"On every side of life, there are beautiful scenery."
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Original: The edge of life
Welcome to reprint, do not copy
01
Normal quarrels
The sun was nice that morning.
Too good to be picky.
I woke up to the bickering of my parents and wasn't surprised.
For me, parental quarrels have long been the norm.
"Drinking doesn't kill you." When they get married, we will be separated, and I can't imagine what it would be like to spend the rest of my life with an alcoholic! ”
Mother said this countless times.
I've heard it countless times, and my father has heard it countless times.
A sentence that has been heard countless times will not be taken to heart.
After all, who's going to take nagging seriously.
02
Alcoholic father
It is unclear when my father drank and when my mother began to argue with my father.
At least I can't tell.
By the way, let's introduce our family of six: father, mother, eldest sister, second sister, third sister and me.
I am the precious son of my parents and the younger brother of my three older sisters.
But in fact, I didn't feel much pampered, maybe my parents' energy had been exhausted in endless quarrels, and there was no possibility that the rain and dew would all be on me.
As for the three sisters, the rough life can smooth out everything, including their delicate care for me.
As for his mother's words that he was leaving, his father became more and more insincere.
"Let's go, the farther you go, the better, Lao Tzu is not rare!"
Father may not be rare mother, he is really rare, I am afraid that only wine.
This is not necessarily accurate, after all, the father said that it is not rare, but it is based on the fact that the mother has not really left.
But comparatively speaking, my mother, or me, see the actual situation is that my father is more concerned about his wine.
Only if there is enough wine money every day, whether this wine money is earned by his own work, or the third sister fishing for fish, he has no reason to be dissatisfied with life.
But life obviously did not allow my father to be upside down all day long, because of drinking, my father's job was lost.
Regarding this matter, the father himself cried out for injustice—
The nasty foreman at the mine did find the wine he had hidden under the well, but he swore he hadn't even unscrewed the cap.
But the father's discernment was of no use, and he was finally thrown out by the foreman.
After losing his job and giving the tavern a lot of money back to the wine, the father, who did not know how to tell his mother, decided to take the risk.
Yes, it is desperate to take risks, but the father's target is not others, but the mother.
He quietly took the money his mother had hidden in a hanging basket on the beam.
03
Cloth merchants
At some point, a mysterious cloth merchant appeared in our house.
Every year in the spring and autumn, cloth merchants wearing top hats are particularly diligent.
The last time a cloth merchant appeared in our house was in the summer a month ago.
As usual, he rode his horse slowly, and when he came to our door, he tied it to the maple tree in front of the house.
Then, the cloth merchant talked to his mother across the bamboo fence.
He spoke of the cloth shop he had opened in the city, of the business of the cloth shop, of the shop that had been run by his children and his wife, of the recent death of his wife, of the fact that he had to ride his horse to deliver cloth.
Of course, this kind of home delivery work is only a special preferential treatment for some old patrons.
In the course of the cloth merchant's narration, the mother always smiled and listened intently to the guests nagging him about his sadness.
After the conversation, the cloth merchant unloaded the cloth and entered the room like an old friend.
The second sister instructed me to give the horse water, and the third sister to mow the grass, and then she and the eldest sister could not wait to enter the house.
I knew that the second sister and eldest sister had to carefully select those fabrics to dress themselves up like a flower butterfly.
The third sister is still young and does not need it, and work is her best arrangement.
As for me, a boy, what's the fuss?
While giving the horses water, through the open window, I saw the eldest sister and the second sister happily picking up the cloth, and the cloth merchant was biting the sweet potato chips while smiling and squinting at the mother's face.
That look made me wonder if he was the one who had just talked about his wife who had just died.
The mother was a little embarrassed for some reason, and in a panic, she knocked a bottle of goat milk to the ground.
All of this will end quietly before father returns.
The mother seemed to have calculated the time, and promptly and very politely sent the cloth merchant out of the house.
What I don't understand is that even if a cloth merchant lost his horse in our house, he didn't even call the police.
Speaking of this matter, it was very strange, that time the cloth merchant suddenly came to visit, and my mother seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, and ordered me to hurry up and get the eldest sister and the second sister back.
When I returned, half an hour later, the horse was gone, gone without a trace.
Curiously, the cloth merchant didn't look depressed at all, he just wanted to leave in time before his father returned.
04
Grief heals
My mother did exactly what she said, and after the eldest sister and the second sister got married, she took me and left the house.
Except for a jar of wine, a note, the mother did not leave anything for the father.
The mysterious cloth merchant became my stepfather.
You asked the third sister, oh, that dumb, outside the wild habit, all day long like a crazy, Mo said that the mother does not want to take her away, just want to take, afraid that it can not be taken away.
Or go back to the horse that the cloth merchant lost, twenty years later, I finally found it—
Because I wanted to find the disappeared third sister, I drained the pond to make sure that she hadn't stumbled and fell into the pond (which she had dug herself and later became a paradise to feed her and her father).
In a short exclamation from the crowd, I saw a huge skeleton.
Not a man, but a horse.
Even though only the black hole hole remained in my eyes, I still saw panic and despair in those eyes.
Wen Fei's work "The Pond of Zhou Yu" tells the sad story of the above in a calm tone.
The work uses the perspective of a little boy "I" to observe my unhappy marriage with my father, and also uses a few concise brushstrokes to explain the life of my father who was stitched up after my mother left.
The person who stitched up her father's wound turned out to be the third sister, who had always been unpopular, who took her father to the shack she had built and fed two people with the pond she dug with her own hands.
In dealing with the broken relationship in the family, the father's method is to numb himself with wine, while the mother, after enduring it again and again, finally uses the most decisive way to completely cut off her connection with the family.
It's hard to evaluate who's right and who's wrong in this marital relationship, which is obviously what the author wants to avoid.
He simply shows us quietly the wound of life and how this wound heals in the silent passage of time.
Regardless of this way of healing, it is conceivable or unexpected.
Life Jun said
"Grief can't be seen, but it can overwhelm people."