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Unit 4 Nettles
第四单元 荨麻
Alice Munro
艾丽丝·蒙罗
In the summer of 1979, I walked into the kitchen of my friend Sunny's house near Uxbridge, Ontario, an saw a man standing at the counter, making himself a ketchup sandwich.
1979年的夏天，我来到好朋友赛妮在安大略省的阿克斯布里奇的家中度假。在她家的厨房，我见到了他一在灶台旁正忙于做番茄酱三明治。
Years afterward, driving around in the hills northeast of Toronto with another man, I looked for the house. I tried to locate the road it was on, but I never succeeded. It had probably been torn down. Sunny and her husband sold it, a few years after I visited them. It was too far from Ottawa, where they lived, to serve as a convenient summer place.
几年后，我坐在另一个男子的车里围绕着多伦多东北部的山区，寻找那幢房子。我试着找到它所在的街道，但从未成功过。那房子可能已经被推倒。在我拜访过他们的几年后，赛妮和她的丈夫就把房子卖掉了。因为它离他们在渥太华的住处太远，不便作为夏天度假之地。
In the countryside where I lived as a child: wells would occasionally go dry in the summer. Our well was deeper than most, but we needed a good supply of water for our penned animals—my father raised silver fores and mink—so one day the well-driller arrived with impressive equipment and began the work of extending the hole down, down, deep into the earth until the water was found in the rock. From that time on we could pump out pure cold water no matter what the time of year and no matter how dry the weather. There was a tin mug hanging on the pump, and when I drank from it, on a burning day, I thought of black rocks where the water ran sparkling like black diamonds.
在我儿时所在的乡下，夏天井水偶尔干涸。尽管我家的井比大多数人家的要深些，但是父亲圈养的银狐、水貂需要大量的供水量。所以有一天掘井人带着让人难忘的掘井设备，开始了他的工作——扩充井深一直到有水的地方。从那时起，无论任何季节或者无论天气有多干燥，我们都能用泵摇出纯净冰凉的地下水。在水泵上挂有一个锡制的杯子，在灼热的天气，我用它来喝水的时候，我就想象着水流过黑色岩石时有如耀眼的黑宝石。
The well-driller was a man named Mike McCallum. He lived in the Clark Hotel, in the town close to our farm. He had come there in the spring and he would stay until he finished up whatever work he found to do in this part of the country. Then he would move on.
掘井人名叫迈克·麦卡乐姆。他住在一家叫克拉克的旅馆里，离我们农场很近。他春天就已经来到这儿，并要住到把这附近能找到的活儿都干完才离开，然后会继续到别处去。
Mike McCallum had a son who lived with him in hotel rooms or boarding houses, wherever he was working, and who went to whatever school was at hand. His name was Mike McCallum, too. He was nine and I was eight.
迈克有一个儿子，他和父亲一起住在旅馆或寄宿公寓。父亲在哪工作，他就会就近上学读书。他也叫迈克·买卡乐姆。那时他9岁，我8岁。
