Rent a truck?
Will this cost too much?
But the price offered by the purchaser is indeed getting lower year by year, because they are sure that they have no sales.
Cherries are so seasonal that it is too late to find a market when they are ripe. If we wait until then to find buyers, can we not let them decide the price? It's no different than rotting on a branch or being smashed into your hand.
While Xu Mingkang was hesitating, a child came over and shouted: "Uncle Mingkang, sister Yinyin is back!"
"What? Yinyin is back?"
Xu Mingkang hurriedly followed the child to pick up his daughter at the entrance of the village.
The village chief also followed him in confusion, muttering in his mind: How come Mingkang's daughter, who works in a big city, chose this time to come back? There's no way he's here to pick cherries for the family, right?
It is possible for other people's juniors. The fruit ripening season is the busy farming season, and children who work in the city will come back to help when they have time off.
Only the daughter of the Mingkang family is impossible.
In the past years, when did I see her go to the cherry orchard when I went home? Either hide at home or go shopping in the city.
She is a grown-up girl in her early twenties, and she has no sympathy for her parents at all, so Mingkang and his wife still treat her like a child of a certain age.
Xu Yin took out some Anshi specialties given by Chen Jiao and gave them to the children playing at the entrance of the village: "Stop playing here, the sun will set soon, everyone go home!"
"Thank you sister."
The children each held a piece of sweet and soft sweet-scented osmanthus cake, and laughed happily. They followed Xu Yin and skipped home.
"You are still young. Don't come to the entrance of the village to play in the future. Even if you come out to play, you should stay together and not alone, you know?"
Xu Yin instilled safety knowledge into them while walking.
"I know sister, my mother said that bad people will catch us."
"My parents told me that too."
Don’t you all understand this?
Xu Yin asked: "Then why did you come to the entrance of the village?"
"My grandma said my mother is coming back this month, so I'll wait for her."
"I miss my parents too."
Xu Yin felt a little sore in her heart.
These children are all left-behind children.
The family has no money to contract an orchard, and both parents have gone to work outside. Apart from the children, only the elderly are left at home. However, the fruit trees planted in front and behind the house need to be taken care of, and they have to do housework. There is almost no free time at the end of the day. How can I have time to look after the children? ? Basically they are stocking.
"Yin Yin? Is it really you?"
Xu Mingkang hurried up and took the suitcase from her hand:
"Why didn't you call home first? Neither your mother nor I knew you were coming back."
"I also made a temporary decision. Is our cherry orchard going to be harvested soon?"
"No, your mother and I have been in the garden every day these days. Your mother went back early to cook. I came down a few steps behind her. I met your village chief grandpa at the foot of the mountain and chatted for a few words. Otherwise, you wouldn't know You're back."
"Dad, are you feeling uncomfortable somewhere? Why are you so out of breath? Your face doesn't look good either."
Xu Yin actually knew that this was an early symptom of coronary heart disease. Her face was swollen and her eyes were swollen. She would easily suffer from heart palpitations and asthma after walking a few steps quickly, and her face would be pale and she would sweat.
But Xu's father didn't realize it: "I'm in good health. I just ran a little too fast. I'll be fine in a while. Let's go! Go home! Your mother should have prepared dinner. There's not enough food to steam you an egg custard. I'll Go and cut some meat and come back to replenish it for you."
Xu's father looked at his daughter distressedly and said, "You're still talking about me, haven't you lost weight yourself? Are you under a lot of pressure at work? Your mother had a dream some time ago that you were crying. It seems that the work in big cities is not that good. Like this, the salary is low and the pressure is high, so I think it’s better to come back.”
Xu Yin nodded and said, "Well, I don't plan to leave when I come back this time."
"ah?"
The surprised sound was not made by Xu's father, but by the village chief who walked closer.
I once heard that the daughter of the Mingkang family stayed in Anshi to work after graduation and refused to come back. She said that it was not easy to get into a big city. If she returned to her hometown, wouldn't all her studies in these years be in vain?
Many people were very unhappy after hearing this. They also have children who have gone to big cities to study at universities. After studying, why don't they come back and take the local civil service exams? Is it possible that only staying in a big city can you be successful? Isn’t it just that you haven’t read in vain for more than ten years?
To put it bluntly, she dislikes the poverty of her hometown, has seen the feasting and entertainment of big cities, and does not want to return to the ancestral land where she was born and raised.
Unexpectedly, when I came back this time, I actually said I couldn't leave and wanted to stay in the village.
Father Xu was surprised when his daughter said this, but he was also very happy.
"It's good to go home! It's good to go home! It's so hard to work outside. You still have some fat when you go back after the New Year. You haven't lost weight in a few months. Go home and let your mother give you a good supplement."
The village chief twitched the corner of his mouth, thinking that it was not because of hard work and pressure, but he was clearly starving himself to lose weight. Oh, that's not called starving, it's called losing weight. I don’t know what girls these days think. They don’t have much meat on their bodies and they still think about losing weight all day long.
"Your dad is right, you are doing well as you are now, don't lose weight any more." The village chief said with a smile, "It's good to come back, your cherries will be ripe soon, help your parents to save them too much tired."
Every time the original person came back, the village chief would recite a few words to her when he met her, but the original person couldn't listen to her, and in turn, she thought the village chief was too lenient.
This time, Xu Yin responded with a smile: "I will do it, don't worry."
We separated from the village chief at the fork in the village road. The village chief's house was at the village road intersection, and Xu Yin's house had to walk further in.
We walked until we were almost at the foot of the back hill before we arrived at her house.
The courtyard of the Xu family is still an old tile-roofed house built in the 1970s and 1980s, with three main rooms, a kitchen, and a woodshed. There is an abandoned pigsty next to the woodshed.
It was built in the early 1980s when the government encouraged pig raising. Later, too many people raised pigs, and the country opened large-scale pig slaughterhouses. Domestic pigs could not be sold at high prices, so no one gradually raised them.
Until recent years, as the price of ecological pork soared, some households in the village started to raise pigs. However, the Xu family had too few laborers and was unable to raise pigs if they wanted to, so the pig pens remained abandoned.
The roof of the pigsty was gone long ago, and the tiles were removed to repair the roof of the main house.
The pigsty without a roof became a small vegetable garden, and Xu's mother planted some commonly eaten vegetables, onions, ginger and garlic.
Although the Xu family only has three main houses, the homestead is actually quite large, and the surrounding open space belongs to them.
He just didn't have money to build another house, so Grandpa Xu asked someone to buy some fruit saplings, including peaches, apricots, and pears, and planted them in front of and behind the house.
However, these fruit trees are all seedlings, and the fruits they produce are either small and thin, or sour and astringent.
Some people reminded Xu's father that he could find someone to graft, but there was no one in this town who could graft.
Xu's father went to the next town to inquire about it, and learned that grafting a branch costs 1.5 yuan, and if it takes more than three working hours, a meal will be included.
There are a total of eighteen fruit trees planted on his homestead, including six peach, six apricot, and six pear trees. If they were all grafted, it would cost a lot of money.
Xu's father was reluctant to let go. In addition, the couple had been busy working in the cherry orchard every day in the past few years. They had no time to take care of the fruit trees around the house, so they simply ignored them and regarded them as space for the homestead. When they saved enough money, they would be cut down. Build a big house.
(End of chapter)
