When I was in the first grade, a mechanical pencil cost two a piece, and at that time, two cents of pocket money was only enough to buy a few pieces of candy. And since I was ten years old, I found that my family seemed to be very poor, and I never asked my parents for pocket money. At that time, the concept was that if you wanted money, you should work hard to earn it.

I don't have pocket money, and I need to buy pencils, erasers, or study materials to go to school. At that time, it was difficult to ask my parents for more than a dozen yuan. Dad sold vegetables, loved to leave a little money to play cards, and gave most of the money to Mom to save. Mom thinks that Dad has money to play cards, so he must have saved a lot. And my father felt that all the money from selling vegetables was given to my mother, and I should ask my mother for money if I needed it. The two shirked each other, my father asked me to ask my mother for money, and my mother asked me to ask my father for money. And I was in a dilemma, and I was anxious. When the teacher asked us to pay the test paper fee, I couldn't get the money from my parents, and I was even more at a loss and didn't know what to do. That's when I realized the importance of money. If I had money, I wouldn't need to ask for it.

At that time, I heard that someone in the opposite village collected Fushou snails and fed them to the ducks, two cents a catty. On weekends or summer vacations, at about six or seven o'clock in the morning, I would follow my sisters to the fields with plastic bags to catch snails. At that time, the plastic bag was a nylon bag for compound fertilizer, and when the fertilizer ran out, the bag could be cleaned and kept for rice or other things.

In the summer, the water is warm in the morning, and the grass or vegetable leaves pulled in the field are thrown into the ditch, and there will inevitably be a large number of snails roosting there in the morning. By noon, when the temperature rises, the snails burrow into the soil. Therefore, the best time to catch the snail is before 10 o'clock in the morning.

The ditch is covered with leaves and grass, and in turn, the snails float on the leaves to eat the leaves, or float on the grass to eat the leaves, and some hide in the soil underneath to perch. I need to bend over, hold a small bucket in my left hand to fill the snails, and my right hand to catch the snails. I grabbed a small bucket and poured it into a plastic bag.

Although it seems simple to catch Fushou snails, it is not easy to hold on for three hours in the morning, and bending over will actually cause back pain. And as the temperature gradually rises, the sun is shining, and the sun will be covered with sweat.

The snail is blocked by leaves and grass, and the snail underneath is not clear, so it can only be groped by hand. And once the leaves and grass are rotten, the water is muddy, and the bottom will be difficult to see. And there is everything in the soil, and it is possible to step on glass slag with both feet, or the hard shell of a dead Fushou snail. My hands would touch all sorts of strange things, sometimes water snakes, sometimes fish, and they and I were taken aback by each other. Sometimes, the hand will be scratched by glass slag or Fushou snail shell or sharp stone. Once you get scratched, there will inevitably be pain. Slip your hands and feet out of the water, and the injured area must be bloody. And I don't want to go home if I get hurt, the desire to make money is greater than the psychology of being persuaded to quit by being injured, I will endure the pain and continue to catch the Fushou snail.

Of course, we can't catch snails all day, we have other things to do. Mom won't let our children catch snails all the time, and we need to do the farm work in the fields. So, we can catch up to nine o'clock. If you are lucky, you can catch fifty or sixty catties in three hours, plus the two sisters caught it, a total of about two hundred catties. It was too heavy, so we would pedal bicycles or tricycles to sell them, and sometimes my mother would help us sell them. And we went home for breakfast, and then we went to work in the fields.

Fifty or sixty pounds in three hours, it can be sold for ten yuan. However, there are also three hours when the Fushou snail under the plastic bag is suffocated, and the price will inevitably be halved. The money from the sale is my own, and I make money through my own efforts, and I am happy in my heart. However, most of the money is saved for school supplies, and only a small amount of money is used to buy snacks to treat yourself for your hard work.

When you're unlucky, there is no grass or vegetable leaves in the ditch, and there are bound to be fewer snails. We need to go to the river to catch the weeds, but this kind of place is very dangerous, and it is easy to fall into the river. I heard that there were children in the neighboring village who caught the snail and fell into the river and drowned. While making money, life must come first. Places that are too dangerous, we rarely go. I fished in my own field or in the field next door for three hours and then went back.

It's not like there are dozens of catties to catch Fushou snails every day. In one place, there are so many Fushou snails, if you catch them today, they will decrease accordingly tomorrow. It also takes a certain amount of time for the snails to breed and grow, not to mention, in winter, the snails have to hibernate, and the number is greatly reduced. In this way, even if you are busy for three hours in the morning, you can't catch twenty pounds. So, we often come to catch it every once in a while.

Another way to make money is to take advantage of the lunch break to pick up scrap and sell it. Sometimes they go to the fields to pick up abandoned pesticide plastic bottles, and sometimes they pick up drink bottles, beverage cans, cartons, paper sheets, scrap iron, etc. If you're lucky, you'll be able to pick up abandoned wires. Cut the plastic skin of the wire, and the copper wire inside can be sold, and it is also worth more money. However, the wires were rarely picked up, and most people took them home. However, I didn't really make much money picking up scrap because there were a lot of people picking up at that time, and I didn't have much to pick up. What's more, this picking up waste is similar to picking up Fushou snails, and there are certain regional restrictions. It's impossible for us to run too far to pick it up, and the same piece is not available every day, so we need to pick it up every once in a while.

When it comes to the final exam, after the exam, I will search out those test papers, homework books, and things that I think are useless and sell. However, because the selling price is cheap, even if all of them are searched, they will not be sold for ten yuan.

I heard that there is money to be made by doing manual work, braiding bracelets, stringing beads, and two cents a piece. However, because our children are impatient, they can't sit still, and their attention is often easily diverted. So, often you don't make a few dollars a day. This lucrative manual work was soon abandoned.

There is also a kind of wild vegetables that are sold, and wild vegetables mainly include purslane, plantain, etc. At that time, the wild vegetables in the field were the most purslane, dense, and the greens were crowded so that there was no place to grow. My parents said that the wild vegetables were dug up and sold by themselves, and the money was their own. At that time, I felt that there was another way to make money, not to mention how happy I was. However, it is also difficult to dig wild vegetables to sell, and I dig them myself, and I have to wash the soil on the roots. After washing, they are tied into bundles and handed over to their parents to sell with the vegetables. At that time, if you were lucky, you could sell it for a few bucks a morning.

Finally, vegetables are easy to sell, and when prices rise, parents will be in a better mood. They would reward us with two dollars a day to encourage us to pull more weeds or help with cutting vegetables.

I've heard that long hair can be sold for money, but we can't sell it. It's not because of the parents who suffer from the body's hair and skin, it's mainly because of the lack of nutrition since childhood, and the hair is dry, even if it is sold, no one wants it. Besides, it's impossible for our parents to let us keep our hair that long. As soon as the long hair reached the shoulders, we had to cut it, and I thought we were sloppy. There are many girls in the family, and long hair often falls everywhere, and it is troublesome to sweep it up.