Why is Qingsong's black glutinous rice so fragrant?

Text/Moli

Last night Sister Lihua put us up in Abao's charming little room. The old-fashioned wooden bed was steeped in the stories of time, as if it had been waiting all along to be washed by the morning sun outside the window. This fresh sense of nostalgia made it hard not to get up early.

Stretching and pushing the door open with both hands, I welcomed the third day of the round-island trip. I heard that after Abao left, no one had lived here for quite a while. The sunlight spilling into the room seemed to carry some inexplicable message of joy, and the soot sprites from the My Neighbor Totoro cartoon that hide in the desk, in the blue curtains, in the bookcase were instantly swept away.

The rice-milling grandpa said he inherited this mill when he was young and began operating this machine. The rice went through cycle after cycle and gradually became white. The rice-milling grandpa put on his reading glasses to check the color of the rice, while Chengcheng and Miaomiao innocently followed along the rice chute, gathering the fallen grains of rice with their hands. The rice slid past the rice-milling grandpa's pair of wrinkled hands, and those two little kids' small, chubby palms, how much of the sorrow of a declining countryside could they really catch?

The old grandpa asked Chengcheng, since he was having so much fun, would he like to stay at the mill and keep grandpa company? Chengcheng smiled shyly and shook his head. Once the rice was bagged, when the old grandpa used the bag sealer he even made as if to seal up Chengcheng's jacket, and everyone laughed so hard they could not close their mouths.