Old Times Under the Locust Tree

"She returned to her hometown with the insomnia in the city, but found the medicine to cure time in her grandfather's old pocket watch." Lin Suisui, 28 years old, is an art director at a Shanghai advertising company. She stays up late for a long time, suffers from anxiety, and relies on drugs to stay asleep. Late one night, she received the news that her grandmother had been injured in a fall and hurried back to Qinghuai Village, her hometown in southern Anhui after many years of absence. The muddy paths in my memory have turned into asphalt roads, there are tourist QR codes under the old locust trees, and my grandma still carries her favorite roasted sweet potatoes in a bamboo basket when picking up passengers. Pushing open the mottled wooden door of the old house, Suisui discovered: Grandpa treasured every certificate she received from childhood to adulthood, and sealed it like a cultural relic; The grandmother who was injured in a fall secretly sewed her baby teeth into the pillow, saying it could "calm down the fright and calm the nerves"; The "flying tractor" she drew as a child remains on the wall of the granary, and it has now become a check-in spot for internet celebrity B&Bs. When she unexpectedly discovered 18 unsent birthday letters in the attic - written by her grandfather in small regular script with a brush every year, and the lines were full of the four seasons she had missed - Suisui realized that the family affection diluted by the fast pace of the city had never faded in her hometown. A journey of healing across generations begins: She used her design expertise to help transform the packaging of her grandmother's sauce shop, giving traditional crafts a new lease of life through live broadcast; She taught the left-behind child Xiaodouzi to draw, but she saw her dream from back then in his paintings; When Party A pressed for the manuscript again, she replied for the first time: "Please wait, I want to watch the news broadcast with my grandpa first." In the end, Suisui's rural transformation plan won the industry gold medal, and on the podium, the PPT background she displayed was a sentence from her grandfather's letter: "You have to see tall buildings to know how precious the shade of a locust tree is."