In October or November 1985, my father and his college classmates, after several visits to the provincial capital, finally implemented the policy, assigned a job, became a full-time teacher, and were arranged to teach at Yuxia Middle School in a neighboring township.

Soon after my father came to Yuxia Middle School to teach, he helped my sister and me transfer to another school, but I don't remember the specific time, but I remember that I just arrived at Yuxia Middle School and took the mid-term exam.

After the reform and opening up, the Guanxia Commune was withdrawn, and as a village was merged into the countryside of the bath, the Dongling of the aunt's house and the Shangwangping of the aunt's family all belonged to the bath, and since then the following mode has been opened, two sisters and a younger brother, four cousins and three cousins, all have followed their fathers, not many of them are in high school, and one of them is not admitted to college.

I have the impression that the talent is actually good, such as the little sister, who was rated as a top three student in the region in elementary school, and several cousins and cousins also had excellent academic performance, and the awards were plastered all over the wall, but they all had problems in junior high school, and they became ordinary from excellent.

Reading and hard work are twin brothers, maybe my sister and I didn't take the lead, maybe it was the influence of social atmosphere, maybe it was the lack of correct guidance, maybe there were all of the above reasons, I still saw excellent grades in the first year of junior high school, and I began to decline in the second and third years of junior high school, some were not admitted to high school, and some were admitted to high school and gave up studying.

Yuxia Middle School is located at the foot of a hill in the northwest of Yuxia Village, with a tall and neat green cedar forest behind the forest farm, and an open rice field in front of it, in which a river flows, compared to the small river in front of my house, the river is deeper, the current is faster, the river is wider, and people are often drowned in deep water.

In my impression, the river has no name, and it meanders down the adjacent Chi'an Township to join the Nanyan River. Rivers like this in mountainous areas generally have names, and many places are named after rivers because of this, such as Liuxi Township, Shixi Township, Yuxi Township, and Shangfu Township.

The source of the river is the head of the "Old Yugong" dam, which has no name and no origin, and is rare. The "bath" under the bath is a transliteration, in fact, it is next to the stone character, there is no such word in the dictionary, except for the inscription with a long history, and the handwritten account, this word cannot be seen.

Later, I had the intention to search, but I didn't find the source, after the popularization of computers, the computer could not type this word, and since then it has been replaced by the word "bath", and now the previous milestones or stone carvings can be found on the roadside, and the word "bath" next to the stone word is on it.

For example, Shangfu, its name origin is very special, the source of the Nanyan River flows through Shangfu called Fuxi, rich in resources, fertile land, rich in products, known as the upstream Fuxi, the name comes from this.

The fields are in pieces, the radius is about three or four miles, there is a machine farming road in the middle, connecting the bath village, between the Qianmo, the fields are uncountable, several fields connecting the river and the school, are trampled into a solid field path.

On the other side of the river is the agricultural machinery factory, where my father's aunt, my aunt's family, lives.

The dormitory of the agricultural machinery factory is divided into upstairs and downstairs, one for each household, but there are three entrances, the front room is generally placed with labor tools or sundries, the middle is the living room, there are stairs rotating upstairs, generally used as a dining room, two rooms upstairs to live, there is a small patio behind it, which is convenient for full lighting, and the patio is followed by the kitchen.

At that time, it was quite a good architectural model, and when I first went to my aunt's house, I was very envious, the area was not as good as my house, but it was more reasonable, more comfortable, and more magnificent, and I always wanted to stay at my cousin's house for a few days.

With such a good house, his identity is still a farmer, and his life is still poor, so his cousin didn't get married until he was in his thirties.

I remember that my father used to take me to visit my aunt and mother-in-law, one of them was about eight or nine years old, and a new bridge was built on the river under the bath, not far in front of the agricultural machinery factory, and my aunt and grandmother took me to see it.

Now, it is a very ordinary stone arch bridge, but at the time, it looked trendy and magnificent, because it was not only made of cement, it was particularly tall, and there were neat rows of railings on both sides, which looked particularly high-grade.

Next to the new bridge is the old bridge, with a huge granite base into three bridge bases, the bridge base is tiled with three long granite stones, three people can walk side by side empty-handed, the stone surface is shiny, I don't know how many people have passed, before the new bridge is built, maybe this is the only passage.

