Everyone comes from childhood, but everyone has a different childhood experience.
Leo Tolstoy once said, "Happy families are all alike, and unhappy families have their own misfortunes." ”
I was born in the impoverished early sixties, living in a turbulent decade of catastrophe. My father was a "rightist" who was criticized and controlled. So, my childhood was like a colorful bottle with sweet, sour, bitter and salty ......
Inscription. 1. Primary school life
I studied in the first grade during the Spring Festival. Carrying the blue cloth schoolbag that my mother sewed for me, I carried a wooden table with two small benches on the table with my neighbor Xiaosi to the school classroom.
The enlightenment teacher is the homeroom teacher Liang Meihua, who teaches both Chinese and arithmetic. Before class, I would like to pay tribute to the great leader and wish him a long life.
The first lesson of the Chinese language is "Hooray!"."At that time, Hanyu Pinyin had not been promoted, and I directly recognized words. Mathematics is called arithmetic, and it is learned from numbers. Teachers teach us every day to "study hard Xi and make progress every day".
After entering the school, the teachers successively taught and sang revolutionary songs such as "Dongfang Hong", "I Love Beijing Tiananmen", and "Three Disciplines and Eight Attentions".
In the second semester, there was a meeting where our first-year students were to be "Red Soldiers" (not called Young Pioneers at that time). The teacher put a bright red scarf around the necks of the students, but the teacher didn't put it on me.
I don't understand why I didn't wear a red scarf because I had good grades in XiI realized later that my father was a "rightist".
During my years in primary school, I was not nervous or stressful about Xi. There was never any homework, no late self-Xi, and there were few exams, sometimes open-book exams.
I also heard the teacher talk about Zhang Tiesheng's handing over white papers and Huang Shuai's anti-trend. However, when the teacher heard that a student from a middle school in Henan Province committed suicide by throwing himself into the river because he was unwilling to learn a foreign language, I felt very terrified.
At that time, the school would organize various forms of activities for students. Criticism meetings, criticism meetings, story meetings, report meetings, and bittersweet meetings are often held.
The school also often rehearses theatrical programs and publicizes performances in the surrounding brigades and production teams. When I returned home at night, I often followed the older children and lined up to chant slogans, which was called the "evening call team" at that time.
The school also often organizes us to go to the nearby production team to do farm work. For example, in the summer, they help harvest wheat and help pull water weeds in rice fields. In autumn, I help harvest rice and help pick cotton. He often mowed cattle grass for the production team near the school, etc.
These labors, in the name of work-study, support agricultural production. It can be said that the school's labor education has been carried out vigorously and in a down-to-earth manner.
My last homeroom teacher at Baomiao Primary School was Mr. Bao Shurui, who taught Chinese.
Once, the teacher took us to harvest rice for the Baomiao 4 team. As a result of my carelessness, the scythe cut a cut in the big toe of my left foot, and blood flowed immediately.
The teacher immediately told me to stop and helped me to the water to wash my feet. The teacher tore a strip of cloth from his jacket, bandaged my torn toe, and told me to go home early.
I only attended Mr. Bao for one semester before I dropped out. For this reason, Mr. Bao also came to my house several times to persuade me to continue my schooling.
2. Domestic work
In childhood, children living in rural areas had to do chores and hard household chores all year round.
Cutting grass is an important job.
On Sunday and holidays, when it was just dawn, my mother called me to get up. I took a sickle and a basket on my shoulder, and went out into the field to mow the grass with my eyes blinded.
Our hometown is a plain, and grass grows on the roadside, beside the ditches, on the ridges of the fields, on the weirs of irrigation canals, on the edge of ponds and fish ponds, and ......in dense woods
Most of the grass growing on the side of the road is hairy grass, bagen grass, white flat grass, flytrap grass, bud grass, shovel head, and knotweed. The cow felt grass, water onion grass, small hair reed grass, artemisia grass, and many other weeds on the edge of the paddy fields are now unnamed.
In the morning, I can cut a basket full of grass, and then I will carry it to the place where the production team feeds the cattle, weigh it, and record the number of catties, and finally I can go home for breakfast. If you occasionally cut too much and too much, you need the help of the adults in the family to carry it back.
Due to the dew in the morning, when I returned home from mowing the lawn, my shoes and trouser legs were already soaked and covered with mud.
When you go to mow the grass at noon and in the afternoon, you can often ask a few partners to go with you. A few people talked and laughed, and before they knew it, they cut a large basket of grass, and then carried it back home.
