N advantages of living in the countryside essay

I was born in a farm family and grew up in the countryside. I have never been taboo about this identity. However, even though I live in the countryside, it is true that I have never done farm work, nor have I ever dug the ground or chopped firewood. Because after finishing school, I will become a teacher in a few years, and I will be classified as a "gentleman" in the countryside. In our family, there are not many women doing farm work, they just pick tea leaves, and some harvest rice for a few days in the autumn. Here we still uphold the tradition of men working outside and women taking charge inside. Cooking and washing clothes are all women's work. I have been a husband, a "family cook" and a "breathing washing machine". It has a longer history.

I have stayed outside for more than ten years, but even though there are many opportunities to make money outside, I am always restless, feel unsteady, and have many inconveniences. Because the water used for washing clothes in my home comes from the mountains. It is water absorbed by bamboos and trees and then discharged. I once filled a mineral water bottle and asked my students to take it to Shanghai for testing. The result was pure water. We use it when we wash our clothes, when we drink water, when we wash our hair and when we take a shower. Its advantage is that it has a constant temperature that is warm in winter and cool in summer. It flows through the water pipe to the pool at home. It is cold when washing clothes in the pool in winter, but it is not cold when washing clothes in the river.

I have stayed in Xidi. The water there is also clear, but after boiling and filling it into a thermos, there is thick scale inside. After you take the scaled thermos home and fill it with home water for a while, it will be gone. Chemically, the water there is alkaline and our home is acidic. I stayed there for five years and found that many women's hair fell out after they turned fifty. I thought it was because of the water, and I was afraid that it would happen to me when I got older, so I went home. This doesn't happen in our family.

Whether it was in Xidi or later in the county, I often suspected that my quilt and clothes were not washed properly. Because the river in Xidi is in the middle of the village, the wastewater from residents' homes flows into the river. Use a basin to wash it at home. Because it is a basin of stagnant water, I always suspect that bacteria are still on the quilt. In the county town, there is a small pool the size of a washbasin, and the quilt cover cannot be washed at all. The washing machine is not as good as the basin. A little water is swirling around. I always suspect that the bacteria and dander on the quilt are still left in the washing machine. Therefore, I always take quilts home to wash in the county. In the river, I can rest assured if the flowing water takes away the bacteria.

Others have mysophobia, but I have a "showing habit". I dry my quilts, pillows, drawers, and books. I even moved out the bedside table and desk to dry the drawers. I like to keep the room windows open all day for ventilation. However, in the county town, my habit of showing off was severely restricted. First of all, the rented place was small, and I could not show off the mattress or quilt after washing the quilt cover and sheets. And after being exposed to the sun in the morning, the sunlight in the afternoon was blocked. The quilt that is not exposed to the sun is really uncomfortable. Later, there was smog, and the red sun couldn't shine even more urgently. My quilt is dried once a week and washed once every three weeks. If it cannot be washed or dried, it will be very uncomfortable.

In the summer of 2013, I finally returned home. After returning home, I discovered that rural life has many more benefits than urban life. First of all, the air is good. My hometown is a basin, surrounded by mountains. There are evergreen bamboos and various trees on the mountains. It turns out that the low-lying areas at the foot of the mountains are paddy fields. Because the paddy fields are terraced and inconvenient for machine farming, they are returned to farmland. Lin. Tea, trees and bamboos were planted in places far away from the village; crops were planted in places close to home, so the forest coverage of our village reached 80%. There are no factories, no need to burn coal or straw, and there are few cars. Villagers travel by motorcycle. Blue sky and white clouds, green mountains and green water, and stars at night can be seen in our house every day except on rainy days. We have a special room in winter, where we can put a small charcoal fire for heating and use electric blankets for sleeping. My mother is in her seventies. When I described the smog to her, she couldn’t understand it! Because there are very few foggy days in our house, and it’s still the kind of fog that “spring rains and summer fog clears, and winter fog and snow close the door.”

