Thousands of knots on the earth
Text: Zhang Yuxia
The day before yesterday, I was chatting with a friend, and while chatting, my friend suddenly said, "I won't play with you anymore, I'll go to the kang." I seemed to hear the crackling sound of the firewood and grass in the stove, and by the way, I also seemed to smell the smell of cooking smoke, and I seemed to see that in a happy farmhouse, the man's face was red from the flames in the stove, and the woman sang a nursery rhyme with her lovely grandchildren in her arms on the kang head: "Little mouse, go up to the lampstand, steal oil to eat, can't get down, cry and shout for grandma, and roll down ......."”
I was born on the kang and grew up on the kang, a native girl. At that time, there were no diapers, and all newborn children wore homespun bags filled with sand. There is a casserole on one side of the stove in every house. The mother said that the children who wore dirt pants changed the soil after eating, and after cooking, they used the heat from the stove to heat the sand. The temperature of the sand should be carefully controlled, too hot will burn the child's buttocks, and if it is not hot, you are worried that the child's buttocks will be cold. Therefore, you must be very careful when loading the homespun bag, and many inattentive adults have burned the child's buttocks. I was definitely lucky because my mom was a particularly attentive person. Although I don't remember the days when I wore dirt pants, I knew that I was warmed by my mother's pot of dirt.
Speaking of wearing dirt pants, there is also a small episode. I was born in October, and by the time I was one year old, I was a toddler. At that time, my father was teaching in another country, and my mother was alone at home to take care of my brother and me. Children who are just learning to walk often pee their pants. In order not to make a mess for me, my mother forcibly stuffed me into a homespun bag. When I was a child, I was very naughty, and I often stood up in a homespun bag and dragged it along. Mom said, "Ni, you can be since you were a child." "I said that this ** is okay, this is a hard life, is it good, just know how to run, and let you be trained into a woman. After saying that, the two of them laughed.
When I was a child, in the countryside, every family slept on a clay kang. Many families cannot afford to pay attention to hygiene, and there will be biting lice in the bed. My mom loves to be clean. So my brother and I escaped this, and I remember one winter. Dad took our family of four to my aunt's house. The living conditions of my aunt's family are much better than mine. As soon as I entered, my aunt prepared delicious peanuts and sweets for me. I looked around my aunt's house while eating candy, and I suddenly noticed that my aunt's kang was different from mine: there was a small kang on the top of her big kang. I climbed onto that little kang as if I had discovered a new world, and said I was going to sleep in this place. The aunt said, "Little fool, this is a kang, it's very cold, you will be cold when you sleep on it." "My aunt and my sister-in-law are in the same village, and they are opposite the door, my parents and brother were arranged by my sister-in-law to live, I like my aunt's crutch kang, so I stayed at my aunt's house for a night. The next day I felt itchy all over my body and told my mom. The mother said, "It's bad, your aunt has lice on the kang, child, take off this dress when you get home, let's not wear this suit first." "I was sad because I was wearing new clothes that my mother didn't want me to wear, and I got lice after a night's sleep. The novelty of the kang and the sweetness of those candies instantly turned into nothingness. When I got home, my dad was busy boiling hot water, my mom was busy getting me a change of clothes, and then my mom put me in a big basin full of hot water and gave me a bath. When I changed into clean clothes, my father brought back a packet of medicine powder called "Liuliuliu" from outside and sprinkled it on the clothes I had taken off.
I haven't spent the night at any relative's house since I went to my aunt's house to get lice, and I cried and wanted to go home in the evening. Once my grandfather had a birthday, and my father, who was too drunk to drink, was drunk by two uncles. Mom didn't ride a bike when she was younger. This means that there are no "drivers" in our family. Seeing that it was getting dark, I cried in fright. Grandma said: "Look at this child, this is in grandma's house, not somewhere else, if you can't leave, you can stay, what's there to cry about, isn't it also sleeping on the kang in your house?""My mother knew what I was afraid of, so she asked my aunt's cousin to help us and sent us home. The first thing my mother did when she got home was also to make a. I lay on the hot kang, smelled the quilt that smelled of the sun, and said to my mother, "The sun has a smell, and our quilt smells of the sun." My mother laughed and then asked me, "What do you say the sun smells like?" "I casually said that the sun has your taste, sweet and fragrant. Then call it mommy.
Now I have been away from the clay kang in my heart for more than 30 years. Not saying or writing doesn't mean forgetting, why my heart always floats, and today I found the answer. The smoke, the hot clay kang, and the quilt that smelled of the sun have always been in my heart. My mom loved to dry quilts since she was young. A few years ago, because I went to work, I didn't have time to dry the quilt, and my 70-year-old mother did not hesitate to run six or seven intersections in order to dry the quilt for me, shuttling in the traffic, and made a special trip to my house. Writing this, tears filled my eyes, because the mother who loved me has now become a candle in the wind, and I can only do my best to block the wind for my mother. I'm really scared, in case I can't stop it, the smell that I rely on to survive to find it?The smell of the earthy kang, the smell of the sun, and the taste of the mother can melt into one taste, and that is the taste ...... love