The paulownia hits tung oil, and the maple tree bears maple balls.
People cross bridges, and water flows under their feet.
Some people estimated that Huang Gu was a cow.
Moo! Moo! Moo!
This is a nursery rhyme in Xiangbei, and it is also a true portrayal of my hometown. Less than two miles up the Luo River, a tributary of the Miluo River, there is a small mountain village, backed by mountains and rivers, and the villagers are surnamed Cao, I was born here in the early seventies of the last century.
In my memory, there are many maple trees and tung trees in front of the village and behind the mountain. In the spring, the peach blossoms bloomed, and the tung blossoms also bloomed, and there was one on the hill in the northeast of my old house.
Every year when the tung oil flowers bloom at their peak, my father will pick a sunny afternoon, call our brothers, lift the thin me above my head, I reach out to grab the horizontal branches, a light backflip, stand firmly on a big branch, and then wrap my body around the tree, climb the branches with one hand, pick up the big tung oil flowers with the other hand, at this time my father and my eldest brother pulled away the white burden of sieving fennel powder, and then I threw down the tung oil flowers. When I have half a burden of tung oil, my father will say that it is enough, and I will pick a few naughty flowers and throw them on the heads of my father and eldest brother, and when my father takes the tung oil flowers I cast with one hand, I will still pick two of them, stick them upside down in my nostrils, put my hands and feet against the smooth body of the tree, slide down, tighten my nose, make a grimace, and run to school with a smoke.
I know that my father will definitely find my eldest brother and say: a tung flower produces a tung seed, a pound of tung seeds can make three taels of tung oil, and I also know that after we go to school, my father will put the tung oil flowers in the burden into a clay pot filled with tung oil, used to make scald medicine, I don't understand that our brother has never used the scald medicine soaked in tung flowers, but my father still soaks a clay pot every year.
As for the tung tree and maple tree mentioned in the nursery rhyme, as far as I was a child, although the tung blossom blooms beautifully, and the tung trees that produce are not much bigger than the maple balls, I like the maple tree, because one of the things I was most afraid of when I was a child was peeling tung seeds.
Every year after the Double Ninth Festival, the paulownia is ripe, and on Sunday, my father will arrange for our brothers to pick up the bamboo basket to pick up the paulownia that fell on the ground, pile them up in a pile behind the house, and let them be exposed to the sun and rain, until the cyan paulownia turns black and smelly, and the thick paulownia shell is softened by the rain, and at this time, winter is coming. At that time, there were no gloves, in winter, ten fingers will be black and smelly tung peeled in half, and then from the wet and cold tung seed shell to the tung seeds one by one, not long after, the body is getting colder and colder, the legs and feet are more and more numb, the tung seeds between the fingers are slippery, such as the eel head in the mud, sometimes the tung shell that is not rotten wood fiber pierced into the fingers, is the pain of the heart, finally to the time to eat, greasy, black hands with firewood ash how to wash can not be clean, soaked in the hand pattern of the black stain will become shallow and light after three or five days.
The maple ball of the maple knot is different, under the winter sun, three or five friends get together, draw a straight line on the ground, than who blows the maple ball far away in one breath, or find a reed flower, pinch the head and remove the tail, leave the length of a palm, look up to the face, put one end on the tip of the nose, and the other end on the light maple ball, to see whose reed rod and maple ball stay on the tip of the nose for a long time.
At dusk, the friends would go together to drive the cattle on the embankment on the opposite bank. In the old days, there was a stone bridge on the small river, the bridge deck was paved with two pieces of long granite, the width can be comparable, the bridge pier was made up of several pieces of short granite, it was in the shape of "well", the bridge pier was shallow in the south and deep in the north, the depth was less than one person, and the shallow place was only to the calf. Autumn and winter are sunny and rainless, the river only leaves a narrow line, occasionally three or two days of continuous rain, the water and the bridge are flat, in the morning and evening, the granite bridge deck will leave a cheerful nursery rhyme all the way.
Today, more than 40 years later, when I teach my nephew to sing this nursery rhyme, there is no longer a single tung tree in Caojiashan, where villas and buildings are lined up, and after the peach blossoms bloom, I can't see the snow-like tung oil blossoms. I asked my father, who was over eighty years old, why didn't there be tung oil behind my old house? Didn't that year?
My father thought for a moment and said that it should be 98 years (1998), when we were all on the island. After the Mid-Autumn Festival, Tongzi fell down and smashed the head of a primary school student in the village into a bag. In the spring of the following year, the tree had no leaves or flowers, and after it dried up, it was cut down to make firewood.
So there are so many tung oil trees on the mountain behind it? I asked my father.
My father was speechless, and after a long time, he said that he passed by the Honghuashan Reservoir in the winter of last year, and saw that there was a tung tree on the mountain against the dam of the reservoir, the size of a rice bowl. Two years ago, he passed by a production company in the city, and the paper shell outside the door wrote: Tung oil is worth a catty of Wu Shiyuan. At that time, the plough and rake waterwheel used for farming were indispensable for tung oil, and ——, I looked at my father who wanted to stop talking, and I knew that what my father didn't say was: now the fine men go to the hospital if they are burned, and the scald medicine made with tung oil and tung flowers has long been unused.
