Rebirth in the 1980s: Xiaoxiao's road to becoming a top student

Her family has seven pear trees and five apple trees in this not-so-big orchard, which were distributed by the village.

These fruit trees are quite old and even two people can’t hug them.

Yan Guoqing parked the tractor in the aisle between two rows of pear trees. They came here to pick pears today.

There are already quite a few people under the pear trees. Each family has been allocated a few trees. Some of the pears on the trees have been picked very few, with only a few small ones left, which need to grow longer.

Yan Guoqing spread the plastic sheeting he had brought under a pear tree, then covered it with a layer of torn quilt. He took the cartons of pears off the truck and began to nail the cartons down.

First, stretch out the cardboard box, then fold one side along the mark, nail it with special nails, and then put special cardboard in the box, and you have a box.

Yan Xiaoxiao took a round basket woven from rattan and started picking the larger pears from the tree first. This was because she was afraid that the pears on the tree would accidentally fall down and smash the pears on the ground.

She quickly picked all the fruits she could reach. The trees were quite high, so she couldn't reach much.

After Yan Guoqing ordered the boxes, he stepped onto a simple ladder and started picking the fruits from high up.

"Xiaoxiao, call me when the basket is full. It's too heavy for you to carry."

"Dad, I can carry it!" As she spoke, Yan Xiaoxiao picked up the newly filled basket effortlessly, walked a few steps to the torn quilt, and carefully took out the pears one by one and arranged them.

Of the pear trees that Yan Xiaoxiao's family was given, only two were snow pears, and the rest were duck pears. Duck pears are juicy and thin-skinned. They are easily pierced, and once they are pierced, they cannot be stored, so they are handled with care.

Yan Xiaoxiao thought that in later generations, pears were all put in bags, and many people changed their farmland to plant pear trees, and they would pour whole baskets onto the trucks.

How could pears be as precious as they are now?

Now, apart from these fruit trees, the village also grows crops.

Yan Xiaoxiao was very fast. She climbed up to the treetop with her bare hands to pick the fruits. She was as nimble as a little monkey. Yan Guoqing stared at her with his eyes wide open and kept shouting, "Be careful!"

It took the two of them about two hours to pick all the pears.

Yan Guoqing took down the floor scale from the truck and found a flat place to adjust it.

The boxes are placed on partitions, each of which can hold a certain number of pears, and are placed layer by layer with cardboard in between. After that, they are weighed, and each box of pears has a certain weight.

So when picking pears, you can’t pick big ones, nor small ones.

Yan Guoqing kept changing the size of the pears until the weight was acceptable, then he took down the entire box of pears and put them aside.

Yan Xiaoxiao sat beside them and wrapped the weighed pears in special paper. Once they were wrapped, they could be loaded onto a truck and taken to the purchasing station.

The two packed all the pears before dark. When Yan Guoqing drove his tractor to the purchasing station, the lights were bright.

The so-called purchasing station is a simple shed built on the side of the road. At this time, there were several tractors parked on the side of the road and there were quite a few people in the shed.

Yan Xiaoxiao was surprised, "Dad, how come there is electricity here?"

Their village has power outages five out of seven days, and the power only comes back on after 11pm.

"The bosses who collect the pears are from the south. In order to collect the pears faster, they borrowed generators from the nearby power station. The loud noise you heard was made by the generators."

Only then did Yan Xiaoxiao realize that there was indeed the sound of the machine, but it was somewhat covered up by the noisy voices in the shed.

Yan Guoqing parked the tractor as close to the shed as possible, told Yan Xiaoxiao to wait in the tractor, and went into the shed to look for someone.

Soon a middle-aged man came over. He spoke with a southern accent, and if you didn't listen carefully you wouldn't know what he was saying.

The man's eyes lit up when he saw Yan Xiaoxiao, "Oh, this is your child, so pretty!"

Yan Guoqing smiled and said, "Yes, this is my child. He is just a naughty kid."

Yan Xiaoxiao: …

The man randomly opened three boxes of pears from the car and carefully examined the quality.

"Okay, let's weigh it!"

Yan Guoqing hurriedly unloaded the pears from the truck and lined up to wait for them to be weighed. There was a special person watching over the weighing, and everyone had done it in advance. Now it was just a formality and the process was very fast.

Soon Yan Guoqing came out with a slip of paper. This was the slip for collecting the money in a few days. Basically, the money would be given after the pears were harvested and ready to be shipped away.

These people who collect pears come here almost every year. They stay in the villagers' homes and are quite familiar with them, so they are not afraid of being cheated.

However, Yan Xiaoxiao knew that these people were really unpredictable, because her family had been cheated in her previous life. It was said that the pears were shipped to the south and lost money, and it was the villagers who guaranteed them at that time.

You can only blame yourself for being unlucky. What can a villager do to you? In the end, you only received a few sets of worthless teacups, which is really a rip-off.

Farmers have an easy life. Not only do they have to rely on God for their livelihood, but once they are cheated, they will lose all their income for the year.

But this is the current situation and Yan Xiaoxiao can do nothing about it.

When they got home, Yin Xiu had already prepared dinner. After a simple meal, they each went to rest.

Yan Xiaoxiao continued to recite the book for half the night, meditated for half the night, and went to her master early the next morning.

While standing in the posture, he recited to the master, and then asked about a few points that he did not understand.

Yan Qing explained everything to her one by one, then went to cook, leaving Yan Xiaoxiao to practice swordplay on her own.

After dinner, Yan Xiaoxiao washed the dishes and rushed to school.

In the afternoon, I followed Yan Guoqing to pick cotton. Yan Xiaoxiao's family planted cotton in the north of the village. Her family had a piece of land in the north of the village, where they planted rapeseed, cotton and the like every year.

Yan Xiaoxiao followed Yan Guoqing's example, took a square bundle, tied one end around her waist and the other end around her neck.

A simple pocket is ready.

The cotton stalks were almost as tall as Yan Xiaoxiao, and she moved nimbly around in the field.

There are still a lot of green ones on the cotton, like green peaches, but they have not fully grown yet. Yan Xiaoxiao and the others want to pick the ones that have fully grown and reveal white cotton.

Cotton usually has four petals, which can be plucked with one hand. Yan Xiaoxiao picked a large bag of cotton with her hands flying. She put the cotton in her pocket into the woven bag she brought, and placed the bag on the ridge of the field on one side. When she returned later, she would take the cotton away and put it on the tractor.

When I got tired of picking cotton, I took off my bag and spread it on the ground, then lay on it, looking at the cotton stalks around me and the blue sky and white clouds, which was very comfortable.

I took another bite of the pear I picked yesterday. It was so sweet! Although the pear was a defective one, I was still happy.

When you get home, pour out the cotton from the woven bag and spread it out to dry. You can pack it up after a few days, and when you have finished picking it, you can find someone to fluff the cotton.

The day passed quickly, and Yan Guoqing had become somewhat accustomed to the super "fighting power" displayed by his daughter.

Although he didn't know what she had learned from her master, he was deeply impressed by her abundant energy and strength that was greater than his own.

After working for two days, Yan Xiaoxiao went back to study with her master in the afternoons because her father said the corn would be harvested in a few days.

Every afternoon, she was either refining medicine or on her way to identify herbs. She also had to endure Yan Qing's sighs from time to time, "You can't recognize these herbs because you haven't seen them before. Next year, Master will take you to explore the old forest, and we will definitely identify all the herbs."

Yan Xiaoxiao also began to look forward to next year's trip. In fact, she was already looking forward to it, hehe!