On the northern plains at the turn of the century, the snow in Liushutun always turned into muddy tears at the beginning of spring. After her husband Zhang Dashan passed away unexpectedly, 25-year-old Li Xiuyun held her infant Yaya in her arms and became what the villagers called the "killer". Rumors are like knives, but they can never cut off her stubbornness in farming. The buckwheat and black beans interplanted in the saline-alkali soil are the tuition fees she saves for her daughter, and they are also a flag to declare war on fate.
18-Year-old Zhang Jianjun threw away his college admission notice. The soil on my brother's grave has not yet dried, my father and mother's coughs and gasps penetrate the earthen wall every night, and the patch on my sister-in-law's shoulder is soaked with sweat. The young man picked up a rusty sickle and cut a way out of the wheat waves: "Sister-in-law, we must not let the contracted land on the western slope go unused!"
Twenty years of wind and rain have passed through Liushutun: the wave of migrant workers has swept away the young and the strong, and the empty-nesters' pipes and pots are banging on the cold stove; the land transfer contract has brought harvesters, which have also crushed the boundary monuments of ancestors; Yaya's admission notice and the New Rural Cooperative Medical Insurance Card are pressed side by side under the kang mat, while Xiuyun's early white hair on the temples is like the faded hemp rope on the yard, tightly tied to the footsteps of the founding of the army.
When Yaya insisted on bringing her boyfriend back to the provincial capital, pointing to the old house and saying, "This is the root of our family," Xiuyun stroked the cracked door bolt of the ancestral hall, and Jianjun rubbed the knife marks carved on the beams and columns. The gossip about "a brother-in-law raising a sister-in-law" has long been blown away by the wind, leaving only two pairs of old rubber shoes lying side by side next to the grain store, with the same piece of loess still stuck to the soles.
