I've heard many famous singers sing and collaborated with composers, but it's my mother's voice that haunts me.
My mother was illiterate, she didn't know a single word, and she didn't have the inheritance and edification of music and art, and her maternal grandfather and grandmother were all farmers who worked all their lives, and she married my father at the age of sixteen, and worked hard for the family inside and out, but she had a talent for simulation, a natural good voice, and she was proficient in singing without a teacher.
"Hey-why don't you sing when the wind is cold and the water is fast, what are you doing with that leisure? In two years, he will be old again, and his son will marry his relatives and leave the cabinet, how can he have the leisure to sing mountain songs? "Mother's singing voice is clear and bright, like a gurgling canal, from one end of the field to the other, from this side of the hill to that slope, all the way far, far away.
Mother's song is accompanied by labor. When the car was in the water, she sang: "The stars in the sky are blinking, and the river is jubilant under the moon." The sound of the car water trumpet is answered, and the laughter and laughter are non-stop. The brother of the slave family was jubilant, and the brother of the slave family kept his feet. When sowing, she sang: "After eating, planting seedlings, cutting crutches to be inserted, three teas and six meals to eat with you, hot tea and hot water to be boiled, sprinkling sweat beads God knows." When weeding, she sang: "As soon as the sun comes out red like fire, carry the seedlings on your shoulders and go down the slope." One Guo and one Guo are ahead, weeds grow seedlings, and seedlings grow and harvest more. At harvest time, she sang: "Mountain songs are easy to sing, cherries are delicious, trees are difficult to plant, rice is delicious, fields are difficult to plant, steamed buns are delicious and difficult to suffer, fresh fish is delicious and difficult to drain." During the fight, she sang: "The sun is traveling westward, play the golden hook to hook the sun, the golden hook is in the clouds, and the sun cannot be hooked." When delivering public food, she also sang: "Birds climb high branches and trees to look at spring, and phoenixes do not fall on bald mountains." The spring breeze does not blow the flowers and does not bloom, the rain does not sprinkle the seedlings and the seedlings are not green, the party is the spring breeze and rain and dew, and every inch of land becomes gold. ”
In the crowd of laborers, the mother is the leader of the singing, as long as she procrastinates "hey-", everyone will follow her melody, and the song will suddenly spread, like a white cloud floating in the blue sky.
My mother's singing always echoed in "that year", in my mother's own words, it was "that year" when "I ate a bowl of rice and closed my eyes when I died". In those years, under the slogans of "working hard and going fast" and "catching up with the United States", the people's commune was set up on a large scale, and in accordance with the rhythm of "running into communism", the pots and stoves of each family were dismantled and built in the company to build a large stove, and the members of the society did not want money to eat in the "big canteen", but the "Great Leap Forward" of "how bold the people are, how productive the land is" was mercilessly punished by the heavens, the sky was in great drought, the ground cracked, the crops were not harvested, and the big pot stove changed from thick porridge to thin porridge to vegetable paste, and finally the pot could not be opened by scraping the bark and picking wild vegetables, and only the hollow big iron pot was retained. eat in the form of a large canteen" to cope with the inspection of superiors. The young republic was plagued by man-made and natural disasters and suffered from "three years of hardship", and the people of the village struggled on the starvation line.
My mother often sighed: "In those days, I felt hungry all day long, so I was looking forward to filling my stomach with something!" "In those days, when they saw something to eat, people's eyes immediately lit up. My mother often reminisced about those past events, and mentioned a real incident countless times: once, my mother and several women from the same village went to work, and suddenly a woman surnamed Wan exclaimed, "Look, I have picked up a baby!" The mother looked back and asked, "I found a grain of rice!" Before she could fully open her palm, she quickly covered it in her mouth and chewed contentedly, with a happy smile on her face. In my memory, my mother would come back from the field at noon with her legs muddy and tired, staring at the small pot with empty eyes. At that time, I was only two or three years old, and my grandmother, in order to protect me, walked more than 100 miles to secretly bring back a small basket of rice from my father, who was working in other places, and every day grabbed half a small handful of porridge made of adobe and fed it to me, leaving a small bowl for my mother, who drank it in two or three sips, staring straight at me and the bowl with her eyes, until I finished drinking, she dipped her fingers in the juice stuck to the edge of the bowl, licked it up little by little, and finally scooped half a scoop of cold water into the small clay pot where the porridge was boiled, and drank it with a clatter. That's it, she dragged her legs out of the muddy water again, worked in the fields with full spirit, and the girls and daughters-in-law who led the "38 Commando" sang mountain songs, and the fields opened a crisp and pleasant singing.
