes are especially delicious and flavorful when stewed in winter.
The town also planted potatoes for two seasons, and these potatoes were stored in the cellar to be eaten fresh.
In addition, sweet potatoes were planted in the vegetable garden and the wasteland. My father said that the cracks in the ground were quite large, so they should be growing well. I just don't know if they have been damaged by maggots or field mice.
Although her family never ate fancy food, they at least had enough to eat three times a day. They ate things like tofu, vermicelli, and lard every few days. And the food they gave her was always refined grains. When she occasionally ate coarse grains, her grandparents would feel sorry for her, worried that her stomach couldn't handle it and she would get indigestion.
Since she couldn't directly use the good stuff from her space to make up for it, she could only go to the grain storage room, and when she saw which bag of grain was almost empty of beans, she would add a little bit. She didn't dare to add too much, and she had to stir it thoroughly so that no one could tell.
Now the mother and daughter sheep have also come to live with them in the old house, and the burden of raising sheep has fallen on her shoulders. Every time she goes out with her grandfather to collect firewood, she will lead the mother and daughter sheep, and from time to time she will sneak some vegetable peels and leaves from her space to feed them.
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