Spread out the grass in front of the house to dry until it dries, and then bundle it up and pile it up in the pot house, where it is kept to feed the sheep or burn the pot.
Cutting the grass with a sickle is also sad work.
Find a place where there is grass, put down the basket, squat down, drag a handful of grass in your left hand, take a sickle in your right hand and cut it hard, and put the cut grass in the basket.
Sometimes I accidentally cut my finger, so I put the broken finger in water to wash it, spit a few mouthfuls of saliva on the wound, which is considered to be disinfected, grab a handful of fine sand and soil and apply it to the wound, and press it with the other hand for a while.
If the knife wound is serious and the knife edge is deep, tear off a strip of cloth from your body, wrap the wound, and wait until the blood is gone, even if it is treated, it will only take a few minutes, and then continue to mow the grass.
In those years, I don't know how many times my fingers have been cut by a knife, and Xi is used to it. It can be said that a few fingers are the old knife edge has not yet grown, and the new knife edge has reappeared.
To this day, I can still clearly see a few scars on the fingers of my left hand from the sickle when I was mowing the grass, which has become a lifelong memento.
There are also happy times when cutting grass. Sometimes a few buddies are tired from mowing the grass together and want to take a break.
I don't know who suggested that each person take a portion of the grass from his basket, and each person should take a small pile at a time, and arrange it neatly separately in a straight line.
Decide the order in the form of rock-paper-scissors, and at a distance of six or seven meters, take out the sickle in your hand and throw it at the haystack, and if the sickle hits someone's haystack, the grass can belong to the person who threw the sickle.
The tense atmosphere of throwing the scythe and the cheerful atmosphere of hitting are intertwined, and it is full of fun until the end of the game.
Cutting pigweed is also a must-do chore.
Every year from the beginning of spring, we would go out into the fields with a small sickle and a small basket on our arms to look for pigweed.
There are many young grasses and wild vegetables that piglets like to eat, such as white or red tender flat grass, tender plantain, knotweed, shepherd's cabbage, amaranth, dandelion, noodle vegetables, spiny tooth cabbage, like the common name iron shovel head, attached cotton seedlings, rotten feet, and many tender grasses and wild vegetables that can no longer be remembered and named.
In summer and autumn, the grass and vegetables that can be given to pigs are more abundant. For example, young bean grass, young corn seedlings, potato seedlings, melon seedlings, young leaves, aquatic plants, water chestnut seedlings and so on.
At that time, in addition to raising pigs, rural households also fed goats, sheep, rabbits, etc., and we rarely raised cattle there.
Therefore, it is necessary to often take the sheep out to graze where there is grass, and bring some young grass home to feed the rabbits. I remember that rabbits liked to eat a kind of grass commonly known as cat's eye.
Although mowing pigweed is a long-term chore, it is still very comfortable to see the piglets in the pigsty grow up day by day, because it has its own share of the fruits of labor.
Collecting firewood is an uninterrupted labor task in all seasons.
In spring, it is warm and cold. The windier it gets, the more we need to go out and pick up dry sticks or branches that have been blown off by strong winds, usually willow branches on willow trees are easily blown off by strong winds.
When we came out, we also carried a long bamboo pole, and an iron hook was tied to the end of the bamboo pole, and when we saw the dry branches of the tree, we hooked them down with the bamboo pole hook, and if necessary, we also had to climb the tree and cut off the dry branches with the sickle that we carried with us.
There are a lot of friends who come out to collect firewood. Sometimes everyone picks up very little. At that scene, I really felt a bit of "worrying about the cold weather", hoping that if the wind blew harder, more dry branches would fall from the trees.
When I was lucky, I was able to pick up a large bundle of dry branches, and I was completely free of the cold feeling, and I was happy to return with a full load.
After the autumn harvest, when the weather cooled down, we took our pockets and a wire about two meters long from our homes and went to the wild woods to string the leaves falling from the trees on the wire we carried around, like a string of sugar gourds.
When a string of wire is full, pull the leaves off the top of the wire, put them in the pocket you carry, and continue to string the leaves, and so on.
At that time, there were usually tung trees, poplars, plane trees, paulownia trees, mulberry trees, and peach trees in my hometown, and the leaves of these trees were large enough to be strung with wire.
Tree species such as locust trees, willows, elms, neem trees, and tsubaki trees, the leaves of the trees are very small, and it is not easy to use wire strings, so you can only sweep them into piles one by one with a large broom, and then collect them and pack them.