I can hardly imagine how my mother sang so loudly with a hungry stomach and dragging her tired body, and I once asked my mother curiously, and my mother smiled lightly, and replied with a slight sigh: "The more you think about your hunger, the more hungry you feel, and when you open your mouth to sing, you forget about hunger." ”
Can singing fight hunger? It's incredible! When I was a child, I always didn't understand the mystery of my mother's singing, but I read a lot of books, especially the biographies of celebrities, and every time I read how they sought spiritual strength to overcome themselves in distress, my mind echoed my mother's singing. Beethoven said, "Music can make the human spirit burst into flames." Mother should not understand such a profound philosophy, but she, like this super musician, uses spiritual power to choke the throat of fate.
Mother's resistance to pressure in life is beyond people's imagination, no matter how tired and bitter she is, she will be resolved into a song of breeze and bright moon.
My mother gave birth to a total of seven children, the first of whom unfortunately died, my youngest brother and I were both dogs, the difference was twelve years old, when the six of us sisters were still young, my father worked outside all the year round, and my grandmother was unable to bear the weight since she was a child, and the only labor force in the family was my mother, who accumulated manure, planted seedlings, watered, hoeed, harvested, farmed, picked grain, in the field, in the field, in the field, in the field, all the hard work, my mother had to do everything, and everything was excellent. She went to the well in front of the village every morning to fill a jar of water, often carried rice to a processing factory in more than a mile to mill rice, and sometimes went to the streets nearly ten miles to grind flour and sell firewood and grass—all of which were done by men in other households. I remember one time, I was woken up by my mother on the fifth watch, and accompanied her to grind noodles on Yaoli Street in nearly ten miles. There were so many people processing flour that day that there was a long queue, and my mother and I slowly moved forward with the "dragon's tail", and by the time the flour was processed, it was already dark at night. My mother picked up the noodles, and I carried the wheat bran on my back, kicking and stumbling back. My stomach growled, and I gritted my teeth and endured, I knew that my mother, who was carrying the burden, must be hungrier than I was, and her shadow was clearly shaky.
Although my mother is very capable, after all, our family has a large population and little labor, and we are a well-known "overspending household" in the production team, and the ration rice has to be enclosed in the warehouse of the team headquarters every year, and the rice can only be brought home after paying the "overrun". One night, the team privately divided the freshly beaten rice, and asked each family to send it to one worker and one household to another, and my mother naturally went to deliver food to others, and it was delivered until midnight, and our family did not receive a grain of grain. The production captain watched his mother clean up the empty fence bucket, and he was moved by compassion: "Alas, Yao Yuzhi (my mother's name) also sent food in the middle of the night, and went home with an empty fence, and the family is also very sad, give her half a fence bucket." The grandmother was very angry when she saw it, and wanted to go to the captain to theorize, but the mother stopped her with a smile: "Forget it, compared to the years when I starved to death, I can still eat a bowl of rice!" Then he turned to me and my younger siblings and said, "If you don't eat steamed buns and fight for breath, one day our family will not overspend, and we will distribute food to our families!" Later, every time my mother talked about this unbearable past, her tone was calm, sometimes even smiling, as if telling a story about someone else's life.
When the land contract responsibility system was implemented, I was studying in other places, and my younger brothers and sisters had only just reached the age of studying, and could only do some auxiliary housework, and all the fields in the family depended on my mother alone, accumulating fertilizer, plowing, raising the field, selling grain, and cutting grass, and she was not idle at all times of the year, taking advantage of the moonlight to pull seedlings in the fields, hoeing grass in the fields under the scorching sun, harvesting rice on the field in the torrential rain, and mowing grass on the mountains soaked in dew. In the winter, my mother was never idle, repairing ridges, digging corners, shoveling turf, and planning for planting in the coming year. Seeing that other people's houses had been renovated, my mother discussed with my grandmother to build another house on the west side of the old house and build a few rooms for the children to grow up. The foundation was dug by my mother herself, the foundation stone was picked up by my mother and me with my sister and brother, and the wall was also built by my mother and the mud. Dig the hard soil on the pine hill, smash it with a hammer, pour water to soak it thoroughly, sprinkle chopped dry straw and red hemp roots, pull up the trouser leg and trample on it, until the soil is sticky and thick, my mother picked up the iron fork and taught us to build the wall, build a layer, step on it tightly, and then lay a layer of straw, and then build the second and third layers. Each time, you can only build more than a foot high, and only continue to build after drying. I remember that in the early winter of that year, before the freeze, the wall was more than one person high. The mother always held a shovel in her hand, looking left and right around the earthen wall, with smile lines on her face - she was admiring her "masterpiece", like a child watching herself grow taller and stronger day by day. Looking at it, she couldn't help but hum a song: "In autumn, the golden chrysanthemums are yellow, Mulan goes to the battlefield in the army, Jin Ge hangs frost and silver helmets, who knows that I am a girl......"
