Fourth Team, evening, at the Tao family home.
Tao Daqiang drove the tractor back from the watermelon field, its engine chugging away. Once inside the yard, he eased off the throttle, afraid of frightening his daughter Xiuxiu.
The baby was over six months old now. Tao Jianshe had made her a wooden crib, and she was crawling around in it, playing and gnawing on her own foot.
Yang Pingping sat by the door, where she could see her daughter just by turning her head, sewing something with a piece of fabric in her hands.
Although they had a sewing machine, some clothes were too small to sew easily on it, so she sewed those by hand.
After switching off the engine, Tao Daqiang took the tools off the tractor and put them away. He took the washbasin from the stand in the yard, poured the water over the decorative wall into the vegetable plot, then drew a fresh basinful at the hand pump and gave himself a good wash.
"How are the watermelon seedlings doing?" Yang Pingping asked.
"Growing nicely. My brother finished weeding his plot and came over to help me for a while." Tao Daqiang wiped his face with a towel. It had dried too stiff in the sun, so he soaked it in the water, lifted it out, wrung it dry, and wiped himself again, saying as he did:
"Brother Long said some places inland are so damp that towels won't dry even if you hang them outside. They can even go moldy-how's that possible? With the sun so strong in midsummer, how could a towel not dry?"
"Maybe it depends on the place? Remember learning at school about the plum rains, when it rains every day?" Yang Pingping seemed to have heard the village elders talk