In the rural areas of the 1960s and 1970s, many children from families dropped out of high school before they could finish high school. On the one hand, you can go home to work as a farmer, and you can go to the production team to save work, and you can also help your family to do some farm work that keeps their own land, such as planting vegetables, planting sweet potatoes, and so on. On the other hand, you can also save a few dollars per semester on tuition fees.
At that time, most rural parents thought that reading did not have much effect, thinking that reading was at best to know a few more words, and that they would not be able to recognize their names in the future. Some children of families with better family conditions did not see any "out-of-the-air" until they graduated from high school, and finally did not return to the countryside to "move their heads and pick up mud"? In the whole Huangtian Valley, I did not see any children of any family eating "commodity grain" because they could read.
However, my three brothers and sisters were fortunate not to encounter such a family. This is not only because my father works in the "Shangqingzhai" tea shop of the county's catering service company, and his vision is slightly higher than that of the villagers in the countryside, "as long as the child can read it, he will read until he graduates from high school." And my father had a fixed salary of tens of yuan a month (60 yuan when he retired in 1979), and the tuition fee at the beginning of each semester was fully guaranteed.
In addition, we didn't have to worry about the tuition fees for studying, and we benefited from a lime tree in front of my house.
The lime tree in front of my house, since I understood things, grew in a bamboo forest twenty meters away from my house, with a trunk more than three hundred centimeters thick, more than six meters high, and several branches at a height of two meters. The whole canopy is lush with green leaves, with a shade range of four or five meters, similar to a tall grapefruit tree, which is very conspicuous in the bamboo forest next to the road. Because the lime is very sour, even if the lime is fully ripe, it is difficult to swallow, and there is no need to worry about children who usually pick and eat.
lime
At the beginning of August every year, it is the time of the school's "farm holiday", and the dark green lime fruit path has grown to five or six centimeters in size. My mother would find a good day and take a few of our brothers to pick lime fruits. Because this lime tree grows very tall, the branches of the branches are covered with thorns of four or five centimeters long, although there is a wooden ladder to the tree, every time the lime is picked, there are always many red roads on the hands and legs.
Usually after more than an hour of hard work, the limes in the trees are picked. Looking at the tree again, my mother had picked up all the limes in the basket, and was about to fill two baskets, weighing one hundred and seventy or eighty pounds.
Lime fruit
Carry the lime to the door of the house, cut the lime in half with a kitchen knife, and take advantage of the hot afternoon sun to neatly line the lime on the sun pad. After seven or eight days of harvesting in and out, the lime fruit became a kudzu black skin, beige inner sac, picked up two pieces of each other, made a "clucking" sound, with the thumb nail down, the fruit sac crisp cracked. Such lime fruits are completely dried. Every year, you can harvest more than 40 to 50 catties of dried fruit.
Pick a spare day, my mother would pick these lime fruits with baskets (I remember that there was no snakeskin bag at that time) and sell them to the county medicine company, which would have a total of ten or twenty yuan of income, enough to pay our brothers and sisters a year's tuition.
Later, like my sister and brother, I went to the Wanzai Middle School in the county town to study. In September 1982, I was admitted to the provincial mechanical school, and after graduation, I entered a provincial military enterprise in the county and became an honorable mechanical engineer.
All this is due to the lime tree in my house!