No wonder my aunt and mother-in-law are so excited, showing off with a kind of satisfaction. Before the new bridge was built, it was probably the only way to connect the two shores.

The new bridge connects the bath and the county, and the highway passes through the gate of the agricultural machinery factory, opening up the passage between the mountainous area and the outside world, and inserting the wings of the mountainous area.

In their eyes, the old bridge is inconvenient, but in our eyes, we see an alternative scenery, there is a diversion canal next to the old bridge side by side, the channel is wide and flat, enough for a person to walk normally.

There are trees planted by predecessors on both sides, used to help stabilize the bridge foundation and river embankment, which are old, grow tall and dense, and the bridge base is also tenacious to grow clumps of "scar grass", which will cover the stone bridge and the canal, revealing the simple vicissitudes of the years.

There is also an irrigation canal in front of the school, which has a relatively large amount of water, which is drawn from the fourth-level power station, passes through the school gate, and flows down the foot of the mountain to the direction of the Jianjiao brigade. A section of the canal at the entrance was built into a staircase by the school to make it easier for students to wash their clothes.

Bounded by this irrigation canal, there is farmland in front, a school in the back, a playground, then a school building and a dormitory, which are located at the foot of the mountain and a dense forest of cedar trees in the back.

Rural middle schools may be such scenes, such scenes, perhaps the best reflection of rural children's thirst, study hard, one step forward may wash all the mud feet, out of the mountain village, there are modern cities, there are high-rise buildings, there is a vast world. One step backwards, it is possible to return to the countryside, inherit the ancestors, and continue to cultivate the fields.

Next to Yuxia Middle School, there is also a forest farm elementary school. At that time, there were many systems, divided into different categories, each into a system, such as a forestry system, a water and electricity system, a medical system, a reclamation farm, etc., some had their own primary school, some had their own high school, or technical secondary school.

This forest farm primary school, which belongs to the forestry system, has set up a forestry workstation under the bath, which is generally referred to as the forest station, and the primary school only enrolls the children of the forest station, so it is also called a children's school.

The county also has a forestry vocational high school for the forestry system, a hydropower vocational high school for the hydropower system, and several reclamation farms also have their own primary, junior and senior high schools.

Such a school, and all have a sufficient source of students, it can only be said that there are too many people born in that era, in fact, each township generally has two junior high schools, such as Huibu Middle School and Zha Village Middle School, Yuxia Middle School and Guanxia Middle School.

Up to now, these vocational high schools or high schools have disappeared, and there is only one ordinary high school and one vocational high school left in the county, and the number of junior high schools has also decreased sharply, with only one in each township and township, and the number of students has also dropped significantly.

The number of primary schools is even smaller, for example, the Fengyuan Primary School I attended, which has long been withdrawn, and I went to see it a few years ago, and it was overgrown with wild grass and used as a bullpen by the people of Shixiang Village. The remaining rural primary schools generally have only first, second, and third grades, and in many village primary schools, there are only a few students in one grade, and there are even more teachers than students.

Coming to the side of the road in Yuxia Village, there is a small road leading west to Yuxia Middle School, passing through several hills, turning around the foot of a mountain, and the first thing that appears is the forest farm elementary school, which is adjacent to Yuxia Middle School, and a row has been built along the foot of the mountain.

The architectural style of Linchang Primary School is unique, there is only one, two floors up and down, divided into two sides before and after, the wall is all granite, a piece is built, the cement is used to hook the joint, it has special characteristics, outside the wall on the east side, one left and one right built two stairs upstairs.

The floor is made of wood, the materials are exquisite, heavy and sturdy, and the downstairs is the lower class classroom, the upper class classroom, the teacher's office, and the teacher's accommodation is also upstairs.

Compared with Yuxia Middle School, the construction of the children's school is not only better in materials, but also in the classrooms with lime powder walls. The floor and corridor in front of the classroom are paved with cement, dry and flat. The windows are glazed and in good condition.

Side by side, separated by a wall, is the third grade classroom of Yuxia Middle School, the wall foundation of Linchang Primary School, which is flushed with the eaves, forming a barrier, and the rain washes into a small ditch, which serves as the dividing line between the two units.

