I was born in a very remote small mountain village in western Gansu. When we were young, we lived in the best of the old family houses. The old house was built by a great-grandfather. It is a typical Jiangxi house. There are three rooms in it. There are a box house and a hall on two floors. The bricks and tiles are very elegant. There are also ancient poems and paintings on the eaves. I remember one poem is “Suijian Dejiang”, which reads “Moving Boats and Smoking Smoke, and the Sun and the Moon Are Worry.” After I grew up a little bit, my father built a kitchen next to the first main house, and then surrounded a yard in the open space adjacent to the second main house behind the kitchen. I was still small at that time, and felt that the yard was very large. In fact, the area is only the same as that of a main room.
There is a long and long bluestone slab road at the door of the house. On the side of the road is a narrow canal. When the spring rain leaps, the water starts to gurgling. The bluestone slabs covered with rainwater looked greasy and had a faint ancient meaning. As soon as the wind blew, the pear blossoms and plum blossoms on the shore landed in the flowing canals, and also fell on the bluestone slabs. This scene, even today, many years later, is still full of deep poetry and painting.
There are three large ponds at the entrance of the village. Flocks of geese and ducks look for food and play in the ponds, and women are chatting and chatting on the shore. In the clear water, we can see the swaying aquatic plants and the fish and shrimp swimming. There is a well beside the pond. The well water springs out all year round, and it is cold in winter and warm in summer. There is a bush of shrubs near the well. In the hot summer, the little friends took the leaves of the shrubs, rolled them into cups, and drank water in the wells again and again. .
2
My father was a good tailor when he was young, and brought three apprentices at the peak of his career. His father was handsome and upright. He was famous for ten miles, but he didn’t interact with people. He seemed to have a kind of independent and arrogant legacy, but he was devoted to his wife and children. In memory, my father bought me all the delicate supplies before I was an adult. In the third grade of my elementary school, my father bought me a stylish and compact red electronic watch. It was in 1984. Many children in the city did not receive this treatment. When I was in junior high school, my father bought me a pen, one of which was a champagne-colored one. The pen is also engraved with exquisite patterns, which is expensive; when I was in the third year of my junior year, my father sent my brother to the provincial capital to go to college. When he returned, he bought me a pleated black waist skirt and a phoenix piano. The quality of the skirt Especially good. I wore it for many years. It started as an ankle. After two years, it was short. It was cut into a knee-length skirt.
I miss many more winter days with warm sun. My father would pick my ears and cut my nails in the sun in the yard. My father was sitting on a chair. I moved a small bench next to him, and lay my head on his knees. My father used a delicate white fungus spoon, and he put what he had taken on a piece of white paper. Sometimes I pull out a lot and my father will make fun of me dirty. And I still miss the warm sunshine when my father drew my ears, and the lazy and comfortable weather under the sun.
My father cut my nails with professional nail clippers or small nail clippers. These two things were also rare in the countryside at the time. I just need to stretch out my two hands. There were two results of the early “organization”. One was that I could not cut my nails with a nail clipper in my life, because my left hand could not repair my right fingernails. I could only use nail clippers, so that when I was in college, I found that the boys sitting behind me could Use your nail clippers to lightly repair all your nails and be amazed. The second is that my nails are trimmed very often. I like cleanliness. I saw Yang Liping’s ghostly and tangled nails dancing in the video a few times, and I felt deeply witchy and creepy.
When I was a kid, I was looking forward to the New Year, not only because I could go to relatives and friends to wear new clothes, but also because I could write the Spring Festival couplet with my father a few days ago. My father’s attitude towards writing the Spring Festival couplet was solemn and prudent, and he would write it with fanfare for several days. He first cut out the red paper, spread out his pen and ink, and then wrote carefully, which was solemn. My elder brother and I would be on the sidelines, help my father spread a sheet of paper, hand a pen, and occasionally tell a joke. Once, my brother told me that there was a family member in our village who posted the spring couplet written on the door of his bedroom, which made me laugh crazy.
Sometimes, my father and I felt itchy when I watched my father write intently, so the two started a writing brush contest. Once, I wrote a word of “snow” with my brother, and gave it to my father for judgment. My father looked at the “Snow” I wrote, and nodded and smiled. My heart was about to ecstasy, and then he jumped out: “Well, it is very good, and it looks like a rabbit! (When I was a kid, my family called me ‘Rabbit. “The elder brother beside him immediately burst into a proud smile.