Winter, the cold season of the year, is coming. At that time, it seemed that the weather was much colder than it is now, and the snow was falling heavily. Long ice skates are often hung under the eaves, and there is a thick layer of ice in the ponds and ditches, so adults and children can skate.
In the same way, we took bamboo rakes and long bamboo poles from our homes, and carried baskets to collect firewood in the field.
In the field, use a bamboo rake to catch the leaves of dead grass and trees. At the edge of the ditch of the small river, the small reeds that were frozen were swept away with bamboo poles against the ice, and then the dry reeds were collected.
Collecting firewood in that weather, I shivered because of my thin clothing. The fingers could not be bent and stretched, and the surface of the hand was already frozen, swollen and frozen. The upper and lower gums kept fighting, and the ears were also frozen and swollen and bleeding, and it took a long time to recover.
If you are not careful, your shoes will fall into the icy water, and your feet will freeze and hurt. It is a pain that children today cannot understand, cannot imagine, cannot understand, and cannot bear.
Sometimes, if you accidentally scratch your jacket, pants and shoes, you will be severely scolded when you return home.
Cooking a pot is also an essential household chore.
Every day, the family has to eat, and it is essential to cook three times a day.
Use firewood, weeds, leaves, etc. to burn pots every day. The better firewood for burning pots is corn straw, cotton straw, wheat straw, dry sticks, dry branches, dry reeds, dry weeds, dry leaves, etc.
The hardest thing to burn is straw. It is said to be sun-dried, but it will return to moisture on rainy days. Put a handful of straw in the hearth, but it smokes but refuses to catch fire. It's easy to catch fire, but if you don't boil the fire, it will burn out immediately.
Burning a pot is not a good thing, it is scorching in the summer and sweating profusely. Winter is smoky and dusty. The house where the pot was burning, due to the smoke and fire for many years, caused the surrounding walls, wooden sticks, and grass to become dark and shiny, as uniform as if they had been coated with layers of authentic black paint.
My family sometimes burns charcoal in the winter. The coal was bought by my father from Suining County or in Gaoji Supply and Marketing Cooperative.
I once pulled a flatbed truck alone to the supply and marketing cooperatives on more than ten miles of road, and bought 200 catties of coal with charcoal tickets. In the end, it was very difficult to bring the coal home.
When using coal to burn the pot, you must find an old iron basin that you don't use in advance, put a little coal in the iron basin with a charcoal shovel, add some water and stir it, like mud, so that the coal can dry and wet evenly into a ball.
Then, find some hay and put it in the hearth to light the fire, and then add a little coal with a shovel to the burning hay, and gently pull the bellows with your hands.
After a while, the coal reaches the ignition point and starts to catch fire, and finally the coal is gradually added to the furnace, and the bellows are pulled hard to increase the wind force, which is the real stage of the pot.
The temperature in the charcoal furnace was very high, and the shovel was often burned red. Once, the porridge in the pot overflowed, and I hurriedly lifted the lid of the pot, and accidentally touched the shovel in the hearth, and the inside of my right calf was burned by the hot shovel, and it hurt my heart. He still has a two-centimeter-long scar.
Grinding was also a chore that I helped my mother with when I was a child.
The stone mill has gradually withdrawn from the stage of history, but when I was a child, there was a large stone mill in front of the door of every household in the countryside or in a corner of the yard, and some families also had a relatively small stone mill, which was an extremely important household utensil.
Its function is mainly to process corn kernels, wheat kernels, soybean grains, yam dices, etc., into flour or paste on the stone mill, and then use it to spread pancakes or make porridge.
Since the mother had to participate in the collective work of the production team during the day, she only grinded flour at night or before dawn.
I often helped my mother with grinding. At that time, I was short and thin, not as tall as the stone mill, and I was holding a wooden stick in both hands, and I was pushing the stone mill with my mother and turning it counterclockwise.
From time to time, the mother used an iron spoon to put grain and water into the grinding hole of the stone mill, and the grain was gradually flattened and crushed in the rotating stone mill, becoming extremely fine particles, which became flour, and then mixed with water, and finally the bottom tray of the grinding disc would continue to flow out of the crushed and even batter.
Sometimes the grinding time is too long, tired and can't keep up with the pace, constantly rotating around the stone mill, the mind is a little dizzy, and I am always sleepy and want to sleep. Therefore, the grinding stick often slips from the hand and falls to the ground, and the mother always reminds him from time to time, and sometimes reprimands him loudly.
Carrying water was also something I used to do as a child.
