Cherry tomatoes bear fruit all year round, but the best one between her and him took six years to ripen.
Every summer after that, they went back to the ruby picking garden. The "Summer Sunshine" in Shed No. 3 Produces new fruits every year, and Pei Yan will pick the first one for Yan Ning every time. She collected each year's stalks, pressed them dry, and put them together with the ones from that year - one, two, three, like the annual rings of a tree.
The boy who squatted beside the fields and repaired drip irrigation pipes during the summer vacation of his freshman year of high school finally saw the girl who painted cherry tomatoes on the window glass when he was thirty years old. He walked into his ancestral hall wearing a phoenix crown and a hare.
On the offering plate in front of the Buddha, thirty cherry tomatoes formed a circle. The largest one in the middle is covered by a red persimmon leaf - like Yan Ning's red hijab.
The red confetti on the bluestone road was swept away by the wind, but the old people in Meixi Ancient Town still remember that day when the sedan chair was carried from East Street to West Street, and the suona was blown all the way. The young man riding a white horse outside the sedan had a small sprig of cherry tomato vine with fruit pinned to the collar of his long robe and mandarin jacket - it was cut from No. 3 Shed that morning.
The vine was later made into dried flowers and hung on the wall of the living room of Jicheng's new home, next to a high school graduation photo. In the photo, a group of children in school uniforms are standing on a ladder. The seventh boy from the left in the third row is looking at the camera, and the girl in a white dress in the second row is looking in his direction.
There was a line of people between them.
But the row in the middle was later filled up by six years of time.
Intention: In this world, all the "almosts" are for the "just right" at the last moment. Youthful secret love is not synonymous with regret, but the motivation for two hearts to grow up until they are side by side. Cherry tomatoes take a long time to become sweet, and so do people.