It had been a long time since I'd been back. This trip gave me a chance to go with my parents to visit my grandmother's house. It is still a fair distance away—about forty minutes on foot. The straight-line distance is not bad, but the actual route twists and turns, so the walk adds up. I have taken that road for as long as I can remember. The main difference now is that most of it has been paved with concrete; only a few stretches are still dirt. When I was a child, we would go to my grandmother's for New Year visits, and everyone worried about rain. Once it rained, those dirt sections turned into mud, and our trousers and shoes would be covered in it. It was miserable.
Back then there was not much in the way of transportation to her house. Now we can take a motorbike for about five yuan and reach the riverbank in a little over ten minutes. Then you shake the bell by the river a few times, and the ferryman on the other side comes over in a small boat. The boat feels old, and it leaks slightly, but it is not a big problem. From a distance it has a bit of that 'smoke rising straight in the desert, the sun setting round over the long river' feeling. I like that feeling a lot.
The boat came over. One boat can carry about six people; the water is not deep, and with too many passengers it would run aground.
We got on. It looks pretty small, doesn't it? It really is not large.
On board, looking at the water on both sides feels good. It is completely different from the sightseeing boats in a park.
At last we reached the shore. The whole crossing took about ten minutes, and then we started walking toward Grandma's house again...