Summer in the Scent of Wheat Stalks

Life on the loess slope moved as slowly as the shadow of an old locust tree. Ma Guilan tended the stove and vegetable garden, watching her twelve-year-old son Jianjun run and jump with a basket of pigweed on his back, and listening to her taciturn husband, Ma Laoshi, smoke in silence. Their days had been as plain as a fire of wheat straw, until Ma Laoshi returned from town with fertilizer and a blue cloth schoolbag printed with a red star.