【Books Fragrant Clouds】The past of the small town

A small town of the past

Author, Reciter: Li Xue

Li Xue, chairman of the Xiangyun County Federation of Literature and Literature and a member of the Yunnan Writers Association, has published many articles in literary newspapers and magazines inside and outside the province, and published his personal essay collections "Strange Flowers" and "Home in Xiangyun".

When I was a child, the memory of Xiangyun County was beautiful and dreamy.

The county seat has always been a place of economic and cultural concentration. My aunt's family lived on the north street of the county town, which is now often called the "dragon tail" of the old north street, and the relatively lively area was more remote. Every morning, the first rays of sunlight in my aunt's yard had just shone through the wall, and she came to wake me up and go out with her on the street to buy breakfast and vegetables, and my aunt knew that I loved to eat roasted bait, and she would come back with an enamel jar with a lid to beat thin bean flour. She took my little hand and walked down North Street, where there were very few people, the morning mist had not yet cleared, and there were several women at the door of the house who were burning fires and cooking smoke. We bought breakfast at the Bell and Drum Tower, where there was an old grandmother who had set up a stall for burning bait blocks very early, and there were four thick and round red pillars in the Bell and Drum Tower, and the grandmother's stall was placed under the pillar on the north side and the west. My aunt smiled and squinted and greeted people, telling me to stand aside and wait, and she took out a jar on another stall next to her to beat the fragrant thin bean flour, and then sometimes took me to continue to buy vegetables, sometimes she told me to go home first to eat breakfast, and not to wait for the thin bean flour to be cold. I only remember the mixed smell of the roasted bait and the mixed aroma of pickled and salted rot, as if to lure out the worms in my stomach, I have forgotten how I got home, and the delicacy was simply the only taste in the whole county!

North Street is not long, from the aunt's house to the bell and drum tower is about three or four hundred meters away, but, being held by hand, in the child's heart only the smell of burning bait and thin bean powder, there is no concept of distance. Today, when I think of the street I walked through decades ago under the guidance of my aunt and grandmother, all that remains in my heart is a deep desire for delicious food.

Sometimes when I run into the streets, I will see villagers who come to sell "chestnut charcoal", old and young, with the same marks smeared by charcoal on their faces, I don't know what "chestnut charcoal" is used for? The kind aunt whispered to me that "chestnut charcoal" can roast fires and burn bait blocks, and it is not as choking as soot, and I think it is really a very strange heating material. On the way, you must pass through a narrow alley, in the alley there are people selling grass, called "grass", aunt said that it can be used to rub into a hemp rope, a thin grass into a rope, very strong.

Under the careful care of her aunt, her yard is really a beautiful "hundred grass garden", which is planted with all kinds of flowers and plants, and those flowers and plants alone can fill all the worlds of a little girl. Pick the hydrangea flowers to dye the nails, see if the lion flowers are dark yellow or light yellow, the daffodil buds are beaten a few, pink and white, the chicken claw flowers are picked and soaked in the enamel jar on the table, the dahlia is like an exaggerated colorful "big bun", the thick walnut tree is too tall to see the flower, I only pick up the green walnuts that fell under the tree in the autumn, take a hammer to knock open the outer skin, one layer, two layers, and then peel off the thin walnut skin, put it in my mouth full of fragrance...

As I grew older, I noticed that the yard was much smaller. However, I still like my aunt's house so much, like her yard, everywhere is clean and tidy, full of flowers. My aunt and grandpa rarely came home, and if they happened to be me, he would warmly roast me potatoes, bake them slowly in the soot at the bottom of the stove, and after baking them, scrape the skin very carefully with a knife, and hand me a clean hot potato in my small hand.

Many years have passed, and the town has undergone earth-shaking changes. Whenever I walked through the renovated North Street, I couldn't help but think of my kind aunt, remembered the jar of thin bean flour she brought me, remembered the smiling eyes of the grandmother who sold burnt bait blocks, remembered my aunt's small garden, the towering walnut tree in the courtyard, and remembered some trance scenes, just like the little girl in the movie "Old Things in seongnam" softly chanting in a careful tone: "Outside the long pavilion, beside the ancient road, the grass is green, the evening wind supports the willow flute, the sunset mountain outside the mountain..."

It turns out that the past of the small town has always been a fragment of the dream left in the heart, coming and going, bit by bit, no connection, but it has always accompanied its own growth, warm and intimate.

May 27, 2012

Photo and text release County Rong Media Center

Editor-in-charge Yang Shiyu

Graphic review Zhang Minlai

Chief Examiner Hu Linguo