Six Records of a Floating Life (Chapter one: Wedded Bliss 14)

    Once the old woman happened to mention the place, and Yun kept on thinking about it. So she said to me one day, "Since leaving the Ts'anglang Pavilion, I have been dreaming about it all the time. As we cannot live there, we must put up with the second best. I have a great idea to go and live in the old woman's cottage."

  "I have been thinking, too, " I said, "of a place to go to and spend the long summer days. If you think you'll like the place, I'll go ahead and take a look. If it is satisfactory, we can carry our beddings along and go and stay there for a month. How about it?"

  "I'm afraid mother won't allow us." 

  "Oh! I'll see to that, "I told her. 

    So the next day, I went there and found that the cottage consisted only of two rooms, which were partitioned into four. With paper windows and bamboo beds, the house would be quite a delightfully cool place to stay in.

    The old woman knew what I wanted and gladly rented me her bedroom, which then looked quite new, when I had repapered the walls. I then informed my mother of it and went to stay there with Yun.

    Our only neighbours were an old couple who raised vegetables for the market. They knew that we were going to stay there for the summer, and came and called on us, bringing us some fish from the pond and vegetables from their own fields. We offered to pay for them, but they wouldn't take any money, and afterwards Yun made a pair of shoes for each of them, which they were finally persuaded to accept.

    This was in the seventh moon when the trees cast a green shade over the place. The summer breeze blew over the water of the pond, and cicadas filled the air with their singing the whole day. Our old neighbour also made a fishing rod for us, and we used to angle torgether under the shade of the willow trees. Late in the afternoons, we would go up on the mound to have a look at the evening glow and compose lines of poetry, when we felt so inclined. Two of the best lines were:

  "Beast-clouds swallow the sinking sun,    

  And the bow-moon shoots the falling stars."

    After a while, the moon cut her image in the water, insects began to chirp all round, and we placed a bamboo bed near the hedgerow to sit or lie upon. The old woman then would inform us that wine had been warmed up and dinner prepared, and we would sit down to have a litle drink under the moon before our meal. Then after bath, we would put on our slippers and carry a fan, and lie or sit there, listening to old tales of retribution told by our neighbour. When we came in to sleep about midnight, we felt nice and cool all over the body, almost forgetting that we were living in a city.

    There along the hedgerow, we asked the gardener to plant chrysanthemums. The flowers bloomed in the ninth moon, and we continued to stay there for another ten days. My mother was also quite delighted and came to see us there. So we ate crabs in the midst of chrysanthemums and whiled away the whole day.