Time is like an arrow, decades have passed, but I still remember the scene of queuing up to take a bath before the Chinese New Year when I was a child.
In the fifties and sixties of the last century, there were very few public baths at that time, and there was only one public bath on Qingyun Street within a radius of several kilometers in the entire Lingqian area.
This bathhouse located next to the tram lane is old, about the Japanese pseudo-period, two floors, wooden floors, stairs, bathing facilities are very simple, wooden slippers are placed at the door, no shower facilities, a rectangular large and a small pool, surrounded by a circle of wash basins, towels hanging on the slender wire hanging from the roof beam in the lounge, and there are boxes for clothes under the bed. Usually there are not many bathers here, but at the end of the year, it is overcrowded, and people with bamboo number plates sometimes line up all the way to the street, waiting for the waiter to shout.
The old people say: Taking a bath a year ago can wash away a year's bad luck.
Therefore, in order to wash away the bad luck, three or two days before Chinese New Year's Eve, grandpa and grandma would shout at us children early in the morning and walk to this bathhouse, but despite this, many people were ahead of us. The bathhouse is full of dumplings, but this does not affect people's New Year's mood in the slightest.
In the heat, the neighbors who are usually busy with each other, and the neighbors who are rare to talk about today met, took the opportunity to ask for warmth, worshiped each other in the early years, and talked about what they had seen and heard in the year, in and outside the city, outside the home, in the sky and on the ground, in the mountains and in the north and south, and talked about everything.
There were also young people humming melodious songs, the long aftermath lingering in the bathhouse for a long time, and we children playing in the water.
When they get home from the shower, Grandma will let the children change into new clothes and wait for the New Year.