Free Web NovelChapter 438: Chapter 230: Talk of a Bountiful Year Amidst the Fragrant Rice Blossoms (Part 2)
Qingmu carried his hoe on his shoulder as he walked, carefully explaining these things to his younger sister. It was rare for her to be so interested in rice cultivation, so of course, he wanted to explain it to her in detail.
They made a full circuit, blocking some of the irrigation ditches and clearing others to adjust the water levels in the paddies. Only after they had everything just right did they head home.
As the siblings were strolling around, they looked up and saw Zhang Huai busy on a distant ridge between the fields, and they couldn’t help but smile. From the way he was bent over, it looked like he was also adjusting the water for his rice seedlings.
It was hard to say when it started—sometime in the last two years, perhaps—but the younger generation had begun to think about farming and animal husbandry more seriously than their elders. They made full use of their nimble minds, not disdaining the experience of their parents’ generation, but simply being more willing to think critically.
If one were to trace it back to its roots, this phenomenon had started with the Zheng Family. To borrow a phrase from a textbook, the bit of commercial awareness Juhua had instilled in her family was slowly breaking down the traditional mindset of subsistence farming in the village.
Zhang Huai had been busy for a while. When he suddenly turned his head, he finally noticed Qingmu and Juhua in the distance. He shouldered his hoe and started walking toward them.
Before he even got close, he saw Juhua from afar, dressed in a light green floral-print dress. Standing with Qingmu amidst a field of verdant green seedlings, she looked indescribably harmonious.
He walked over at a leisurely pace. His gentle gaze swept over Juhua and paused for a moment, as if to ask, ’What are you doing out here in the fields?’ Then, he looked at the Zheng Family’s rice paddies and said to Qingmu, "Looks like the harvest will be good this year. Look how evenly the rice ears are sprouting."
Qingmu nodded happily. "As long as we get this season’s crop into the granary, I’ll be able to rest easy. We can just treat the second season as a trial run. It won’t matter if it doesn’t go well; we can always try again next year."
Juhua watched Zhang Huai walk toward them from across the rolling green fields. As he drew near and his warm gaze fell upon her, a faint joy bloomed in her heart. She felt like the rice stalks swaying in the wind, light, free, and stretching out at will!
Hearing Qingmu’s words, she smiled to herself. ’My brother just hasn’t broadened his thinking yet. As long as he has the idea in his mind, how could he possibly fail to grow it well? Isn’t late-season rice grown the same way? Even if there are some differences, with Dad’s decades of farming experience, he’ll surely be able to handle it.’
Seeing Juhua’s subtle smile, Zhang Huai also smiled but said nothing. ’Juhua is becoming more and more impressive,’ he thought. ’A young woman who’s actually interested in growing rice. But from the look of it, she’s not just playing around. She’ll definitely be able to offer some good ideas.’
Juhua saw the two men pointing at the rice and discussing the paddy’s water, soil, and the fullness of the grains, so she squatted down to take a closer look at the stalks in the seedling patch.
The rice, just beginning to sprout its ears and flower, was still a deep, dark green. A light breeze sent fine ripples across its surface. A shallow layer of water covered the paddy, and beneath it grew a layer of fine, velvety waterweeds, like a carpet—it was too late to remove them with a rake now. Two small green frogs sat beneath the seedlings, their eyes bulging as if searching for insects. They looked up through the rice stalks—a veritable primeval forest to them—at the dappled sunlight filtering down from above.
Tiny, inch-long fish swam about in the shallow water, lively and cheerful. There were also river snails caked in mud—the mud clinging to the moss that grew on their shells. There were even smaller water insects, and occasionally, one could spot tiny loaches and small shrimp.
Juhua sighed in satisfaction. ’What a delightful ecosystem!’
The scene stirred a memory from deep within her.
In her past life, when she was a child, around May or June, she would pick many greenish-white gardenia buds and stick them in the rice paddies at dusk.
The next morning, she would see the gardenias in full bloom, looking fresh, tender, and vibrant, exuding a simple, elegant fragrance as if they had just been picked from the branch. If she had kept them at home in a vase, they would have bloomed too, but they always seemed to lack a certain spiritual quality. The elders said it was because they missed the morning dew.
Back then, she loved to squat by the paddies with her friends, sticking gardenia buds one by one into the shallow water. The subtle fragrance of the green seedlings was refreshing to the soul. Yet if you tried to smell it deliberately, it seemed to vanish, leaving only the faint scent of the unopened gardenias, not nearly as fragrant as they would be in full bloom. Because of this, the line of poetry that resonated most deeply with her as an adult was, "In the fragrance of rice flowers, we speak of a bountiful year."
The soil there was also soft, with fine waterweeds, lively little fish, and mud-caked river snails. And frogs, of course—they were everywhere.
But at some point, she didn’t know when, those delicate waterweeds disappeared from the paddies, replaced by coarse, tough grasses. The small fish and shrimp vanished completely—the fields, frequently treated with pesticides and herbicides, were no longer suitable for them. Although there were still frogs, she always felt they had lost their spirit and gained a certain agitation.
You could no longer just scoop a small basket through the irrigation ditches and come up with a catch of small fish and shrimp to steam for the cat, like in years past. Those lively little fish could only be found in fishponds. And later, even the fish in the ponds seemed to change, their appearances altered by aquaculture.
Of course, people also enjoyed the rich rewards brought by civilization. First and foremost, rice yields increased dramatically. But it seemed the rice itself wasn’t as fragrant. People no longer had to toil at transplanting seedlings or harvesting the grain. Seedlings were scattered, and various machines helped with reaping and threshing. Tractors rumbled into the paddies, and clearing weeds with a rake became an ancient activity spoken of only in legends.
Once, she read a sentence somewhere that said the development of civilization is simultaneously accompanied by destruction, and she couldn’t agree more!
After talking with Qingmu for a bit, Zhang Huai caught sight of Juhua squatting by the paddy, staring blankly at the dark green rice stalks. She suddenly reached out a hand to scoop at the little fish in the water, and he couldn’t help but smile.
Qingmu also noticed his sister teasing the little fish like a small child and chuckled softly. His sister was always different from others. Weren’t all girls supposed to like staying clean and tidy at home? Yet she, whenever she had a spare moment, loved to wander out into the fields.
Zhang Huai smiled and asked Juhua, "Juhua, do you think the harvest will be good this year?"
Juhua gave him a slight glare. "How would I know? I’ve never grown rice before; my dad and brother handle all of it. I should be the one asking you that. You’re a grown man now, you should know how to farm. You need to use your head more often and not just blindly copy the old ways. Learn from their good experiences, but you should also have your own ideas and innovations."
(To be continued. If you like this work, you are welcome to vote for it with recommendation tickets or monthly passes at Qidian.com. Your support is my greatest motivation.)
