Text/Yang Zhiyan
Time flies, when I embark on the road back to my hometown again, looking back at this homeland that I have not seen for many years, I find that it is familiar with strangeness, and new and aging coexist.
Say that it is familiar because the lock on the gate was locked by my own hand more than ten years ago, and now it has long been rusted, along with the weathering and mottled ten-star civilized household door number, the once shiny and glorious color has become more and more dim in the baptism and erosion of the years, so I can't help but hold the hand to plaster, but no matter how hard I try, I can't restore the original polish, but a wide and flat asphalt road outside the yard is permeated with the freshness and strangeness of the silk.
Yes, I used to live here, where peach blossoms bloom in the spring, cattle and sheep flock in the summer, hundreds of trees with fruit in the autumn, and smoked bacon in the winter. Here the mountains are undulating, leafy, grassy streams, villages, and blue skies. My childhood friends and I used to walk carefree together, and the impression is that the fist-sized flower leather ball is our favorite toy, and those big and small paths leave us with our youth of giggling, playing, and walking and walking. One of the most common games is nothing more than one person throwing the ball to the ground, the other person flying to catch it, but once the small leather ball that was not caught rolled into a wet and slippery deep ditch, my friends and I could not help but look at each other, helplessly had to grab the rocky, thorny branches and weeds with our bare hands and wade into the opaque bottom of the ditch, trembling to pick up the ball, but accidentally fell on the way back to climbing, so the moss that had grown for many years stained their beautiful flower skirts into a "hodgepodge". When I got home, I hid in the house and rubbed hard and couldn't wash it, so I had to pretend to be indifferent and continue to school in the "colorful" dress, and whenever I met my mother's questioning eyes, I picked up my skirt and fled the scene quickly, completely without the reserved appearance of my daughter's family. The ditch that once picked up the ball has now collapsed, giving people a sense of decadence, as if the brisk and vigorous days of the past were just an illusion.
The wooden chicken pen next to the corner of the house has long been decayed, and the chickens used to be released by the master's house in the early morning, and then when dusk approached, they were like triumphant "warriors", all of them consciously returned to their nests to sleep, and what I most hoped for was that my mother would make me a large bowl of egg scrambled white rice (commonly known as: flower rice) on a whim in a busy morning, or the eggs under the strips, in short, I ate it with a mouthful of raw flavor. There is also a row of vegetable fields on the mountain edge of the corner of the house, and the competent mother likes to keep them in an orderly manner, always looking like a leafy man. I especially like the cucumbers and peppers planted by my mother, whenever they bloom yellow or white flowers in late spring and early summer, I begin to expect them to bear fruit quickly, so that I can eat my mother's pickled sour and spicy cucumbers in the hot summer, its sour feeling is the best shade in the heat, and the spicy chicken made by my mother is even more unique, and the memory of the memory of the mother picking peppers in the vegetable garden, she always likes to pick fat red peppers, scorns fertilizers, and is good at planting land with farm fertilizers. One of the phrases she often hangs on her lips is "a crop is a flower, and it all depends on dung to run the house." Today, the vegetable garden in the corner of the house has been deserted for many years, and the wild trees have grown into a full year, and the beauty that fills the heart is like a drop in the ocean.
I was speechless with the abandoned windmill in the courtyard, its grunting sound seemed to have dissipated in the dust of history, the familiar white wall and black tiles in front of me were also silently looking at the "stranger" in front of me at this time, standing in front of the door for a long time, I never had the courage to open the two dusty doors, as if we were not only isolated from time and space, but also like a thousand mountains and rivers, the key hidden in the fixed place was finally rusty. The walnut tree in front of the door has broken, lost its knot, no one has picked it for many years, the fruit has disappeared into the soil every year to turn into red dust, it is like a child who has been lost in greed, no longer bears fruit in several winds, frosts, rains and snows, and like an old woman living in the dust, the peach tree is dead, and the pipa tree is half dead and half alive with me. Seeing the weeds in the garden, where did all the beautiful conditions of childhood go?
Once upon a time, I became the old man of the old house in the mysterious time and space, from running away from home to earn money to support my family, and then after several tosses and turns, my identity changed from drifting roots to buying a house, transforming into the new owner of the big city, all the way to the wind and lightning too late to breathe, I thought that the hometown will always wait for me with an inherent beautiful posture, it is my backer, we will never be separated in time.
However, today, I look at the old house speechlessly, and I fall into a deep sorrow, and my mind recreates the scene of the childhood garden for no reason: vegetables reveal two young buds, dressing for spring; peppers carry red lanterns and bile for summer cicadas; lentils shake their heads and sing for the autumn wind; radish cabbage crawls on the earth, adding vitality to the snowy world. I was overwhelmed with emotions, unaware that the wind had stirred the leaves of one tree after another, they were drifting to zero, they were falling leaves and returning to their roots...
(Image from the Internet)
【Author's Profile】Yang Zhiyan' works have been published in Readers, Selected Essays, Speeches and Eloquence, Newspaper And Periodicals, Essays, Hubei Writers, Good Days, Wenyuan Enlightenment, Being a Man and Living in the World, Thinking and Wisdom, 37 Degrees Woman, New Youth, etc.
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