It has been more than ten years since the old house collapsed, but in my dreams, the previous appearance still appears, like the sketches of Zhang Painter, the impression that the lines are not thick is so clear. It was as if I could easily open the slightly blackened door and go to sleep beautifully on the bed covered with yellow straw.
I remember the houses in the village, with mud walls, large green tiles, wooden windows but no dangling glass. In winter, in order to block the cold wind, my father had to nail old yellowed plastic paper. Listening to my father, the reason why the houses are similar is that in 1954, the Yangtze River flood broke the polder, most of the old houses collapsed, and the old houses that used wood through the square could not withstand the tearing of the flood.
My old house was connected to my uncle's house, a big slip, and from behind the house, it looked longer than the school classroom. Uncle's two houses in the middle of my family two rooms is my grandmother's house, each house has a partition wall in the middle, the name is also a little special, like the two heads of the house we were called black four at that time. I can't figure out what the word "black" means now.
After Grandma's death, the one behind her was given to her uncle's house, and the front room belonged to my family. When the brother reached the age of marriage, his father was leading people to make some extra money in anqing petrochemical industry, so he bought green bricks in the brigade kiln factory, and connected another one on the open space on the east side of the house, all three sides were green bricks, and the brick seams were also hooked with lime. In front of the new house, a pot house was built. My house is black six plus one has become seven, not including the pot house. But this new house for my brother became my marriage room, and my brother's marriage room was still in the old house.
The layout of the old house is mostly the same: the two sides are rooms, the main entrance is open in the middle of the room, the partition wall is the front of the big back small, the back of the small chicken coop and miscellaneous things, there are also kitchens, the front of the big living room is the place where the family eats, but also the place to entertain guests, but also to the twenty-fourth of the waxing moon to take the ancestors home for the festival. The tangible and the invisible are accommodated in the living room, which shows the importance of the living room. But at that time, the conditions were poor, and there was really no decent decoration: a strip with kerosene lamps and teapots, shell thermoses, a thick wooden table, and a few benches that did not show their true colors. The floor is also compacted with mud, and the guests want to pull the table apart, because the uneven ground always has to be dragged around and moved several times, and the impatient simply pads thin wood blocks or cardboard.
The walls are adobe walls, like large bricks in ancient times, but they have not been grilled by kiln fires, and they cannot withstand the erosion of wind and rain. The leaking wall is like a rough hair of a cow's belly that has been turned over, and you can see the grooves left by the long-term leakage, like the tears under the old man's eye bags. Except for the living room, which was painted with white lime water with mud powder, the other rooms were all yellow mud color of the original juice. At night, the lampshade of the kerosene lamp was polished brightly, and the light that came out was also dim, like the face of an elderly man.
The New Year is the happiest, and the altar jars at home are filled with sweet and fragrant snacks. I would also ask my father for change to go out on the street to buy some landscape paintings and nail them to the wall of the living room. It is painted with black and white bamboo, the kind of long axis. I like bamboo, maybe I go to teacher Lin's house in the East Gate team to see a bamboo forest next to his house; maybe I read a few books and think that I am a very literary teenager.
I often imagine that there is a cluster of bamboo or a small bamboo garden at the back or side of the house, which is a poetic residence, and it is a kind of scenery to put a small table on the bamboo side to read and write in my spare time. Unfortunately, behind my house is the path taken by the villagers, and in front of it is a small rice field for drying crops, and there is really no little empty space to satisfy my own little wish. Even the paintings I bought seem to be very small, and after nailing them, I looked at the straw hats hanging on the wall, crop seeds, cotton shoes made by my mother for the whole family, single shoes, and the graffiti that we had scratched since we were young.
The deepest memory of the old house is the pot house, after school or playing outside tired home, the first goal is to find food in the pot house. Lift the lid of the pot, open the kitchen cabinet, if you don't find anything, you will climb to the lid of the water tank to see if there are any washed potatoes, radishes in the basket hanging under the strips... As long as there is food, whether he is raw or cooked, take it and nibble while going to play with his companions.
I have lived in the old house for more than twenty years, the old house is my harbor to shelter from the wind and rain, but also carries my childhood carefree and happy time, carries my countless dreams of youth flying, but this old house is deeply imprinted with the imprint of my fathers, too low, too dark, not what I imagined. In order to change this imprint and for the ideal in my heart, I chose to go to another country to work hard. Until the old house one day after a storm, the mud wall was too wet to withstand the heavy pressure and fell down.
During the nearly three decades I spent wandering outside, I also bought a few houses. But the old home, the old house has always been in the heart, how can not give up. Last year, a small building was rebuilt on the foundation behind the village, and when the new house was beamed, after the firecrackers and flowers disappeared, my wife said to me, spending so much money to make a house and not living here, I don't know what to do? I smiled and said, "How beautiful is this house, the open space in front and back can be used as a vegetable garden, you can plant flowers, you can dig a small fish pond to raise fish, and you can build a grape rack... You don't live, I'll come back and live when I'm old." The wife said, "If I don't come back with my children, you will live alone, and who will cook for you?" At this time, the eighty-year-old mother next to her said: "If you don't come back, I will do it for my son, and I will live here with my son." Now that the living conditions are better, I really hope that my mother can have such a long lifespan.
The old house in my hometown is where I was born and raised in Si, and I also have memories of my life. Now the houses in my hometown are all built beautifully, the car can drive to the front of the door, the collective has also built a garbage pond, the village is clean, the air is fresh, when I go home, I can see my childhood friends, the familiar left and right neighbors, and the village road I have walked out of the house.
No matter where I am now, how my life is, one day I will return from that path to Cheng Jiadun, where my roots are.
