All day long, everyone in the village sat outside their doors. Not a single household was without a mountain of shells piled at its entrance.
By afternoon, people began pushing handcarts to the pier to deliver their goods. Sitting outside their doors, they could see the carts in the distance.
As time went on, more and more carts appeared. Families without handcarts carried their loads on shoulder poles instead. The line kept growing, stretching more than a hundred meters out from the pier.
Nothing like this had ever happened before, and the line was still growing.
They were all astonished at the sight.
"So... so many people? How are we supposed to sell ours now? We probably won't be able to sell anything today." Mother Ye kept craning her neck toward the pier.
Ye Yaodong looked at the corner. They still had two sacks left to sort. They were working far too slowly.
His parents had been busy repairing the roof and settling the pig in at the Old House, and had only come over to help at two. The Old Lady helped watch the baby, calling A Qing over whenever the baby was hungry and needed nursing. The two of them together only counted as half a worker.
There was no way the two children could sit still either. They had run off to play after lunch. Only Lin Guangyuan had stayed to sort with him, but Lin Guangyuan couldn't tell which shells had meat inside and which were empty. He could only separate the different kinds of shellfish, leaving Ye Yaodong to sort the scallops himself.
With just him and Lin Guangyuan working, it was painfully slow. Besides, they had gathered more shellfish than anyone else-two sacks more than either of his elder brothers' families.
They had more