Chapter 22
Sang Luo knew nothing about the Chen family.
She brought her two kids to pick enough leaves from the fairy tree, and returned home to take out a small portion, about four pieces, and washed them, preparing to make fairy tofu.
Chen Ning had done it a few times and was already good at it. Seeing that her sister-in-law hadn't rested much in the past two days and didn't sleep much last night, she rushed forward and said, "Sister-in-law, I'll do it, you take a break."
It's not difficult to do this, Shen Ning can really do it, Sang Luo thought about it and agreed: "Okay."
The task at hand was handed over to Shen Ning, and she did not rest either. She took a bowl to the mountain spring and scooped a bowl of water, then turned around to water the hemp hanging on the bamboo rack outside the house.
After being out for half a morning, the hemp was a little too dry. Sang Luo took it in her hand and looked at it carefully. She estimated that the color would be a little red after bleaching. The hemp made in this way is not white enough, so it is not suitable for selling, but it is fine for home use.
Now that she had a way to make money, Sang Luo didn't care so much. Not to mention weaving, the family should have some threads and ropes and the like. She was also patient, taking water several times, carefully pouring water on each strand of hemp, and then drying it for a day, and then she should be able to spin the hemp.
Chen An had already found another old cloth bag to put the grain in. Seeing that his sister and sister-in-law were busy, he ran to Sang Luo and asked, "Sister-in-law, what should I do?"
Normally at this time he would take his sister around to look for edible wild vegetables and fruits, but today and tomorrow he obviously wouldn't need any wild vegetables, so he didn't know what to do for a moment.
"Or should I go and cut some more hemp?"
"Not for now." Sang Luo looked at the weeds growing all over the ground outside the house and said, "Carry a backpack and go to the stream to find something and put down a basket."
When he heard that they were going to put down the fish basket, Shen An's eyes lit up, and he went into the house and came out again, holding an empty backpack in his hand.
After informing Shen Ning that she was at home, Sang Luo took Shen An out.
Setting up the fishing nest was just a side job. She mainly went to the mountain stream to find stones that could be used to make a small hoe. Iron tools were too expensive, and she couldn't afford to buy them in a short period of time. She couldn't always borrow everything from the Chen family, especially farm tools. Farmers would never use them.
So before she had enough money to buy farm tools, she had to make a temporary substitute.
As soon as they heard that it was used to make a stone hoe, Chen An knew what kind of stone to look for. The uncle and his wife bent over and searched for a long time by the stream, and found several stones that could be used with a little polishing. They didn't even need to move, and started polishing them right by the stream.
They were busy until the sun was almost at its zenith. When Chen Ning came over, the stones for two stone hoes and a stone axe had been polished out, and the newly polished stone axe had been used to make several pieces of wood suitable for making hoe handles.
"Let's go, go back and process the wood, then secure it with hemp rope and it will be ready for use."
Shen Ning looked surprised, and in her heart, her sister-in-law's ability level rose to a higher level!
When they got home, the sunflower porridge had been cooked. After the three of them had lunch, Sang Luo sharpened the wood for the hoe handle, took a handful of hemp hanging outside the house, and rolled out a few hemp ropes. Two simple stone hoes were born in her hands.
Due to the limitations of materials and craftsmanship, this hoe is called a hoe, but in fact it is more like a shovel. Sang Luo tried it in the weeds outside the house. It was more difficult to use than a hoe, but it was no problem for weeding and turning the soil.
Shen An and Shen Ning both tried their hands. The two little siblings got a new farm tool, and excitedly carried it to the hillside behind the house where they used to grow vegetables. Sang Luo brought it back and said, "We hardly slept last night. Go take a nap now. You can play as you like in the afternoon!"
A nap nourishes the heart and helps digest the food. The two children are also obedient. After collecting the new farm tools, they follow me to the small spring to wash them, and then they all go back to the house to sleep.
Probably because she didn't sleep the night before and was very tired in the morning. When she woke up and looked at the sky, it was already mid-afternoon. Seeing that the two children were still sleeping soundly, Sang Luo did not wake them up, but just got out of bed quietly.
The magical tofu in the ceramic basin had already taken shape. She took a bamboo knife and cut it into four pieces. She kept two pieces at home as a snack for her two children to cool down, and put the other two pieces in the ceramic basin borrowed from the Chen family and covered it with a clean lotus leaf.
He put the millet he bought in the morning together with the cloth bag into the backpack, placed the pottery basin on top of the cloth bag, and carried it to Chen's house.
