Nowadays, as the temperature on the planet gradually warms, we can feel that winter is not as cold as it used to be.
In the Jianghuai land south of the Huai River, where I live, the days of snow are decreasingWinter fun such as snowball fights and snowman building has gradually become a rare activity.
The most memorable thing in my memory is when I lived on the Tibetan Plateau. On the road in winter, the snow has been crushed by people and vehicles, and it has long been frozen into a hard "ice rink". On the way to work on a bicycle, it's easy to fall. In order to avoid the risk of "close contact" with the vehicle, I had to walk to work two or three stops away.
After migrating to the land of Jianghuai, although it is not as cold as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, heavy snow will still come in winter as promised。In the 80s of the last century, when I opened the door one morning, I found that the yard was knee-deep with snow, and it was extremely difficult to walk. It took me an hour and a half to walk to the factory, which was two stops away from my home.
In recent years, Jianghuai, which is at the junction of the north and south, has rarely seen decent heavy snowfall。In the past few winters, there have been occasional snowfalls or two, but they melted quickly. Wanting to take children to play in the snow is already a rare and luxurious thing.
What I remember the most is the days when my family lived on the shore of Qinghai Lake in the 60s of the last century.
At that time, my father was the political commissar of the guard regiment at the 221 factory, a remarkable atomic bomb base, and my family lived in an adobe house left behind by local farmers and herdsmen.
The bitter winter is coming. Although there was a fire in the house to keep warm, there was no well, so you had to go far to the river to wash clothes. When I was in elementary school, I once went to the river with my mother to do laundry.
When the mother came to the river with a large basin of clothes, she found a hole in the ice that had been hewn out. The ice was slippery, and I crouched down cautiously. Because the ice was half a foot thick, my mother had to kneel on the ice and put her soapy clothes into the ice hole to rinse. I knew my mother's hands must have been numb from the cold, because I often felt numb when I washed my hands with cold water at home.
When my mother finished washing her clothes and tried to stand up, she found that her knees were tightly glued to the ice. My mother struggled to get to her feet, and I saw some corduroy pom-pom balls on her pants stuck to the ice, leaving some blue marks on them. This "special shot" remained in my heart forever ......
Today, there are still days of ice and snow in the north of China, but in the south – including Hefei, where I live, it is rare to see heavy snowfall, and even when it does, it disappears quickly.
Those days of ice and snow, those extremely difficult days, have become precious memories in my life.