I’ve been living in the city where I work for twenty years, but I was not city born and city bred as some people were. I was a country boy, who spent the first eighteen years of life in my home village. Naturally I have a special sense of attachment to the place where I was born and grew up. When my mother lived there and later my father, I always tried to go back to the old home and be together with my parents.

With both of parents passing away, however, it seems harder to go there and consequently I went less and less. How different you feel when making the trips! In the past there was always something to expect or something waiting for me out there. It might be my favorite food my mom cooked or some news about our neighbors or relatives or just a figure welcoming me back at the gate. And you could count on it that there would always be lots of items to take back to town, mostly vegetables fresh out of the land around the house.

Now it is just my second home, which needs to be taken care of occasionally. It is more of a responsibility than spending weekend or holiday. The house has stood there for over forty years. Being old, the roof always leaked a lot whenever it rained and the furniture inside was always covered with a coat of dirt and pieces of mud. They used only mud on top of reed screens under the tiles back then. As time went by, the reed screens had rotten away. Before my father died, he said he would have replaced the roof if he hadn’t had the disease. And I promised him that I would do the work that he was not able to.

After making several trips, I got everything ready for the project. Then I asked a fortune teller to choose a propitious date for me. It is a big event to remove the roof of the house in my home village. Fortunately it was a weekend and I was able to be there and personally take care of it. It took seven workers two days to complete the whole project. With the help of my two sisters, I managed to clear away all the mud and the remains of reed screens, which was a huge task for us.

Altogether I added five thousand tiles to the roof. Though the tiles were old ones, I used sheets of wood in place of reed screens and on top hydrated lime with ground rice stalk. With this new roof, the old house takes on a new look, much steady and no leaks of course. It will be a haven or a sort of Xanadu for me and family, away from the hustle and bustle of the city on weekends and vacations.