In the winter of the year before last, I went to the county seat early in the morning. After getting off the bus, the visibility was less than 20 meters. It's almost noon, and the sun is high in the sky, unable to shine. After taking the car home, the smog began to lessen as we left the county town, and turned into mist when we reached the winding mountain road. When we arrived at home, the sky was blue and the sun was shining brightly. The family members were so busy washing and drying their quilts that they had no idea that the county town dozens of miles away had been shrouded in haze for several days.

I saw a netizen complaining in the group, saying that he spent 500 yuan on water and electricity bills a month. I said why so many? My electricity bill is only 40 yuan a month. I have two TVs, a desktop computer, and a refrigerator at home. I also use a rice cooker to cook two meals. We are used to eating rice in the morning. However, most of our showers are powered by solar energy, so we don’t have to pay for electricity. In summer, most people use electric fans instead of air conditioners. In the summer at our house, the sun rises at seven in the morning and sets at 5:30 in the evening. It’s not too hot! Only people with buildings need it. The bungalow has to be covered with quilts at night, and no one in the village uses mats. My bamboo mat was used in the county town for half a year and became a burden when I returned home. This year, I installed a water heater for bathing when it rains, and the monthly electricity bill is only 70 yuan! I really don’t know how people in the city use electricity?

We don’t have to pay for water, but we have our own equipment. I bought the water pipes, joints, and tees myself, and brought the water to the foot of the mountain. It was a one-time investment that would take many years to manage. Even women can fix tap water. If the rain is too heavy and the water pipe is washed aside, or the water pipe is blocked, just unplug the connector. The pool at home can usually store a ton of water for washing clothes. The only purpose of the faucet on the pool is to close it when filling the water with solar energy. Open it quickly after filling it, otherwise the water will burst and the water pipe will burst. Just turn the faucet into the pool. Many outsiders see our faucets open and subconsciously turn them off, which is often a disservice. There are many ditches in our village. The tap water flows from the pool to the ditch, and finally flows into the river in the village below.

Some people once showed off their wealth, thinking that cooking with mineral water would make them as rich as Wang Kai cooking with candles. How do you know that we use pure water to bathe, wash clothes, water vegetables, and feed pigs?

Outsiders come to our house to drink tea and think the tea tastes good. They always suspect that we keep the good tea and sell the bad tea. In fact, the water in our house is good. The kind of water that uses pesticides cannot make good tea anyway.

In addition to the absence of smog, fresh air, and pure water, the advantages of living in rural areas are that the cost of living is low. After our family returned farmland to forests, we had to buy all the rice. But the vegetables are grown at home, even though they come later than the market. For example, the earliest vegetables like peppers cannot be eaten until June. But they have no hormones and no pesticides! We don’t grow rice at home now, but we grow a lot of corn, which is specially used to feed chickens. Most of the chickens are hatched by old hens during the Qingming Festival. The roosters can only be killed and eaten in October. They eat rice first, then vegetable leaves, and later Eating corn has a long growth cycle. Old hens are also real old hens, more than two years old. Back then, the hens expected to lay eggs until the end of the year, but the eggs were authentic local eggs, and the yolks were truly yellow!

Compared with the city, the cost of living is not only less money to buy food, but also no transportation costs. There are no property fees or parking fees. To drink water in the city, you can either use a water dispenser or an electric kettle. But rural people like to boil their own water, because rice cookers are used to cook meals, solar energy is used to bathe, and firewood is only used to boil water. Many people think that the water boiled by electric kettles is not delicious, maybe because of the material of the electric kettles!

This year, I expanded my house, which is now about 80 square meters. I have renovated it, covered the roof with glazed tiles, and installed ceilings inside. We built two large wardrobes with a height of two meters and a width of two and a half meters. We also renovated a study room and built two sets of bookcases against the wall. We also built a kitchen and bathroom equipped with solar energy and water heaters. The study room has floors and the bedrooms have floor tiles. I bought a bed, a mattress, and a refrigerator. I also poured concrete into a drying area of ??more than 30 square meters in front of the house and made a cement floor. Concrete and cement floors were poured on the ground behind the house, and a large 13-square-meter canopy was built. The total *** only cost 60,000. But many people in the village bought houses in the county town, which were only 100 square meters, and the decoration cost more than ten or two hundred thousand. I am embarrassed to say that I only spent this amount of money. Last year, a family in our village built a two-story house for only 200,000 yuan, including decoration. You know, I pay people to carry my materials home, and the wages for bricklayers and carpenters are the same as those in the county.

