When Returning Home at Dusk by the Roadside

After Lao Zhang retired, he insisted on going to the frontier to teach. When his wife asked him when he would come back, he only said, "Don't ask about the date of return." In three years, the children he taught went from being unable to write their names to being able to recite poetry. In the winter of the seventh year, his wife went to him with a box of frozen pears and saw him playing shuttlecock with his children in the snow, his laughter shaking the snow off the trees. She suddenly understood that some people's return date is never a day, but an arrival.