As far as I can remember, there were two wells in Zhuangzi, both to the south of Zhuangzi.
One of the wells, in the southeast corner of a small pond, is made of stone, which we call the Old Stone Well.
It's about seven or eight meters deep, and the diameter of the wellhead is about one meter. The water in the well is about three meters from the well's mouth, and in the summer there are several frogs floating on the surface of the well.
Another well is located on the edge of the field about 100 meters southwest of the old well, that is, directly south of the small pond, and is a cement well made of cement pipes one by one.
The depth of the well is about more than 10 meters, and the diameter of the wellhead is less than one meter, so we called it a gray well at that time, also called a machine well, for the people in the village to use water all year round and irrigation in the field on dry days.
For as long as I can remember, there were not many people patronizing the old stone well, and most of the people in the village went to the ash well to fetch water to eat, probably because the ash well was both new and deep.
I often carry two wooden barrels from my house to the ash well to get water. When they got to the well, they tied a rope about five meters long that they had with them to the beam of a bucket, and then slowly continued the bucket with a rope.
The water in the well is about three meters away from the wellhead, the bucket reaches the water surface, shake the rope left and right with your hands, let the bucket sink crookedly and gradually sink the water, and wait until the water in the bucket is completely filled, immediately lift the rope upwards until a bucket of water is lifted up and poured into another bucket, and then put the empty bucket down in the well to continue to draw water.
Finally, he staggered to his home with two buckets full of water.
I remember one winter when I went to the well to get water, because my hand was numb from the cold, my hand did not hold the rope, and the bucket fell into the well, so I had to go home and call my neighbor Shouming to help.
Now that I think about it, although the water source was abundant at that time, water was not valuable, but it was indeed not easy to eat well water every day.
Taking care of the vegetable garden is also an errand that I do in the summer and autumn.
At that time, the countryside was under collective ownership, and every household was given a small amount of land for their own use according to their population.
A piece of my family's private plot is just behind my house, and it is about three points in size. In order to solve the problem of food rations, the self-cultivated land is mainly planted with wheat.
After the wheat is harvested, pepper seedlings, eggplant seedlings, beans, cucumbers, garlic, baby greens, cabbage, radish, broad beans, pumpkins and so on are planted in the plot.
My mother told me to take time out to take care of the vegetable garden, saying that it was to take care of it, and that I had to constantly loosen the soil for the vegetables, water the manure and water, remove weeds, catch pests, build melon shelves, and prevent pigs, sheep, dogs, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, sparrows, etc. from running into the vegetable garden to trample or nibble on them. At the same time, it is also necessary to prevent someone from piggybacking on it.
So whenever I have time, I have to wander around the plot of my own land. Sometimes it was too hot, and after a while, I went to the ditch north of the reserve to take a bath.
At this time, an animal ran into the vegetable garden.
By the time I had finished bathing and climbed up from the gutter, the animals had already ruined the garden, and even the fence made of sticks around the garden had been destroyed by the animals as they entered and exited. All I got was a harsh scolding from my mother.
My family's vegetable garden is adjacent to the vegetable garden of Xiaosijia and Xiaoliang's family, and we will often take care of our own vegetable garden together. We also made a whip for each of us, and when we tended the garden, we had a good recreation by whipping wooden tops, and the loud whip also played a role in scaring the animals into approaching the garden.
One afternoon during the summer vacation, there was a thunderstorm. The three of us, who were taking care of the vegetable garden, had to run quickly to the cow house of the production team to take shelter from the rain.
Xiao Liangzi braved the heavy rain and ran to the vegetable gardens of several families in Zhaozhuang to steal a few tender cucumbers, and the three of us shared them with relish.
Still unsatisfied, Xiao Si volunteered again and braved the heavy rain again to pick a few cucumbers. As a result, the three of us ate a stomach full of cucumbers.
At 10 p.m., my mother went to the vegetable garden and found that a few cucumbers on my cucumber shelf were missing. I hurriedly ran over to observe, and sure enough, three cucumbers were missing.
It was only then that I remembered that when the three of us were sheltering from the rain in the cow house in the afternoon, the cucumbers we ate later were picked by Xiao Si from my family's vegetable garden. I can only eat Coptis dumbly, and I secretly complain in my heart. In the end, I was scolded by my mother.
To be continued
Vernacular proseAbout the Author
Cong Yu, formerly known as Xu Shouwei, is a native of Xuzhou, Jiangsu, and a retired teacher.
This article was edited
Scholars from other places.
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