Idyllic Life ⁽²⁷⁾

I seem still to live before the age of ten; my ears often ring with the bursts of cheerful song and laughter I heard as a child laboring in the fields with my parents in our rural village. Epigenetics tells us that early-life experience is…

Happiness is not only physical health; sometimes a poor memory is, in itself, a kind of happiness. — Albert Schweitzer On Saturday I cycled out to my vegetable plot, dug and turned the soil to prepare for spring sowing, and stopped by Zhongwu Park to…

In the evening, riding my bicycle back from the vegetable garden at the foot of Fragrant Hills, I looked up and saw a bright moon hanging high in the sky. In that moment my heart suddenly became incomparably light and at peace. In my mind…

I rent a small vegetable plot of about forty square meters in Sijiqing Town at the foot of Fragrant Hills in Beijing, for four thousand yuan a year. In Beijing, where every inch of land is precious, this rent is not too high and roughly…

After pulling the wisdom teeth and enduring a few days of gritted, sore days, the tooth on the right side that I had set aside for over half a year had basically returned to normal and could chew food. It seems that pulling the wisdom…

Because of the toothache and the hospital extraction, I had not been to the vegetable plot for three days. This evening I went to water the vegetables. In just three days, the vegetables in the garden had run wild. I picked some golden-leaf chard, youmai…

Four years of growing vegetables, four different plots; this year I finally found the one that satisfies me most. This plot is still in a planting garden at the foot of Fragrant Hills, about forty square meters, outside a greenhouse, with excellent light. The rent…

This week I tilled the vegetable plot, raked out several beds, and planted cabbage and lettuce. The chives already in the garden, once watered, began to grow rapidly. Every afternoon around three o'clock I ride my bicycle to the garden, put in half an hour…

Yesterday afternoon, after finishing work, I went to the small rented vegetable plot to fertilize the ground. The garden management gives us chicken manure twice a year, once in spring and once in autumn, each time at the standard of one 100-jin bag per 10…

I had planned for a long time to go to the foot of Yuquan Mountain to watch the sunrise, but never quite made it. Today, a bit after four in the morning, I finally made up my mind. When I got up, my wife was…