I was scrolling through WeChat Moments when I came across a picture for Rain Water, the solar term. Across it was written: 'At seven nines the river opens; at eight nines the swallows return.' I don't know why, but it brought my maternal grandfather back to me. In my childhood memory, he was always muttering that old count: 'In the first and second nines, keep your hands out of the cold; in the third and fourth, walk on the ice; in the fifth and sixth, look up at the willows; at seven nines, sixty-three, the young gentleman on the road turns his coat; at eight nines, seventy-two, lead out the yellow ox and try him; at nine nines, eighty-one, dogs and cats look for shade.'
My grandfather died of a heart attack in his sixties. Medical care in that place and time was not good, and he had no quick-acting heart pills. He had just come back from the fields. I remember it clearly: it was a few days before Mid-Autumn Festival. My parents took me to visit his house. In the countryside there was a custom for a daughter to return to her parents' home before the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month. At noon, my grandfather came in from the fields. His face didn't look right. He said he had felt unwell in the field, had lain down for a while, and then come back, but he was still uncomfortable. My uncle, my mother, and the others had him lie down on the bed in the main room. He only got worse. He lay down and never got up again.
Grandfather was honest and strict with himself. He never told a lie in his life. My aunt trusted him beyond anyone: she was half-skeptical of what other people said, but if my grandfather said it, she believed it. I remember one time when my mother took me to his house. We didn't even have a bicycle then. My mother was pushing a wooden handcart, and I was riding in it. When we reached the village next to my grandfather's, it happened to be market day, and the crowd was thick. My mother was careless and the cart bumped into someone. The other person made a fuss, and the two of them started arguing. My mother was partly to blame, of course—she had bumped into them. When we got to my grandfather's house, my mother told him about it, full of grievance. My grandfather scolded her instead, saying she should not have quarreled with the other person.
Grandfather was a storyteller. The story he told best was The Legend of the White Snake. My cousins and I listened, rapt every time. Even now I can almost hear him: '...Xu Xian was walking down the street when he met a man selling meatballs. The man called out: Big meatballs, three for a coin; small meatballs, one for three coins!'
Grandfather also could not sit still. The fact that he was still working in the fields shortly before he died says something. His fields were nearly free of weeds and kept in good order. Every time he came to our house, he would make small stools out of scrap wood, cut vines from the edges of the village ditches, and weave baskets large and small.
I write this in memory of my grandfather.