It was cold, very cold. Curled up in the house, I could hear the north wind outside whimpering like a peculiar whistle. From time to time, there were several cries of the old eagle "wow-wow", and the sound was old and dry, fueling the cold dead silence of the world. There was no fire roasting, and Mu and I (I called my mother Mu, which is the dialect) covered the broken quilt that exposed cotton wool to warm up, which Mu said was called "roasting the bed fire". We lived in a thatched hut with a roof that had been blackened by years of smoke and fire, and a long black hanging from the fireworks. The walls were made of mud, and there were large cracks in several places, and the wind blew in from the outside and stabbed people like knives. M stuffed with some old newspapers and rags. There was a square hole in the earthen wall, and in the hole were several wooden sticks, which were windows. Paste it with white paper. There was no light in the house, and it was dim in broad daylight. The two wooden doors are somewhat crooked and closed, and the door frame of the door leaf has several seams, and the cold wind and white light squeeze in from these seams together, bringing a few rays of light and also bringing a cold through the bone.
The crooked door suddenly opened, and the dry door bucket made a very loud "quacking" sound, and the room lit up at once. Wrapped in a greater gust of cold wind and fluttering snowflakes, a man walked in from the white light, with a round face, short hair to his ears, and a yellow dress with four purses, which was Comrade Ye of the land reform working group. She said something to M, and then M grabbed me on my back and went out with her. It was so heavy snow outside that it brushed down on my face and neck so hard that I couldn't open my eyes, and I was restless on Mu's back, and they stopped and made something to cover my face, and walked forward again, and I could hear the sound of footsteps crunching on the snow.
We went to a place called "Bank", the bank is a big bungalow, much taller than the ordinary house, the wall is not made of mud, it is made of green bricks, and it has three floors. There is a dam in front of the bungalow, and the wind and snow are full of people. There was a high platform on the dam, and there were many people standing on the platform, a few of them bent over, bent very short, and everyone wore a long paper hat on their brain shell, and the hat was pointed on the top, which was not usually worn by anyone. Others were carrying guns on their backs, others with shuttle markers on their backs, and no smile on their faces. Someone was talking on the stage, waving his fist as he spoke. The people in the dam shouted loudly and raised their hands high. Someone jumped on the stage and beat the people who bent down and wore top hats, knocked them to the ground, kicked them with their feet, pulled them up and knocked them down, and the hats of these people fell off, and their faces were bleeding. People picked up their hats and put them back on. I know that this is a meeting, a struggle, a fight against the landlord. There were often then, and I was familiar with it.
The meeting was open for a long time, and at first I was on mu's back, very warm and very comfortable, and I looked around and watched the bustle, watched people shouting, watched people raise their hands, watched people walking around, beat people and beat people in the stands. But after a long time, I couldn't move on my back and began to feel uncomfortable. The snow in the sky was getting heavier and heavier, and snowflakes were flying everywhere, one by one, and the snow balls fell on my face and eyes, and it was very uncomfortable. At first, I put up with it, endured it, but then I couldn't bear it, and I began to cry, and the more I cried, the more fierce it became, and I struggled and twisted. Some aunts and aunts around have come to ask, "Is this doll hungry?" Maybe it's cold, right? Crying fiercely. "Later, Comrade Ye also came over and took Me and Mu to a small house on the side, where there was an iron stove burning a very strong fire, very warm. Mu put me down, and I didn't cry when I felt so comfortable. Comrade Ye brought another bowl of rice, hot and whirring, and Mu fed me to eat, we did not go out again, the meeting continued outside the dam, and you could still hear the shouts of people.
After a long time, the meeting finally broke up, and people left the venue one after another. He put me back on my back, and braving the heavy snow, we went back to our four-walled, air-soaked ice cellar-like home.
This is my earliest impression of my mother.
The enlightener who opened my mind was the mother. Very early on, I was taught the ten heavenly stems of the back, the ugly, the yin, the 卯, the chen, the 巳, the noon, the unspoken, the shen, the unitary, the shu, the twelve branches of the hai, and the ten heavenly stems of A, B, C, D, E, he, geng, xin, nong, and 癸. There are also "Three Character Classic", "Hundred Family Names", "Thousand Character Text" and so on. But because there are no books, Mu's memory is not complete, so what I know is fragmentary. "At the beginning of man, the surname is Benshan, the surname is similar, the habit is far away...", "Zhao Qiansun Li, Zhou Wu Zheng wang, Feng Chen Zhuwei, Jiang Shen Han Yang...", "Heaven and earth Xuan Huang, cosmic flood, sun and moon Ying, Chen Su Lie Zhang...", although the back is extremely familiar, I don't know what it means. Mu only said that "Hundred Family Names" is the surname of all people, but there is no explanation for the "Three Character Classic" and "Thousand Character Text", perhaps it is explained, but it is playing the piano for the cow, I can't understand it, I can't remember it, only when I slip it down, I also chant it in my mouth from time to time, as a children's song.