In terms of materials, I didn’t buy the best, but I didn’t buy the cheapest either!

In the past, in the county town, a mop was left at the door and was taken away. Shoes were left drying at the door, and disappeared after returning home from shopping. A T-shirt was hung in the window to dry, and the wind blew it to the ground. , even the clothes hangers were taken away. At home, it doesn’t matter how many days the clothes are left to dry at the door. It doesn’t matter how long the bamboos and trees cut down by the villagers are left on the roadside. There was no one at home, so the neighbors helped collect the clothes and shoes that were hanging outside when it rained. Sometimes I bought rice and oil, brought them in the car and left them on the roadside, and they stayed there even if I didn't take them for a long time. If the tap water at home is blocked, you can wash your clothes in the neighbor's sink. You can also take a solar bath at the neighbor's house. After washing the quilt, you can also dry it in the neighbor's house. In the village, sometimes a family eats winter melon, and the people around them eat it too. Because the winter melon is too big, the owner cuts it open and gives it to the neighbors to share. This state of good neighborliness and good neighborliness cannot be experienced in the city.

The advantage of living in a rural area also includes a quiet living environment. It is truly silent at night here, with no sound at all. Because no one comes out at night, the dogs don’t bark anymore. A few years ago, the sister of a family in the village married to Shanghai, and two relatives from Shanghai came with her. After sleeping until midnight, the two men sat up. The host thought it was because his bed was uncomfortable, but the guest said, no, it was too quiet, terrifyingly quiet!

We couldn’t sleep outside, and we couldn’t wake up when we got home. But it's not good, it's too quiet, and even the slightest sound wakes me up. One night, the clean mop behind the study door fell on the floor, which also woke me up from sleeping in the bedroom on the other side of the living room, and I couldn't fall asleep for a long time.

The elderly in rural areas like to work, grow vegetables, raise chickens, and do housework. There are no potbellied elderly people. This year I went to the county seat and met our postman. He retired after his daughter took over the post and then moved to the county seat. An old man next to him turned out to be from our neighboring village, and he also came to the county seat a few years ago. Now both of them have cerebral infarction and walk with crutches. They asked how my mother was doing, and I said she was fine. She was still cooking, growing vegetables, and raising chickens, but she was a little deaf. They are so envious that they are willing to be completely deaf as long as there is no cerebral infarction. They all said that because they had stayed in the city for a long time, if they were in the countryside, they would also grow vegetables and raise chickens, so they would not suffer from cerebral infarction!

The three elements of human life are air, water and sunshine. If there is a problem with these three elements, what else is there to pursue in life? Unfortunately, many people regard the three essential elements as money, houses and cars, and would rather live in big cities than return to rural areas. Especially some young people whose families live in rural areas go to the county town to buy a house. I really don’t know what they want? There is no fresh air, no pure water, there is smog, and the cost of living is high. There are still many young teachers who are unwilling to teach in rural areas and want to stay in cities. In fact, with the Internet, rural areas are much better than urban areas.

There is a joke on WeChat that a rich man’s child went to the countryside and finally realized that he was poor when he returned home. Their swimming pool is only a few dozen square meters, but the swimming pool in the countryside is a big river; their air purifier is placed in the house, while rural people put the air purifier in their house; they have a dog and a cat in the countryside. There are a group of dogs and a group of cats. Their family buys mineral water in bottles, while rural people buy it in buckets. You have to plant your own garden up to the wall. In rural areas, there are gardens all over the mountains and fields, so you don’t have to plant them yourself. Isn't this true?

2016.1.7