A difficult life is seen as a pain by others, but my mother is very calm. In the years when her father almost "left the family behind", she devoted herself to running the family, and when the children left the nest like birds one by one to build their own small family, she took on the responsibility of supporting her elderly grandmother. She and her grandmother, not so much a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law, but a daughter and her mother, this kind of relationship is recognized by her grandmother and boasted of by everyone, and it is also known to everyone in a radius of dozens of miles from her hometown. Whatever the grandmother liked to eat, the mother tried to prepare for her; My grandmother had bad teeth, so my mother cooked the food until it was easy to chew; The grandmother hummed softly at night, and the mother understood that she was thinking about something, or that she was not feeling well; My grandmother suffered from an eye disease, and my mother carefully used clips to remove her inverted eyelashes one by one; My grandmother was sick and bedridden, and my mother was with her day and night. My grandmother, who was dying, held my mother's hand, stared at it for a long time, sighed slightly, and a string of tears rolled out of the corners of her eyes. Everyone present knew that this love was difficult for my grandmother to let go. And the mother, too, threw herself into her grandmother's arms, her back twitching incessantly, and she couldn't cry anymore. After my grandmother passed away, I took my mother to the town where I worked, so that she could spend her old age with my father, an old couple who had spent most of their lives together. My mother soon adapted to life in the city, taking care of my father's food and clothing like a grandmother, and getting acquainted with the old ladies of the whole building, helping them to pickle vegetables, put quilts, make slippers, arrange wedding belongings, cut baby clothes, and do everything she could do with all her heart, and she was full of joy when she saw that people were satisfied. Later, my father insisted on going back to the countryside to retire, and my mother didn't say half a "no", so she went back to Gangcun with him, and took care of her father without regrets until he died.
As her mother gets older, she likes to tell those past events calmly, and when she tells a paragraph, she will sigh: "In those years, I closed my eyes when I ate a bowl of rice and died!" Now these days, I really sang it! When my mother said this, we begged her to sing, but she always smiled slightly, and refused to speak, only once under the repeated begging of the children, she sang softly: "The fifteenth month of the first month is bright, and there are lanterns in front of and behind the village." A dragon lantern walked ahead, followed by a lion lantern boat. The annual Lantern Festival, playing with lights and singing until the fifth watch. Sing here and there, the lamp sings brightly...... "In my memory, this is the last time my mother has sung, although the singing voice is not as clear as "that year", but it is full of joy and happiness.
Now, my mother, who is nearly 90 years old, no longer sings, and when she mentions singing back then, she always says: "At that time, singing was for life, and now life is for singing." Mother's words seem simple, but when you touch them carefully, they really contain a very profound philosophy!
Mother is a tree that has taken deep roots in that village, no matter how cold the winter or the violent wind and rain, she can face it with singing and smiling. During the Spring Festival the year before last, I took my mother to her new house in Gaocheng, and she happily agreed, but just a few days after she came, she was impatient to go back, saying that she was uncomfortable staying upstairs and doing nothing all day. Every time I went back to visit my mother in the old house in the countryside, I always saw that she was either lighting a fire under the stove, sweeping the floor in the yard, or spreading feed for chickens and ducks, and persuaded her to sit down and rest for a while, but she did not stop her work, and said with a smile: "What is this tired, it is lighter than you city people singing and dancing!" ”
It seems that my mother has really turned her life into singing now. Listening to my mother's words, my mother's song was loud in my ears again, curling and winding with strength.
Author: Zhao Keming