An old aunt named Winnie Weeks died last year. She was in her nineties. Her children and grandchildren had settled down in various places. They were all able to support themselves. The granddaughters were all married and had their own families. But the old aunt still refused to leave, she asked her children to help her, she did not want to die, do not want to leave their children, let them lose their parents, struggling alone. She could not leave peacefully, fearing that her children and grandchildren would be dragged into the army, just as her father and brothers were forced to join the army in 1776, and that other men in the family would have to March and fight with military rations on their backs when they reached conscription age. The children had to reassure her that war would not break out, but she became more restless. You have to laugh more and insist. You are young. You'd better do as I say. They are all militants. You should have heard that the old can see more clearly than the young. Frankly speaking, people sometimes tremble to hear her words, because she has a second sight and can predict the future, which is well known. She had predicted the exact date and time of her husband's death,warehouse storage racks, claiming to have seen something because of her faith that no one else could see. On the Sabbath, many well-dressed young lovers went to her house by car and asked her to do divination. She uses tea leaves as props: a slender passage winding eastward in the tea leaves may indicate a trip to a coastal town; a cross means that love may be on the rocks; a small pile of wet tea leaves next to a large lump of tea leaves may indicate that marriage is approaching.. Aunt Winnie would scream, burst into laughter, and slap the young man on the back if she figured out which couple was lucky. The young couple blushed and their faces were full of pride. For them, the greatest luck was to marry each other and have a lot of children. Sheehan regretted that he had not gone with Lenzu to Aunt Winnie's place to take a divination and see what fate had been. Now she would have to live longer to see it; fate was before her,wire mesh decking, as if she could see it the next day, but when she was about to see it, it was suddenly dark before her eyes.. Will there be a war in her lifetime? Renzu said she was imagining things. Who wants to fight? Since no one wants to, there will be no war. War is a bad thing. Men want to distinguish the camp, and then fight desperately, many people lost their lives, the body was pecked by vultures. My father's uncle, Jasper, was killed fighting the Red Shirts. Come to think of it, heavy duty cantilever racks ,heavy duty metal racks, he's been dead for more than half a century! The worst thing about war is that men have to join the army whether they want to or not, and no one can hide from it; they have the list in their hands, and they will send the draft to you. Sheehan didn't want to see them come to get Renzu and Jack and send them to their death. She didn't want to live to that day. But Sheehan wasn't always bothered by the war. Some old men would talk about the Negro war, but it was just uninformed chatter. There were only black people in coastal towns, who gathered cotton and rice in hundreds of acres of land. Sheehan couldn't figure out why people liked to use black people to work! She heard that some black people were smuggled in by boat. They could not speak a word of English. The foreman treated them like cattle and took them to the cotton fields to pick cotton, or to the wetlands to grow rice. Many of them were bitten to death by a poisonous snake called the fish-loving snake in the rice fields. In wealthy coastal towns, women leave blacks to work at home, help themselves cook, wash their children's faces.. But Sheehan couldn't stand it! She didn't want a black man to look after the children or clean the house. The floors were clean and the rafters were strong. She didn't need a black man to help her. When they needed more space, Lenzu put up a roof and made a small attic to expand the space. The house is big enough now. Sheehan liked the dark space overhead, with small black and gray spider webs in the corners. Sheehan thought these gray spider webs would bring good luck to the house. She loved her house; she hung strings of golden red peppers on the beams to dry for sausage seasoning, and dried beans on string for the winter. The seeds were fresh and in season, and Sheehan had tied them up with clean rags and hung them where the greedy mice could not bite. She hated wild brown rats with black tails that swished along the rafters at night. The white mouse was a different matter, though; he could always pick the best thing to eat, and waiting behind the wooden slats for Sheen to let him out, he could climb up Sheen's arm and cling to her throat. Sheehan had loved the dumb, goofy little thing so much that it died — because, Sheehan's mother said, God wanted women to love only their babies. The white mouse was dead, but its pink eyes were still open. Sheehan wrapped up its stiff body and buried it under a cluster of pink crape myrtle flowers that his mother, Torunzu, had brought to Sheehan. She buried the bodies of the chickens under a row of yellow poplars; she buried Lunzu's sick piglets under a Gardenia Bush by the door. Corpses can provide the most fertile soil for the growth of all things. Everything buried around her house nourished the soil to some extent; now the yard is as alive as the house; Every shrub enjoys the nourishment of other things besides the nourishment of the soil itself, because the plants, rain, sunshine and darkness of the past years together promote the growth of shrubs, and the roots of shrubs are buried with the corpses of birds, pigs and other small animals, which used to purr, chirp and squeak here when they were alive. Knowing all this, Sheehan felt a sense of satisfaction. Now,industrial racking systems, she rarely visits her mother and is content to stay at home — keeping the family running, she says. Before Kisie was born, she came back from her parents' home to find that the clock had stopped. It turned out that Lenzu had forgotten to wind it. Sheehan felt that the ticking of the clock was like the rapid breathing of a house or the gentle beating of a heart. A house without the ticking was like a house without life. Only when the clock continued to move did Sheehan feel that everything was back to normal. jracking.com