Yuxia Middle School has six independent buildings, the teaching building and the auditorium are buildings, and the others are bungalows, roughly forming an east-west line, which is different from the style of Huibu Middle School.

In the past, the third junior high school classroom was distributed in a stepped pattern, and then the first junior high school classroom and the girls' dormitory, built in a straight line, separated by twenty or thirty meters from each other, the same size and shape, single-row bungalows, each building with about eight or nine classrooms.

In the middle of the first classroom and the girls' dormitory, the school building stands slightly in the back seat, embedded in the hillside. The first three sides of the hillside were piled with stones to form a square platform, and the back was walled to form a courtyard.

The first place on the quadrangular platform is a small garden, and a passage in the middle divides the garden into two parts, with five or six wide steps going down, connecting the girls' dormitory of the first classroom through a cement corridor, and three steps as a step into the hall of the teaching building.

In the middle of the hall, a corridor runs from east to west, and a wooden staircase revolves to the second floor, which is about two meters wide, leaning against the wall on one side and building handrails on the other.

At the bottom of the stairs there is a wooden shelf, and in the square cabinet at the top, a black and white TV is locked so that the teachers can sit and watch it, and the students are not allowed to watch it, and of course no student dares to watch TV here.

As a teacher's child, I was not allowed to watch, and later it became a teacher's dormitory, and when I lived upstairs with my father, I only came back from self-study at night, and I secretly took a few glances before going up the stairs, and my steps were very slow, so I could take a look at it more.

Next to the TV cabinet, there is a narrow passage that connects to the narrow back door of the teaching building, leading to the back yard, where there seem to be several tall citrus trees, which are used as vegetable patches by the teachers' families and are rarely visited.

The walls of the building are made of blue bricks, stacked horizontally, without whitewashing, which has a unique charm, but in the middle part of the front, a white wide band of lime is painted, and a few big characters are written in red paint, and I don't remember what is written.

The interior walls are all plastered with lime, and some rooms seem to be separated by bamboo fences, and a thick layer of mud is pasted on them, and the lime is plastered, and in some places the mud falls off, and you can see the bamboo partitions.

The corridor has a narrow staircase to the east, connecting the cement road leading to the auditorium and the cafeteria, and to the west to the cement road leading to the toilet.

The garden in front of the building is surrounded by half-height tree walls in both sections, and there are a few landscape trees and some flowers and plants. On both sides of the passage, four prefabricated cement slabs were piled with stones, forming two rows of leisure chairs, and at the end of the chairs, on the wide steps, there were two particularly thick and tall metasequoias.

The branches are similar to ordinary cedar trees, but the leaves are needle-shaped like pine trees, growing taller than the teaching building, adults can't hold them, the fine lines are erected and arranged, intermittently leading to the tree, vigorous with a strong rhythm of life, the branches are luxuriant in midsummer, and the needles are withered in winter, which is particularly eye-catching.

Directly opposite the teaching building, is a basketball court, the cement pillar supports the wooden blue board and the iron blue frame on it, the cement is poured into a standard field, and it may also be the only standard basketball court in the township.

The long open space in front of the classroom is a playground, except for the basketball court, it is all dirt floor, and physical education classes are generally on the basketball court, and the teachers and students of the school do radio gymnastics, which is generally in front of the first classroom of junior high school.

Like the cafeteria, the auditorium was located in an east-west direction, tall, wide and empty, and had been used as a boys' dormitory, and the canteen was a row of three or four bungalows, which may have been requisitioned for part of the farmland, and was the farmland across a ditch.

There is a path behind the cafeteria that leads to a small mountain village deep in the col, and then up to Dongling, which is a shortcut from Dongling to the bath. There is a stream in the col that does not flow into the farmland, and a dam has been built.

The cedar forest stretches from the back of the school to the hill, dense but not closed, and the forest station thins the trees to create a wide dirt road that can be opened to traffic, and there are several paths that run through the cedar forest, two of which are connected to the school, one behind the cafeteria and one in the middle of the second and third grade classrooms.

This is Yuxia Middle School, the classroom is the main battlefield, the surrounding fields, the river bank in front, the mountains and forests behind, the stone bridge in the distance, and the embankment in the col are all learning positions, and you can see weak figures holding books everywhere.