Author: Chen Gang
The summer is the hottest time of the year. People wear sun-protective clothing when they go out, and there are electric fans and air conditioners when they return home, which is very different from many years ago. I remember when we first graduated, in the mid-to-late 80s, electric fans in rural areas didn't seem to be popular, and people were generally outdoors in the shade of trees in the summer, especially at noon.
In the shade of the trees, the lesbians should be more elegant, after all, the weather is hot, people wear relatively little, lesbians are not too embarrassed to be as casual as the gays, just sit on a stool and fan and talk homely, really sleepy, so go back to their own hall and put a mat on the ground to lie down. More often than not, gay men will put up a door panel and lie down in the shade of a tree to sleep. The children were restless, and at noon, as usual, they went down to the river every day to take a bath, and they were tanned and drilled around in the water like a loach.
Gay men take a dip in the shade of a tree, and in order to cool off, most of the time they wear big pants, bare-chested and barefoot, and lie on the door panel to rest. The cicadas chirp on the trees, and the sun's rays shine through the dappled shadows of the trees, falling on the people, forming irregular patterns. As the sun's rays move, the pattern changes, resembling a mountain peak or a stream. In the eyes of a painter, it might be more like an ink painting, isn't it, there is a sun in the sky, and there is a tree under the sun, and under the tree there is a man lying on the door panel, wearing big pants and resting with a bajiao fan in his hand. There is also a small table and a few small benches for eating next to the man, the wind is blowing, the cicadas are chirping, the shadows of the trees are shaking, and there are playful teenagers with lotus flowers on their heads in the pond not far away.
As for me, I don't know, I didn't sleep in the shade of a tree when I was a child. I think there should have been, maybe on my mother's lap, maybe on the little stool in front of my grandmother. But since I grew up a little, and especially after listening to my mother's story about her mother's parents enjoying the shade in the shade, I really didn't dare to sleep in the shade, no matter how hot it was.
Actually, not only me, but my mother didn't allow me to sleep under the tree, mainly because I was afraid that I would be blown by the wind, but I believe it must have something to do with the story she knew. To this day, I don't know whether the story told by my mother was told by the person herself or from her mother's family. But I think that whether or not the end of the story is necessarily related to enjoying the shade of the trees, it must have happened in real life, and my mother could not have made it up.
In what year it happened, my mother said that I couldn't remember, but I was still young at the time, and I was surprised when I heard it. Now I want to ask my mother again, but she has had a cerebral infarction for more than three years, and many things can no longer be expressed.
Because it's weird, I've always remembered it clearly.
It is also the summer of one year, and it is the weather in the sixth month of the lunar calendar, which is very hot and muggy. The elder on my mother's side, as usual, had lunch and went to sleep in the shade of the tree at the entrance of the bridge outside the door, which was a normal thing. At that time, in the countryside, the conditions were like that, every family was like this, and the gay men had basically the same way of enjoying the coolness, sleeping in the shade of a tree at noon. It's just that the day is too different for the elder of the mother, when he went to bed after lunch, everything was normal, he should not have found anything abnormal, he fell asleep after a while, usually, the rest of the family, after eating, will come out one after another to blow the wind and rest for a while, that day the other four members of the family have eaten and no one came out, they all rested on the mat on the floor of the house at home, and he slept alone in the shade of the bridge outside the door. Some of the neighbors came out, and they were all at the entrance of their own bridge, and no one paid attention to this side.
Under normal circumstances, I slept for an hour in the afternoon, the elder of my mother, suddenly felt cold in my chest in my sleep, touched it with my hand, a water snake coiled on his chest at some point, he was taken aback, jumped up and sat up, frightened and crawled away from the door panel a few steps away, and when I looked back, the snake was swimming towards the river next to it, only to see the tail. He subconsciously knew that it was not good, so he didn't dare to squeak and hurried home, the family was resting in the hall, there was nothing unusual, he just put a little heart.
For the next few days, he couldn't eat or sleep well, and he was always worried that something was going to happen. The family saw that he was a little abnormal, and when they asked him, he didn't say anything, for fear that the family would be worried. Maybe it's just praying silently in your heart. A few days later, at noon one day, there was bad news, his twelve-year-old son was drowning, and the other children who went down to the river to bathe together every day were all right, the river was still the same river, the water was still the same water, but his son had an accident, and he was grief-stricken.
The story is true, and there is a connection between the two in my heart when I was a child. But now that I'm my age, I have my own ideas about people and things, and it seems that the connection should not be big, but it can only be said that it is a coincidence, or it is artificially connected. I don't know if I'm right. It's just that whether it's true or not, I've never slept in the shade of a tree when I'm really this big, I'm afraid of catching a cold or something, maybe both.
About the Author
Chen Gang, born in 1978, is an employee of Shilian Chemical (Jiangsu) Co., Ltd., and likes to exercise and read in his spare time.
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