There's a tung tree in the dam of the reservoir, how could I not have noticed it? Since 2018 when I entered Honghua Mountain to invest in rural tourism, I have walked or driven past the dam of the reservoir countless times, but did I miss its flowering period? Or is it unprepared? Or did my father mistake the sycamore for the oil tung?
I remember last year, a friend in Yunnan fostered a yellow horse in the scenic spot, and a tourist saw it and told her son that it was a yellow cow, which used to be used to plow the field, and was divided into yellow cattle and buffaloes. Her son pointed to the yellow horse grazing on the side of the mountain and asked, "Mother, how do you divide the cattle and buffaloes?"
I heard the mother with a pet dog say, "Buffalo has horns, cattle don't have horns."
I went over and whispered: Cattle and buffalo all have horns, and calves have not grown horns because they have not yet been born.
Uncle, then it's a little scalper! The little face that is upturned has clear eyebrows.
The eyebrow mother rolled her eyes, and before I could finish speaking, she picked up the baby and led the pet dog and hurried away.
Now that I think about it, in the eyes of some people, Huang Gu is no longer a cow! Machines have replaced cattle farming, and many people have never even seen a yellow cow, and most of what they see are beef cattle with mixed coats.
On February 3, 2024, Hunan and Hubei ushered in a major freezing rain and snow disaster. The weather was slightly better, and I walked into the mountains, and along the way there were wetland pines bent by freezing rain, and the soil layer was thin and uprooted. Passing by a ridge, I took out my mobile phone, because the mountain is steep, there was no artificial afforestation back then, and most of the growth was maple, neem and some deciduous shrubs, almost unaffected by freezing rain, and one of the unknown evergreen shrubs hung a tree with red fruits, crystal clear, bright as jewels.
I took a photo with my mobile phone, stepped on the thin snow, and made a detour to the Honghuashan Reservoir, where there was a "crackling" and "crackling" sound from time to time in the silent valley, and I knew that after a "crackling" sound, it represented a wetland pine that had been cut with pine oil broke from the knife edge, or an evergreen, leafy tree that could not bear the burden of ice and snow on the branches and leaves and broke its arm to survive.
At the side of the dam of the reservoir, I found what my father said about tung trees, not plane trees, and the snow under the trees was like a layer of tung blossoms falling from spring. The paulownia that fell to the ground last year were like small snowballs, and some of them showed black husks in the sunny place. I leaned over and picked up a paulownia seed, wiped off the snowflakes, and the husk was soft, and the fragrance of the paulownia seeds came into my nose. The tung tree was wrapped in a thick layer of ice and snow, like a soldier in crystal armor, in the bitter cold, raising his head and chest, not moving.
On the opposite side of the embankment is the wetland pine planted by the first father of the villagers, the pine oil cut the year before last, piece by piece from the edge of the knife cutting oil, the stump of the meter high is like a bayonet, the knife edge is broken and broken, and the blade is full of rust.
Late at night, I faced the stove, the palm of my hand was clenched during the day to pick up the tung seeds, I heard the sound of snow falling, but also heard the "crackling" and "crackling" sound of the wetland loosening, I couldn't help but think of a tung oil from planting to flowering and fruiting, and then to peel seeds and extract oil, how much time, how much labor, and a 10 cm diameter of the wetland pine, every year when cutting oil, only need to cut two knives in the body of the tree, hang an oil bag at the knife edge. The same is that they are all taken from oil, but the difference is that one does not hurt the hair and the other hurts the bones. I once heard the old people around me say that in the old days, the safflower mountain was mostly maple, camphor, neem, tung oil and some shrubs. In the eighties of the last century, afforestation, planted the foreign pine (wetland pine) that cut pine oil, after the ice disaster in 2008, cut down a stubble, replanted or wetland pine, not for anything else, just because it grows fast, less input, and has a large income.
In 2017, I returned to my hometown to invest in rural tourism, and transferred hundreds of acres of woodland around Honghua Mountain. After this ice disaster, the replacement of tree species in Honghua Mountain may be an opportunity, and similarly, for the forestry industry of Miluo City and even the entire Hunan Province, it is an opportunity and a window for transformation, although there is a long way to go. To know that trees are 100 years, trees also need 100 years, or even hundreds of years. The reason why Nanmu is more expensive than ** is that it has experienced hundreds of years of wind, rain, frost and snow, and the change of the sun and the moon, so that it will be branded with golden threads in life. Our 5,000-year-old Chinese cultural heritage, how could it not be the case, otherwise there would really be a day when we teach our children and grandchildren to sing nursery rhymes, but they don't know what tung oil is, and they can't see tung oil flowers blooming, and Huang Gu is not a cow.
Outside the window, the snowflakes are still floating, sleepiness comes up, I fell asleep by the fire, I dreamed that the tung shell in the palm of my hand exploded, a grain of tung seeds sprouted, and the continuous mountain was planted with tung oil, maple, ginkgo, camphor, and red ......When a tree reflects the red of the mountain and the tung blossom blooms, it is like a piece of sunshine and a snow falling.