I was often sad about that ugly lump of rock right by the front of our house. It, a great black rock lay there, bovinely. Nobody knew when exactly it had been left there, so everyone simply ignored it. Only in harvest time, when the front yard piled with wheat and crops, Grandmother always said: "This ugly rock which took up so much space! We have had to move it sometime. "

Therefore, when Uncle's family was building a house, we wanted to use it to pile up a side of the house wall. However, because the rock was of an extremely irregular shape and neither sharp nor smooth, flat, what’s more, we could have used a chisel to break the rock up, but no one was willing to spend much energy; the riverbank was only a short distance away, and any old rock that we brought back from there would have been easier to use than this one. Then, when the house was nearly completed, Uncle also didn't want to use it when we were looking for something for the front steps. One year, there came a stonemason grinding a millstone for us. Grandmother said again: “just use this piece of rock instead of moving another rock from somewhere far away." The stonemason took a look at the rock, and shook his head: he thought the rock's texture too fine, and unsuitable for making the mill.

It didn’t’ t like white marble which words or flowers could be carved; nor was it smooth and polished like black granite which could be used to wash linen and beat cloth. It lay there silently in the yard with no shadow of locust tree and no flowers blossomed around it. Weeds began to grow and flourish that green moss and mottled black covered the rock. And we, as children, began to hate it. Once we even tried to move it off, but we weren’t’ strong. Although we swore it and kept away from it, there was nothing we could do----so we had to let this ugly rock lie there itself.

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