A Chance Encounter with a Century-Old Boxwood While Patrolling the Mountain, 64 Slingshot Forks Sawed Off Before a Quick Departure, Third Brother: Caution Is the Parent of Safety

A chance encounter with a century-old boxwood while patrolling the mountain, 64 slingshot forks sawed off before a quick departure, Third Brother: Caution Is the Parent of Safety.

Nowadays, with the prospects for material life looking brighter than ever, people who have the inclination turn their attention to the things they rather enjoy, which leaves both buyers and sellers endlessly delighted. These days, more people have money, and they are no longer satisfied with just food and clothing but pay more attention to their spiritual enjoyment. Hence the emergence of antique collecting, gambling on rough jade stones, and growing bonsai stumps.

When it comes to growing tree stumps, the past few years have truly seen it become a big craze. Chinese boxwood (Buxus sinica) wild-collected stumps in particular are treasures sought after by many stump lovers. In flower and bird markets, a small-leaved boxwood stump with a unique shape and superior variety can easily sell for several thousand. For this very reason, many stump diggers spare no effort, traveling a thousand li in hardship to search for boxwood stumps.

People of a certain age all know that boxwood, also called the thousand-year dwarf, is a variety with rather hard texture. People in the past often used it to carve personal seals. Also because boxwood grows slowly, a boxwood tree several hundred years old is still not very large. Moreover, boxwood has been an auspicious tree of royalty and nobility from ancient times to the present, carrying the fine meaning of attracting wealth and blessings, so it is recognized by more and more people.

Therefore, in our rural areas, searching for boxwood stumps is quite a hot activity. Recently a man went into the mountains and stumbled by sheer luck upon a century-old boxwood stump, truly a case of arriving early being no match for arriving at the right time. The story behind this is as follows: this person is the famously heavy drinker of our village, Huang Xiangbo, who ranks third in his family, so whenever we see him we all call him Third Brother.

As it happens, this period is the time for harvesting large bamboo shoots, so he was patrolling the mountain and managing the area with his boss. One day, half tipsy, he was hollering all over the mountain, and unexpectedly such a lucky find landed right in front of him. But he did not dig it up; instead, he trimmed some branches for the boxwood and casually sawed the cut boxwood branches into 64 slingshot forks on the spot, then quickly left.

Because he knew that the state is now fairly strict about the reckless cutting of plants, and one careless move could land him in trouble, so he could not be negligent either. And he said, this is a society ruled by law now, don't go around butting your head against nails; caution is the parent of safety. That said, with so many slingshot forks sawed off, surely they are not meant for making slingshots to shoot crows. There is something fishy about this. No, we had better catch up and ask clearly just what is going on here.