When Sang Luo arrived, Mrs. Chen was sitting under the eaves of the main hall with her granddaughter spinning hemp.
Sang Luo smiled and called out "Grandma", and then "little girl".
The little girl still remembered the divine tofu and fish that Sang Luo gave to their family. Her eyes lit up when she saw Sang Luo, and her voice was especially sweet when she called her "Sister Shen".
Mrs. Shen...
Sang Luo was not really used to this title, but she still responded with a smile.
When I saw Qin Fangniang's figure from the window of Chen's kitchen, I realized that this was the time when most families were preparing dinner, which was the second meal of the day.
She still has modern thinking, and the habit of three meals a day is ingrained in her bones and blood. On the first day, she told her two children that they should eat small and frequent meals to keep healthy, but in fact, that was Sang Luo's original living habit.
Mrs. Chen put down the work at hand, stood up and took a few steps to greet him: "Why are you here at this time?"
Sang Luo smiled and put down the basket on her back: "I came to return your hemp-picking implement, and I also want to borrow your mortar and pestle for a while."
"Okay, the things are under the eaves. I'll get you the wooden pestle." When Mrs. Chen heard her son say that Sang Luo had bought millet, she had guessed that she would come to borrow the mortar to pound rice, but she didn't expect her to come so quickly.
She took the hemp-removing device and put it aside. She glanced at the backpack that Sang Luo had just put down and saw an earthenware basin inside. She didn't know what was in it. It was covered with a lotus leaf. Under the basin was a cloth bag filled with grain. Mrs. Chen was a little surprised: "Have you eaten the rice I brought up the mountain for you the day before yesterday?"
Two liters.
Well, two liters of rice would not last a few days for an ordinary family, but given the situation of Sang Luo and her two children, Mrs. Chen felt that they would not be so extravagant as to eat white rice.
Sang Luo laughed and said, "How can that be possible? This is another cloth bag."
As he spoke, he took out the pottery basin from his backpack, uncovered the lotus leaves, and handed it to Mrs. Chen with a smile, saying, "I made this freshly when I got home. I'll add a dish to your family. Uncle Youtian helped me carry the burden all the way today."
Mrs. Chen saw the green tofu in the ceramic basin at a glance.
She now knew that this thing was sold at two cents a piece by Sangluo, which was more expensive than eggs. She shook her head and refused, saying, "It's just a side job. There's no need to bring these things."
Sang Luo put the pottery basin into Mrs. Chen's hands, and when she took it firmly, she let go and said with a smile: "That's a great help to me. Otherwise, I would have been in a lot of trouble this morning. Besides, I would like to borrow your pottery basin for a few days."
Mrs. Chen held the heavy pottery basin in her hands with mixed feelings. She looked in the direction of the courtyard gate and took it without saying anything else. She told Sang Luo to use the basin as long as she needed it and only told her to come directly if she needed to borrow anything in the future and she didn't have to bring things with her every time.
Then he asked Sang Luo to sit for a while and went into the kitchen with the pottery basin.
Sang Luo responded with a smile, picked up the cloth bag filled with grain from her backpack and went straight to the mortar and pestle under the eaves of Chen's house.
At that time, almost every farming family had a mortar and pestle, because millet is relatively easy to preserve and not prone to infestation by insects, while rice is prone to infestation by rice weeds. Therefore, people would not pound too much rice at one time. Those who had enough manpower would pound rice for a few days at a time. Those who did not have enough manpower had the women in the family pound rice almost every day for cooking.
Mrs. Chen brought the tofu into the kitchen, and soon brought out the empty pottery basin. She also held a wooden pestle as tall as a person and handed it to Sang Luo: "Use it. Do you know how to pound rice?"
Sang Luo nodded.
In fact, she had never pounded rice herself. In modern times, rice is sold directly everywhere. It is not easy to find a place selling millet. Even if you live in the mountains and buy grain from farmers in the mountains, you will buy rice that has been husked by machines. You have never done work like pounding rice.
As for the original body, Li had transferred the job of pounding rice to her since she came to the Shen family. The two bags of grain after the separation were also millet, which was all thanks to the original body using the Shen family's stone mortar to pound the rice. Naturally, it was not just two bags of rice at that time, as 30% of it was chaff.
When there was no food, we would roll up some bran balls, wrap them with wild vegetables, and force ourselves to swallow them down, and it would be a meal.
When the two children went to the Shen family to borrow grain, even the bran had been eaten up at home.