During the Great Famine, the family would often break down, at which time my mother would take a basket to the harvested vegetable field to dig up the roots and come back to eat. When we are lucky, we can dig up a full basket, and when we are unlucky, we are only half a basket or even less, because we are not the only ones digging vegetable roots.
Wash the roots in the river, put them in a pot, and cook them in well water to eat. But this well water is also not easy to come by. I don't have a bucket in my house, even if I have a mother, I can't pick it up, and I don't have a container to store water. Mother always used a small antimony pot with wire tied to the ear of the pot to carry water from a well hundreds of meters away. The image of my mother hunched over a pot of water on a path full of wild grass and thorns is still vivid in my mind.
There are only two kinds of root that can be eaten, cabbage root and cowhide root. They are not all edible, only the outer skin of the root can be gnawed, and the core in the middle is very hard like a wooden stick. The outer skin of cabbage root is very thin, and the root of cowhide vegetable is thicker, twice as thick as cabbage root, and the taste is sweet, and the cabbage root is light and tasteless. Every time I nibbled on the root, my mother gave me the cowhide root to nibble on, and she only nibbled on the cabbage root.
Despite the extreme hardships and hardships of life, my mother's moral education of me was still very strict, emphasizing that I must be a righteous gentleman and never be a dirty villain. Once, when I was extremely hungry, I shaved four sweet potatoes in the team, ate two in the wild, and left two to come back to honor my mother, and I knew that she was also hungry. But when my mother saw me, instead of praising me, she gave me a reprimand to me for being a gentleman who was poor and poor. My mother was gentle and easy-going, and almost never lost her temper, and that extremely harsh reprimand left an unforgettable impression on me, and I never oversteped my bounds in my life, and I benefited from my mother's teachings from an early age.
My mother's life span was long, until she was ninety-three years old. It is a great pity that in the last few years, I was bedridden and could not take care of myself, and I could not cure it with all my efforts. Only by serving carefully can it be comforting and wishing for its longevity. The meals are all soft and crumbled, and the rice, flour, noodles, tangyuan and dumplings are constantly changing. As soon as she noticed that she was a little out of appetite, she did something else. At first, she placed food next to her mouth and gave her a spoon to eat herself, a small bowl at a time. Later, when she saw that she had eaten less, and leftovers for each meal, I asked her why, and she always said that she was full. I guess maybe she was a little tired, but didn't want to cause me any trouble, so she said so I fed her every meal so that she could eat a small bowl again.
I moved the TV set I had placed in the living room to my mother's bedroom so she could sleep in bed and watch TV so as not to be lonely. In winter, the stove was built in her room, where the fire was roasted to cook meals, first to warm her room, and second, to make it lively, so that she would not be left alone. I always have to pinch the time when I go out, and I have to come back within two hours. Because the mother either wants to drink water, or eat food, or turn over, or change the diapers. In short, she needs to be taken care of and cannot leave people.
My mother's eyes were blurred, and the newspaper I brought her every day said she could only see the headlines, and the content was not clear. I wanted to give her a pair of glasses, so I went to the city and asked a few optical stores, but the stores did not come to the suburbs to optometry and dispense glasses. Helpless, finally found the bright glasses shop to explain the situation, after negotiation, the other party agreed to let me take five pairs of glasses to try, and finally as long as one pair, you can return four pairs, but you must pay five pairs of money first. I took one pair every fifty degrees and came back with five pairs, but after trying them one by one, they couldn't work, and my mother said that it was even more difficult to see clearly when I put them on. There was no way but to take them all back and return them. The shop is still very generous, and they have returned to me.
When my mother was alive, although she could not do anything, and she still needed to be served, she was busy every day, and her life always felt warm and full. Later, after the mother died, after the funeral service returned to the mountain, suddenly felt that the home was empty, empty and unpopular, a dead silence, lonely to the outside and did not want to go home, the thought of opening the door into the house, no one in the house, no sound, no movement, at this time the home is no longer like home, but like an old cave abandoned for a thousand years, cold and empty, chilling. This is not a home in the usual sense, just a cave where I eat and sleep, such a place, I really don't want to go back, I have to stay outside all day and day. At this point I felt truly and deeply that I had become an orphan. From the depths of my soul, I realized the destination of a human true feeling: the mother is there, the home is there; the mother is gone, the home is gone.
I envy people who have mothers, whether they are poor or rich, healthy or sick, faint or sober.
Blessed are those who have mothers.