After retiring, I had time to clean the storeroom. The old doors were hard to open, like I was unsure about my new life. Inside, it was a mess, with old belongings from years ago and even a family of foxes had lived there.

I pulled on work gloves, then moved a box of motor oil out of the way, intending to clear some space. I reached all the way back, and my hand hit something hard. What could that be? I pulled out a round metal tin (罐). With one finger, I cleared a thick coating of dirt from the top to uncover a green background with white flowers. Could the tin hold a hidden treasure?

Little by little, I removed the cover until it suddenly came off and fell to the ground. I held my breath. Inside were several yellowed envelopes. I opened one, and a sense of despair swept through me.

Just then, my wife Peg walked in. “What’s that?”

“Seeds (种子),” I said. Nothing but seeds.

Peg came over to examine the tin’s contents. “Look, here’s a letter.” She held up a faded envelope with a three-cent stamp and a postmark of May 13, 1940. Before I was born! The letter was addressed to the original owner of our house.

“‘I am sending you the seeds of the hibiscus (木槿) you admired when you stopped at our tourist home last year,’” Peg read. “‘Plant when the ground becomes warm, and do not be alarmed if they do not come up for several weeks — they are slow to grow.’”

“Huh,” I said. “Eighty years old. I wonder if they’ll still grow?” I had several hanging pots and a few flower beds, but I was no expert. I took a plastic box where I’d planted potatoes, shook the hibiscus seeds out of the envelope, pushed them into the soil and set the box in the sun.

“What are my chances?” I asked my neighbor, an experienced gardener. “Not very good,” he said, “but maybe… if they were packed right and kept dry and dark.”

With the seeds planted, I checked the box every day, eager for any sign of life.

Just when I was about to give up, something astonishing happened.

I used to play football when I was a little kid. Okay, let’s face it. I was never really a little kid. I was so big that I got to play football a whole year ahead of my friends. Our football league didn’t have an age limit, but it had a weight requirement. If you were heavy enough, you got to play. I was heavy enough at the age of eight.

The only problem was, by the time I turned ten I was too heavy. You had to weigh a certain amount to start playing, but if you weighed too much they made you stop. Not playing would be just fine with me. I would be happier sitting at home reading a book.

Dad was one of the team’s big sponsors and friends of the coach, so I figured I would let him down and that quitting wasn’t an option. I went, day after day, and week after week... until I was eleven and weighed more than two hundred pounds. I thought that would be the end of it, once and for all.

However, my coach came up with a bright idea to help me lose weight. The very next practice he presented me with a T-shirt made out of a black garbage bag. “Put it on,” he said, pointing out the holes for my head and arms. “Start running around the practice field.” “Koop going, Fireplug (消防栓),” other players would shout. “Fireplug” was the new name they gave me. Although no one ever explained it to me, I figured it had something to do with me being shaped like it.

Every day in practice, I had to run in that stupid garbage bag. My short fat legs weren’t exactly comfortable, and often I’d trip and fall. The other players would laugh. At that moment, I asked myself, “Why? Was I being punished for something? Wasn’t the running, sweating and pain enough?” I suddenly realized that I’d been knocking myself out for something I didn’t even want to do in the first place!

It was then that I decided I wouldn’t play football anymore.

Much to my surprise, my dad was on my side.

Never in my wildest imagination did I picture myself standing on the back of a running horse. I’m not a cowgirl and don’t even ride horses for pleasure.

But I was doing a television fitness show, and someone in the group had the bright idea that we should go to the rodeo (牛仔竞技表演) grounds and ask the trick rider if they could teach me a stunt (特技表演) to do on camera. We could use this short video as the new opening to the show. I agreed the stunt would be eye-catching and prove how flexible a fit person can be.

That was how I ended up at the rodeo grounds with a camera group, watching the remarkable performances of three talented young cowgirls. Once their show was over, we approached them, detailing our ideas for the television show.

The cowgirls asked me which particular stunt I was interested in learning. I especially liked one stunt — one of the girls led a horse to continuously and slowly run around the grounds while one of the other girls ran across the grounds toward a small trampoline (蹦床). It was timed perfectly so that she jumped onto the trampoline, up into the air, and then onto the horse’s back. As she landed on its back, she stood up and stretched her arms outward as the horse continued slowly running. It looked impressive.

They talked me through the necessary moves, stressing the timing since I would need to be in the air at the correct time when the horse ran past. I alone would judge the speed of the horse and my own speed to jump onto the horse on time.

It was clearly difficult. I was a little hesitant, afraid of being unable to do that well and slowing down the filming. But I knew the most important thing for me was to concentrate on the task at hand.

The first time out, I hit the horse’s back part and fell to the ground.

At 6: 00 pm, we completed the stunt filming, with my knee injured.

