When the snow falls heavily in the north, Wen Yanzhi always stares at the half piece of white jade on the table. The jade was brought from the south of the Yangtze River, and its edges were polished smooth. There was only one crack that was glaring - it was knocked out by a green umbrella bone when Su Wanyi was twelve years old and squatting in a rainy alley to pick up jade.
He didn't forget how he entered the Wen family. When the Wen family was in trouble, it was she who held up a blue umbrella with a green bamboo handle and pulled him up in the corner. There were raindrops hanging from the edge of the umbrella. She stood on tiptoe to wipe his face: "My umbrella shop can accommodate people." In the next few years, in the rain alley in Jiangnan, she held the umbrella in front, and he held the corner of her clothes behind. She taught him to recognize the curvature of the umbrella ribs, and he ground the broken jade he picked up into small pendants and secretly hung them on the handle of her umbrella.
Later, he went north to seek a future, and when he left, she gave him this half piece of jade, and tapped the umbrella rib in his palm: "When you come back, carve an umbrella head for me." He deserved to be confident, but he didn't think he couldn't help it. In order to gain a foothold, he followed the arrangements of his elders and surrounded himself with a well-matched woman. On the day he returned home, he was standing at the alley with the head of his carved jade umbrella. He saw her put the old green umbrella into the bottom of the box and smiled at the other boy: "This umbrella is old and can't hold up the rain."
It was snowing tonight, and as he stroked the cracks on the jade with his fingertips, he suddenly heard the soft sound of an umbrella rib outside the window - very much like the sound of her holding an umbrella and waiting for him. But when he looked up, there was only wind and snow in the sky. The half piece of jade was bone-chillingly cold in the palm of his hand, and he realized that when she put the umbrella away, more than just the ribs were broken. It was the bit of warmth that he should hold on to most in his life, which was frozen and cracked by himself in the north wind.
