In the village, there are specific customs for moving house and making the bed; one cannot just do it casually. It requires choosing an auspicious day, or if not, picking the first or fifteenth day of the lunar month.
Therefore, Father Zhou decided to move today.
Zhou Chenglei and Father Zhou took cleaning tools to tidy up the old house.
Jiang Xia was worried that a man wouldn't be as meticulous as a woman when cleaning, and she had quite high standards for the hygiene of her living environment, so she said, "I don't really need to pack my things, so I'll go help clean too. Many hands make light work."
The original owner hadn't been married long and was always prepared for a divorce, so many of her belongings were still in red-white-blue plastic bags, unpacked.
This made moving quite convenient.
"Alright, then I'll have your mother stay behind to help your sister-in-law sort things out."
Tian Caihua felt that Jiang Xia was shrewd; she was pretending to be diligent by going to clean, leaving Mother Zhou behind to divide the property.
In this way, would she really have the nerve to give the old, broken, and inferior items to her mother-in-law?
She had truly underestimated her!
She was cunning!
Suddenly, she thought back to the entire division process. Jiang Xia had acted like a virtuous woman who didn't fight or scramble for anything, making her—Tian Caihua—look petty, sharp-tongued, and unfilial. In the end, besides taking advantage of the new house, the two elders hadn't wronged the couple in the slightest.
The more Tian Caihua thought about it, the angrier she became!
Pah! She didn't believe Jiang Xia was truly indifferent and wanted nothing; that big-tailed wolf!
She was simply sinister and cunning!
She reckoned the two elders would still feel that Zhou Chenglei and Jiang Xia had gotten the short end of the stick by moving into the old house, and would secretly take out some private savings to subsidize them.
Thinking of this, Tian Caihua became unhappy again.
Jealousy made Tian Caihua temporarily forget that Jiang Xia was planning to divorce; what would she care about anything else?
*
The Zhou family lived in a small fishing village, relying on the mountains for resources and the sea for their livelihood, so most villagers made a living by fishing at sea.
Moreover, this area was mostly plains with very few mountains. It was sparsely populated, so every household had quite a bit of farmland.
The villagers lived reasonably well and didn't go hungry.
The Zhou family's old house was relatively close to the sea, though not right on the shore—just nearby.
Houses close to the sea had heavy moisture and were quite damp; living in them for a long time easily led to rheumatism. If a tsunami occurred, there was also the risk of destruction. It definitely lacked the poetic quality of "I have a house, facing the sea, with spring flowers blossoming," so villagers never chose to build by the seaside.
Although the seaside scenery was beautiful, they saw it every day and didn't find it rare.
It was only later, with economic development, that many houses and hotels were built by the sea to create tourist areas and selling points.
Jiang Xia examined this long-abandoned stone house. The courtyard walls were also built of stone, looking very sturdy and full of history.
The courtyard was overgrown with grass, but it was very large.
In her past life, Jiang Xia was a city dweller. After her parents passed away, their house was sold to pay off debts. The place she lived in later was a basement assigned to her grandmother before she retired as a sanitation worker. It was tiny, dark, and windowless; she couldn't even keep a flower alive in it.
It wasn't until she got into university and paid off the medical bills from her grandmother's illness that she finally had enough money to buy a one-bedroom apartment in Beijing in full, two years after finishing graduate school. The hateful thing was that she transmigrated before the building was even handed over.
So, in this life, she had never lived in a house with a courtyard!
This courtyard was huge, and Jiang Xia liked it the moment she saw it. After she got divorced in the future, she would also buy a house with a courtyard, planting flowers in the front and fruit trees in the back.
She was already using this courtyard as a prototype in her mind, imagining how to build her own little yard in the future.
Right now, the yard was full of weeds. Because it was an old house built decades ago and hadn't been lived in for two or three years, it was in disrepair and lacked human presence. Many roof tiles had fallen off; standing inside, one could look up and see light filtering through the gaps.
Where light leaked, rain would naturally leak too.
Father Zhou frowned, "We need to buy some tiles to repair the roof, otherwise it will be troublesome when it rains or a typhoon hits."
Zhou Chenglei said, "I'll go buy them tomorrow."
Jiang Xia looked up: the sky was a deep, watery blue, not looking like it would rain at all. However, Jiang Xia thought of the plot in the book.
In the book, a super typhoon made landfall in this coastal area. After the typhoon, there were many fish and shrimp on the beach. The female lead ran over to pick them up to sell for living expenses and tuition, as school was starting in September. As a result, she was too bold; in pursuit of a fish, she ran too far and was swept into the sea by the waves. It was the male lead who saved her.
According to the plot, the original owner and the male lead were supposed to divorce and leave today, which was when the female lead should make her entrance!
Who knew when that super typhoon would come?
She felt a bit anxious and said, "August is an active season for typhoons, and I don't know when it might rain. It's still early, can we go buy some tiles now and fix the roof?"
Father Zhou said, "Starting this year, there are weather forecasts. If there's a typhoon, the broadcast station will announce it to tell everyone not to go out to sea."
Jiang Xia felt a little more at ease, but couldn't help but doubt, "Are these weather forecasts accurate?"
"Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't."
Jiang Xia: "..."
Father Zhou: "The weather forecast covers the entire city, and there are so many counties under the city."
Zhou Chenglei saw her worry and said, "Dad, I'll go see if there are tiles for sale now. If I buy them, I should be able to fix the roof in an afternoon."
Father Zhou didn't feel it was appropriate to stay alone with his daughter-in-law for too long, so he said, "I'll go! You two stay here and clean."
There was a tile kiln in the neighboring village that offered delivery, so they didn't need to haul them themselves. Zhou Chenglei didn't fight him for it.
After Father Zhou finished speaking, he left.
Zhou Chenglei looked at the weeds in the courtyard. Weeding was hard work, so he said, "You go inside to clean; I'll clear the grass in the courtyard."
Most of the furniture in the house had been moved away, leaving it empty. It had been cleaned when they moved in, so it wasn't cluttered, just dusty. Cleaning it wouldn't be too tiring.
Jiang Xia had no objections, so she tied her headscarf, covered her mouth and nose with a cloth, and then, holding a broom, set out with great ambition to inspect her "new home."
The house had four rooms in total, with a living room in the middle and rooms on both sides.
The living room was long and deep, and the layout wasn't very good.
On the left and right sides of the main house were two lower structures. The left side was the kitchen, which had two large stoves, with two smaller, lower stoves next to them.
The right side was a utility room for storing farm tools and the like.
Next to the kitchen was a low, narrow room; that was the washroom, or bathroom.
The bathroom floor was paved with red bricks. The kitchen and utility room weren't paved, but the main rooms were paved with old square floor tiles, which was decent.
Jiang Xia had heard her college roommate say that in her hometown, there were still mud-brick houses from the fifties and sixties where the floors weren't paved at all, just hard-packed dirt that had turned black.
The house also had a backyard, which was quite large. There were pigsties, a cowshed, and a chicken coop built of stone, though they were all dilapidated.
After touring it, Jiang Xia felt it was much better than she had imagined. She decided to start cleaning from the rooms.
The old house had electricity and lights installed. Jiang Xia pulled the string on the wall by the door, and the tungsten lightbulb lit up.
She took a long broom, deciding to sweep the cobwebs off the walls and rafters first.
After sweeping the four walls, she raised the broom to sweep the rafters, when suddenly, she found herself face-to-face with two snakes on the beam.
"Ah!" Jiang Xia was so scared she threw the broom and ran out like the wind, the cloth on her face blowing away.