Late May in the Countryside: Wheat Harvest, Family Weekends, and a Children’s Day Out
Wheat Harvest
It’s wheat harvest season again. The weather at the start of this year’s harvest wasn’t great, and online there was the usual mess of noisy arguments, including talk about things like “cut four, pay five.” Sure, there are always a few bad apples, but most people are still decent.
My family has a tiny patch of land tucked away in a corner, and that one still has to be cut by hand with a sickle. What a thrill. If anyone wants to “experience rural life,” don’t contact me next year either—unless nobody else wants the job and you’re paying 500. Jokes aside, I do admire my parents. Year after year they keep planting those awkward little scraps of land. And this year that inconvenient corner plot actually produced quite a lot, around 500 jin.
The rest of the land—more than a dozen mu—is in regular fields, the kind a combine can pass through in one go. The weather has been good these past few days, so everyone is waiting for the wheat to fully ripen, then harvest it and sell it straight away.
That online talk about harvesting fees also reminded me of when combine harvesters first became common back in my childhood. At that time, there was usually someone in the village acting as the organizer, contacting the machine operators in advance. Once they arrived, the village generally handled everything for them, so the operators just focused on the work. Because this area is flat, the harvesting itself usually went smoothly, and the operators were happy to build good relationships with the local organizers. From what I knew, the organizer’s own family often had their wheat harvested for free. Some people online say they took a commission instead, but that probably happens much less now, if at all, since there seem to be rules against it.
A lot of those machine operators were ordinary farmers themselves. When they ran into elderly people living alone, many of them charged little or nothing, and free harvesting wasn’t rare. Villagers would also bring out drinks and fruit they had prepared for the workers. It was mutual kindness in both directions. And at noon, whichever household the team happened to be working for would provide lunch. During the busy farming season, it might not be some grand meal, but nobody was going hungry.
On the way back to my hometown, I passed a bend in the road and saw three dogs standing guard over some wheat laid out to dry. That was too good not to record, so I turned back just for that.
Weekend Notes
Like I said before, I’ve been trying to go home every weekend when possible. The kids are bigger now, and weekends should be for taking them out and spending time together. Last time I made the mistake of joking with my older child, asking whether she wanted a different mom. I lost that one badly.
So after getting married and having kids, it really is better to live together as much as possible. If there’s any way to avoid the whole left-behind children situation, then it should be avoided. Given the current temporary arrangement, I’ll probably need to adjust my commuting situation later on.
And honestly, kids these days have it rough—rougher than we did when we were young. Some of that feeling came from arguments at home during earlier visits. Part of it was me running my mouth too much, but eventually I figured something out: if I’m going home, then I should go home in a good mood. If I go back and only make the family unhappy, then what’s the point?
That mindset is what led to my recent stretch of cooking. Outside, I’m just another beast of burden at work; back home, I become the cook. Even my older kid said my cooking tastes better than her mom’s. To be fair, I did recently get to eat one of the rare meals my wife has made in recent years. Usually when she comes home, my mother already has food prepared. And my mother’s cooking is the kind you eat without complaint—especially since taking care of children is exhausting. That’s the full loop right there. Being a man is not easy.
Taking the Kids Out More
I actually had a pretty ambitious plan last year: quit smoking and drinking, then use the money saved to take the kids out more often.
School, in the end, depends mostly on the child. Push too hard, and a small kid’s whole mental foundation can collapse—that can get serious fast. Kids today also get hit far less than we did growing up. Back when I was little, if you weren’t disciplined for three days, you’d be climbing onto the roof. In a strange way, that era also trained our generation to build very thick psychological armor. A lot of people could drag themselves through depression and somehow heal on their own.
Kids now are different. I’ve seen it up close in the family. My poor brother-in-law has had a terrible time with my rebellious older nephew. The boy even used jumping off a school building as a threat, leaving the teachers completely at a loss. In the end he dropped out and went home, slowly stepping into society early. Whether that turns out well or badly depends on what comes next.
That’s part of why, while I still have the time, I think it’s more useful to take my kids out and let them see more of the world than to keep them shut inside this little county town. I had some of those experiences myself when I was young, and I hope they’ll be worth something to my children later on.
A Children’s Day Trip
At the end of the month, on a day off, I took both kids into town for a walk. The original plan was just to stroll around and head back, but right before leaving we got handed a card at an arcade for free game tokens. Since there wasn’t much to do back home anyway besides sitting around, I figured we might as well go upstairs and take a look.
My older daughter turned out to be especially good at one game—the marble machine. It cost 10 yuan for 120 marbles, with 5 marbles per play. The younger one was mostly in a babbling, along-for-the-ride state. Halfway through, another child stopped playing and let my older daughter take over. That little girl left behind at least 200 marbles, basically a hidden master level move. With that huge resource boost, my older one was doing runs of 15 or more at a time and somehow managed to grind out 8 prize cards.
The exchange rate was 1:100, and it takes about 1500 points to trade for a gift, so this place definitely deserves a second visit. The marbles themselves are a minor issue.
With Children’s Day coming up, I had originally thought about buying electronic toys before the holiday, but after thinking it over, I decided not to. Kids often don’t stay interested in that kind of thing for long. So instead I bought two gift sets and deliberately avoided snacks, since some people at home don’t like that route. In the end, I got two plush toy sets. Simple enough—but still, I hope both kids are happy.
Other things can wait until the middle of the month.