Snow Falling in Spring by Moying Li

Author:Moying Li
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312608675
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

High-pitched crows from Lee’s roosters woke me in the morning, followed by the voices of our neighbors’ roosters. It was like being surrounded by a rooster orchestra. The old alarm clock on the desk pointed its hour hand at five. Rise and shine, I thought. I got out of bed and walked into the yard.

Lee was up already. Looking around, I saw smoke coming out of many stoves. “This is the beginning of our daily routine,” she said. Barley porridge and corn bread with pickles for breakfast was another daily routine. Unlike in Beijing, there was no rice here.

“Let me help you carry water back from the well,” I volunteered after breakfast.

“Are you sure you can handle it? There’s a lot of uphill walking.”

“I’ve done it before, when we were helping farmers during harvest,” I assured her.

The local well was two miles down the hill. All the villagers, about a hundred of them, went there every morning to carry water home in two big pails each, well balanced on their shoulders. The way down to the well was easy, even though the pails were much bigger than the ones I had carried before. Throwing the wooden pail into the deep well took practice. A rope was tied to a timber beam across the well, and the pail was loosely hooked onto the other end and slowly lowered. Giving it the right swing would tilt it just enough to catch water. Too much angle or too hard a swing might knock the pail over and sink it. I had lost such a pail myself trying to help the farmers during one of the harvests. So this time I handed the pail to my more experienced cousin.

After Lee filled both containers, I balanced them over the long bamboo pole, trying to remember how I had done this before. The wooden pails felt much heavier than I recalled, and my balancing was not as good as I remembered, either. My cousin knew me too well to intervene and walked close by just in case. The first few yards were not bad, but then I started to feel the full weight of the water. I gritted my teeth and steadied my pace. A village girl a few years younger than I passed by us with the same load on her shoulders. She looked like she was simply out for a walk. I bit my lip this time and doubled my efforts. I did not last as long as I had hoped before my cousin forced me to stop and let her take over.

“You’ve done very well already. Save some strength for tomorrow,” she said.

After a simple dinner of corn bread and stir-fried cabbage, Lee and I relaxed on the wooden bench in her yard. “I’ve heard about what happened in Beijing,” she finally said. “It must be awful for you.”

As we sat in this quiet village yard and watched the distant hills slowly disappear in the darkness, all the terrible things that had happened during the past four years passed through my mind, like a movie in slow motion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.