3
My mother’s hands are very clever. She can make all kinds of shoes. Cloth shoes are comfortable and delicate. I remember when I was in elementary school, my mother also made two pairs of leather shoes for me, a pair of flat-heeled round lace-up shoes, for school girls only; a pair of half-heeled round-mouthed, quite fashionable. Probably because the quality of the leather is not very good, both pairs of shoes are very tight to wear, so that I eliminated them after a few wears.
My mother also knitted me a rusty red snow cap, and now this hat seems to be extinct. However, I liked the two streamers hanging on my chest. When she was young, she was an actor in the squad. On a winter night at that time, the family was around the brazier, and while mother was making shoes, she taught us to sing “Liuyang River”, “Nanniwan” and “Red Plum Praise”. A few days ago, watching a literary party celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, I heard a piece of music that was taught by a mother near a brazier when I was a child.
Unlike the warmth of my mother’s singing, the warmth my brother gave me was mostly silence. My elder brother is four years old and I have loved my younger sister since childhood. Although my hometown is in a corner, it is rich in iron ore underground, and it was developed the year I was born. For a while, we could also enjoy the public bathroom on the mine for free. When I was a kid, I used to take a bath with my brother, who went into the men’s bathroom and I went into the women’s bathroom. I was very small at that time, I couldn’t reach the bathroom faucet switch with my extended hand, and every time I went to wash the faucet that others didn’t turn off.
But one day, there was no place where the water was on and no one was washing, so I ran to the men ’s bathroom to find my brother. I asked my brother to go to the women’s bathroom to help me turn on the faucet, but no matter how much I begged or threatened, my brother didn’t say a word and didn’t go to help me. I was sad and puzzled: “Why is my brother suddenly so unkind?”
Now I want to come. At that time, my eight- or nine-year-old brother already knew that there was a difference between men and women, but I had no such consciousness as a private men’s bathroom. After coming to live in Hangzhou, I went to the public bath again. I would pay attention to the women who took off bathing, but the look was not so beautiful. Especially in the locker room of a certain swimming pool, I saw an elderly woman with a shower, her lower abdomen kept hanging down, covering her thighs, and suddenly she was sad. Aging is really a terrible thing. It is no wonder that 72-year-old Hemingway committed suicide by shooting himself, maybe because he couldn’t face the sorrow and desolation of aging?
4
I am six years older than my sister and naturally have to do a lot of responsibilities as a sister, but my sister also gives me a lot of fun. The younger sister was naturally clever and mischievous. Even if the mother hid the snack, she could find it by the smell even if she hid in the hidden corner gap. One summer afternoon, she sneaked up to me, unrolled her flower shorts, and found out two little round cookies, one for me and one for her own enjoyment, and repeatedly told me not to tell my mother . However, I didn’t know which one was wrong, I still told the secret, and my sister naturally had to scold me.
When I was a kid, I had a special hobby: I liked to give people haircuts, and I decided to go to haircuts after graduating from elementary school without entering middle school. However, it is difficult for me to find a practical object for this habit, so I had to use my sister as an experimental product. At first, my sister was very cooperative due to my authority as a sister, no matter if I thought of her head as a toilet lid or a yin and yang head. But after a long time, she was unwilling to cooperate with me. When my hands were itchy, I had to ask my sister to be my “customer”, but the money was paid down. Each time, I will give my sister two to three dollars at the market price at that time. Thinking about it now, I still feel funny.
Sisters’ feelings are always good. I was in poor health when I was in college. I went to bed with my sister when I returned home on a summer vacation, and when I woke up, I found that the blanket was all rolled up by my sister, and I coughed because of it. Although I complained to my sister, at night I still wanted to sleep with her. Who knows, when I woke up the next morning, I found that the blanket was all on me, and my sister slept on my right, curled up into a small ball. She was still deep in sleep, probably in order to prevent herself from rolling away the blanket, and kept this alert posture in her sleep. There was a sudden surge of warmth in my heart, and she quietly covered her with a blanket. Now, although twenty years have passed, the picture of that summer morning has always been in my mind.
Time flies, the years of the old house, and the memories of childhood are all settled in my memory like Jiguang Pianyu, quiet and warm.