When the tide of reform and opening-up swept over the coastline, this machinery factory, bearer of glory and dreams, drifted like a tenacious ginkgo leaf carried by the seasonal winds of the era, settling in a rain-kissed town in Southern Shaanxi. My parents—that model couple tempered by the Educated Youth Movement—planted a plane tree beside the workshop road with hands still smudged with machine oil, etching my childhood into the rhythm of dawn and dusk marked by gears meshing. In my memory, the years peeled away layer by layer like dust from the red-brick factory walls, and the roar of the lathes gradually drowned in the clamor of the marketplace. I thought it would inevitably become a dust-covered specimen in an industrial museum, until one sun-drenched afternoon, I returned, pedaling along bicycle tracks laid down twenty years ago. Moss whispered on the mottled walls, rusted gears resonated in the silence, while sunlight streamed through the glass curtain walls of the smart workshop. Third-generation workers in uniforms operated CNC machine tools with orderly precision—time, it turned out, had never died here. It had merely transformed rust into osmanthus honey, letting each dawn and dusk sprout fresh rings of growth.