When we were finally dismissed from the last class of the day, the students streamed out of the classrooms. It was another boring day after school. I dragged my feet home as I sighed. Yet another uneventful day, I thought. Little did I know that the day would take a turn for the worse.

The lift lobby (电梯间) of my flat was old and dirty. The walls, which were painted white, had been dirtied over many years. I reached my flat’s lobby, and pressed the lift button and went in. Just then, Mrs Lim, my elderly neighbour, hobbled (蹒跚) in. She looked ancient with tissue paper white hair, wearing a faded old-fashioned dress. I held the lift door open, flashing a friendly smile, and politely greeted her. I asked her how she felt that day and pressed the buttons. She thanked me for being so polite, then we were silent for the rest of the ride.

The lift fell down increasingly fast. There were loud clanking sounds here and there while the lift grew slower and slower. My heart beat hard and fast as my hands turned cold and wet with sweat. Unfortunately, the lift came to an abrupt stop at the fifth floor. I pressed the buttons hard several times, but it was of no help. The lights on the buttons had gone out. It soon dawned on me that we were trapped. An icy fear crept up my spine. Mrs Lim was hysterical (歇斯底里).

“We will never get out!” she cried with her face pale. It had become a colourless mask. I had no time to lose. I pressed the bell in the lift immediately. The sound was surely deafening, but what other choice did I have? Mrs Lim burst into tears. I tried my very best to comfort her, telling her that everything would be all right and that we needed to find out how to get out safely. Mrs Lim began having trouble breathing, and I immediately helped her sit down and loosened her collar.

Paragraph 1: Several minutes passed, but no help came.

Paragraph 2: Bang! My hopes were lifted when I heard the firefighters on the other side of the lift door.

It was the second day I left my lovely hometown for the city to live with my grandfather, who was taking me to the supermarket for the first time.

“I forgot. You’ve never seen a supermarket before, have you?”

I shook my head, indicating indifference to the surroundings.

“Imagine it like this,” Grandfather said, “This store’s speaking to you. It is telling you some of the new things that you’ve never learned.” I did not understand.

“A trading post in a remote town only shows you a small part of the world. This store speaks of a world that is a very big place.”

“So I should just forget my roots, is that it?” Angry and upset, I was expressing my reluctance to live here.

“Absolutely not. Carry it with you, so that you may freely navigate in both worlds, big and small.”

Ignoring words from him, my gaze fell on a woman selecting some green apples. I thought so what if it’s a big world, but I’d rather purchase whatever in a trading post for they only stocked one type of apples, at least all ripe!

Noticing the expressions on my face, Grandfather chuckled. He gracefully walked over to the table where the green apples were and selected half a dozen.

“You’ll get a stomachache if you consume green apples,” I said.

Grandfather appeared as though he was going to laugh again, but he didn’t.

There was no word any more. I followed him while Grandfather filled the cart with our necessities, encountering numerous new items. I was burning to ask him what those strange foods were, and what their flavors and origins were. However, I kept it in my mind that I was supposed to be bored and uninterested in anything, thus, keeping silent all the way.

As we exited the supermarket, Grandfather was smiling as if he understood some private jokes. About halfway back, he gestured for me to stop, bending over to find the plastic bag.

注意：

1. 续写词数应为 150 左右；

2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。

Paragraph 1: He picked out a green apple.

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Paragraph 2: With his words in mind I couldn’t help taking a bite, too. _

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“You should throw me in the bin, Mummy.”

Those are the words my son say to me, words a mother should never hear their child say. When I asked him why, he told me that like his digger, he was broken and could not be fixed. My heart cracked a little more at that and I knew that, I had to try and find a way to bring back the joy into our world.

At age two, he was diagnosed with type two diabetes and he was “just losing his puppy fat”. My son grew sicker and sicker until eventually, he was admitted into hospital.

Motherhood changed in that moment. I went from “Mummy” to nurse, always keeping a watch for signs he might be in danger from his own body. It can be hard to find the balance between the demands of being a full-time carer for a child with illness and being a mother. In those early days, it broke me to hear him beg and cry for me not to hurt him with needles again. The risks that come along are as big as they can be: blindness, organ failure, coma, death. His life is, and always will be, dependent on the monitoring and assessment of all these factors.

Yet, I had to find a way to raise him to know that he could live it fully and with all his dreams within reach. I had to learn how to live with these two roles, just as he had to learn to live with the demands his body would place on him. What I had not expected was to find the way through in the mud and rubble (瓦砰) of a new-build social housing estate.

My husband, son and I moved to the new estate in Cumbria when my son was four. The back garden was nothing more than a patch of newly sown grass, and a thin layer of topsoil. Underneath that was rubble and rock. The site was a former industrial stoneworks, and but to us, it was a place of hope.