"Knock, knock, knock..."
Yang Ge, with a nail clamped between his lips, focused on affixing a small sign—carved with the words "Huang's House"—onto the door of the dog's kennel.
The rough courtyard had already undergone a drastic transformation; there was a new pond filled with fresh water in the northeast corner, next to which several tall, slender bamboo plants towered over the courtyard wall. The morning sun shone through the bamboo, casting mottled shadows across the yard.
In the middle of the east wall, a moon-shaped gate had been cut, leading to a small patch of open, flat land for vegetables. It was crisscrossed with small paths laid with cobblestones and encircled by a fence.
And in the northwestern corner was still the grape trellis. Beneath it stood a square stone table and a small bamboo chair on one side. Around the base of the courtyard wall, near the trellis, a circle of flowerbeds had been built, filled with the fresh blooms of little wild chrysanthemums.