Sang Luo was frightened when she recalled the feeling in her original memory of pounding two bags of rice and her arms were so tired that she couldn't even lift them. She was glad that she only pounded more than two liters of millet.
She took out the cloth bag from her backpack, poured the grain inside into the stone mortar, picked up the wooden pestle and started to work. It was easy at first, but later on, only she knew how sore her arms felt.
No wonder pounding rice was used as a punishment in the Qin Dynasty. Pounding rice non-stop all day is no different from being tortured.
Mrs. Chen put the washed pottery basin back into her backpack and watched from the side, shaking her head slightly. She was already beginning to wonder about Sang's background, as she didn't look like a farm girl at all.
However, Mrs. Chen always had a strong sense of boundaries, so she just kept it to herself. Since Sang Luo didn't say anything about these things, she wouldn't ask any more questions. She would go back to weave hemp and chat with Sang Luo from time to time.
When the time was almost up, Mrs. Chen went over and asked Sang Luo to stop. She grabbed a handful of the rice bran mixture, moved it on her hand and looked at it carefully, then turned back to the house and got out a dustpan, a small reed broom and a bamboo drying mat.
The drying mat was spread out in the corner of the yard farthest from the kitchen, and the broom was placed on it. Only then did Sang Luo stop and hand over the dustpan, then looked at Sang Luo hesitantly: "Do you know how to clean the weeds?"
It's not that she underestimates Sangluo, but winnowing rice is different from winnowing spring rice. It doesn't just require strength. It really requires some skills. If you don't have enough skills, the rice on the winnowing basket will fall to the ground.
Sang Luo touched the memory of her original body and nodded: "Yes."
Only then did Mrs. Chen hand over the winnowing basket and go back to continue spinning hemp, glancing at Sang Luo from time to time.
Seeing that she was unfamiliar at first, but gradually got the hang of it, I felt relieved.
This was the first time that Sang Luo followed her original body's memory and instinct to do something that her original body would do. She was so nervous that her palms were sweating.
The rice that was cleaned the first time was not completely pounded clean, and there was still a lot of millet mixed in. She poured the rice on the winnowing basket back into the mortar and started a new round of pounding the rice. She repeated this twice. After winnowing the rice, the winnowing basket was filled with distinct rice grains and millet, but only a very small amount was left.
Sang Luo picked out the millets, there were only a dozen or so grains in total, and it was not worth pounding them again, so she threw them directly into the stone mortar. The Chen family could pound them at the same time when they pounded rice in a few days, and they would not be wasted.
She poured the rice into the grain bag she brought with her, and borrowed a cloth from Mrs. Chen to wipe the water stains in the clay basin. She swept the bran on the drying mat with a special small broom, then picked up the drying mat and poured the bran into the clay basin she brought with her.
The work of pounding rice is only finished at this moment.
Sang Luo swept the drying mat clean and rolled it up. Before she could ask where to put these things, Mrs. Chen came over and took over. Seeing that Sang Luo's hands were covered with dust, she put the drying mat away and went into the kitchen to scoop up a bucket of water and asked her to wash her hands.
Sang Luo shook her head: "No hurry, grandma, where is your rice? You gave me two liters of rice before, today I will return you one liter."
As soon as these words were spoken, not only Mrs. Chen, but even Qin Fangniang, who was cooking in the kitchen, raised her eyebrows and could not help but turn her head to look at Sang Luo in the yard.
Both the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law heard from Chen Youtian that Sang Luo bought a ceramic basin today, and the remaining money was only enough to buy two and a half liters of millet, which, if pounded into rice, would be a little more than one and a half liters. So now she has to return one liter to their family?
Mrs. Chen looked at the deflated grain bag in Sang Luo's backpack and shook her head, saying, "After returning one liter, what do you have left? Keep it for yourselves first. It's good enough that you have this intention. There's no need to rush."
Sang Luo, however, was someone who could not afford to owe a debt. She smiled and said, "We have enough food at home. I won't hide it from you. I will have to think of a way to sell some more Shenxian tofu tomorrow, so you really don't have to worry about my family running out of food again."
Mrs. Chen was surprised: "Isn't there no market tomorrow?"
Sang Luo said, "Well, I plan to make a small amount and carry it in a basket to Sanli Village to sell. That should work."
Only then did Mrs. Chen nod, and finally understood why Sang Luo wanted to continue borrowing the clay basin from her. She went back to the house, took out the measuring cup, and measured a liter of rice from the cloth bag.
After Sang Luo left, Mrs. Chen said to Qin Fangniang, "This Sang is quite likable."
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