NOVPUB
Chapter 284: 174 you graduated from high school
Before lunch, Li Hongjun brought back half a truckload of lumber with two young soldiers.
The two soldiers helped unload the wood into the courtyard. Seeing how everyone was sweating from working in the cold weather, Shen Yunfang hurried to serve them water and offer them sunflower seeds. She even planned to cook a few good dishes for lunch as a treat. However, the enthusiasm of the sister-in-law scared the young soldiers; they didn’t drink the water or eat the seeds and instead drove off immediately.
Li Hongjun burst into laughter when he saw his wife holding the water pitcher and plate of sunflower seeds in surprise.
Shen Yunfang could only force a smile. "What’s this all about? Am I that frightening?" She considered herself to be quite gentle and charming, so why did it seem she scared people away?
"You’re not scary, just too enthusiastic. Those kids are only seventeen or eighteen years old; they’re not used to someone being so eager to serve them drinks and snacks," Li Hongjun said, laughing as he went into the house with his wife to see their son.
"Ah, being a human is truly difficult. Being enthusiastic doesn’t work, and being indifferent doesn’t work either. Does this still allow anyone to live a good life?" Shen Yunfang suddenly exclaimed. She then relayed the incident about Qiu Fengmei coming over with her child, causing trouble, and asking for cabbage.
Li Hongjun frowned upon hearing this, but he truly could not intervene in the affairs between women nor did he really understand how women should interact, so in the end, he only managed to squeeze out, "When you have time, you should visit Sister Wu more often and learn from her."
Shen Yunfang held the same view.
"How is Deputy Commander Wang as a person? Is he like his wife?" Shen Yunfang asked while serving rice for Li Hongjun.
The saying goes, "Birds of a feather flock together," and so if the wife and kids were of that nature, Shen Yunfang worried that Deputy Commander Wang might not be an agreeable person either.
"That’s not the case. Commander Wang is actually a good person; he’s just not very talkative. He belongs to those who can do their job quietly without boasting," was Li Hongjun’s candid appraisal.
"So that means his wife does all the talking in their house, huh?" Shen Yunfang joked.
Li Hongjun served a helping of vegetables to his wife and kept silent.
"Do you know where they live?" Shen Yunfang continued, recalling that during the chat last night, she learned that to the left of their home was Sister Wu’s, and on one side was Liu Xiaohua’s house. She was still unaware of where the others resided.
It was too dark when they arrived last night to get a good sense of the area, but she had seen that morning that there was a row of houses in front of their home and several more rows behind, forming a rather large residential area.
After a moment of thought, Li Hongjun said, "I’m not sure exactly where, but I remember they seem to be living in the second-to-last row in the back." He only had a rough idea, having never visited, just heard about it.
Shen Yunfang nodded, indicating that they weren’t close neighbors. That was probably a good thing, as it meant they likely wouldn’t be dropping by often.
After the couple had lunch, Shen Yunfang cuddled up with their child to take a nap in the room, while Li Hongjun tinkered with the wood in the west room. His vacation time was running short, and he needed to work quickly to finish the things his wife wanted.
In the afternoon, no visitors came, likely because everyone knew they had just moved in and had many things to take care of, so they didn’t want to intrude at this time.
Once Shen Yunfang got up and saw the child was still asleep, she went to the west room to help Li Hongjun with his work.
The two of them decided to tackle the main tasks first, and by evening they had erected a plastic shed against the wall of the west room in the backyard. They were able to finish so quickly mainly because they had plenty of experience setting up plastic sheds, having done it every year at home.
Since Shen Yunfang had limited plastic, the shed she built was only about six to seven square meters. Li Hongjun also made a three-tiered shelf inside it.
They planned to spread lettuce and cabbage seeds on the bottom layer to take advantage of the warm shed’s light and to have some fresh vegetables to eat. The middle layer would be used for quails, with the size of the compartments perfectly fitting their five-tiered quail cage, and the top layer was reserved for mushroom sticks. If conditions permitted, Yunfang also intended to grow some mushrooms—after all, it wasn’t convenient to always bring them out from their own consumption.
The next day, Hongjun made another wooden rack and placed it in the storage room, tucking away all the bottles and jars from home, giving the storage room a tidier look.
As for the sheep pen, they couldn’t start working on it just yet due to a lack of bricks. Hongjun planned to build a pen for his family’s sheep that would protect them from the wind and rain on all sides and overhead. But since they didn’t have the materials, the plan had to be put on hold for the time being, and they simply tied their sheep to a fence in the backyard with a rope.
Eventually, Hongjun’s last two days of vacation were over, and he had to return to work, leaving Yunfang to look after the children at home with some free time on her hands. 𝒏𝒐𝙫𝙥𝙪𝙗.𝒄𝙤𝙢
Over these two days, everything in the house had been organized, and their family life was back on track.
"Yunfang, are you there?" Mrs. Wu called out from her yard.
Since their houses were close, the two of them were able to chat from their own courtyards during the past couple of days without feeling estranged.
"Yes," Yunfang put down the book she was holding and shook her neck, then looking at her son with his big eyes eagerly babbling, she said with amusement, "It’s time for your mother to take a break. I’ve been reading to you all morning; haven’t you had enough?"
Now that she had some free time and the child was constantly sleeping, Yunfang had pulled out her junior and senior high textbooks to start revising from the beginning, as the national college entrance exam was going to be reinstated in a year. She thought that if she started reviewing now, she would have a significant advantage by the time of the exams, making it almost certain she would get into college.
What she hadn’t expected was that her son Pangpang was also a keen learner. Ever since he had heard her reading, he’d grown fond of it and no longer wanted to sleep, preferring to listen with wide eyes as his mother read aloud. Of course, what he actually thought, Yunfang didn’t know. She just knew that her son was at his best behavior when he listened to her read, and she was happy to have someone supervising her studies.
Before Yunfang even had a chance to put on her shoes and step out, Mrs. Wu already entered the house.
"Sister-in-law, come in. Please, have a seat on the kang," Yunfang hurried to invite her.
"No need for you to get up; we’re not strangers. Let me warm up a bit first before I sit down on the kang," Mrs. Wu said, cautious not to let any cold from her body transfer to the child on the heated bed.
"It’s fine, the child is tough," Yunfang acknowledged her sister-in-law’s kindness.
"Oh my, even if he’s tough, we can’t take any risks. We must not be careless," Mrs. Wu replied, experienced from raising three children.
Yunfang simply smiled without replying. Both she and her husband had a policy of warming themselves before holding their child, but of course, they couldn’t impose the same requirement on others. Seeing Mrs. Wu so considerate of the child’s well-being made her very happy.
Mrs. Wu instantly noticed the pen, paper, and books on the kang table.
"What’s this, you’re still studying?" she asked, astonished. There weren’t many people studying at this time, especially for someone like Yunfang who was already married with a child.
"Yeah, just looking at some things when I’m free," Yunfang tidied up the things on the table. It wasn’t that she was afraid of people knowing she was studying at home; she just didn’t want to hear unpleasant things behind her back, and enduring criticism or mockery was unnecessary.
"I think I heard Hongjun say that you graduated from high school," Mrs. Wu remembered that her sister-in-law was quite educated.
