Remember my mother

My mother, a rural woman, was born in 1950 and died in 2004 at the age of fifty-four, suffering from colon cancer and dying of great pain. She was a bitter person, not a grandmother and grandfather. My grandmother and grandfather have been married for many years but have no children, and when they opened the door one morning, they saw their mother who was abandoned in the swaddling in front of the door. When my mother was 3 years old, my grandmother died of illness, and my grandfather was an extremely honest and pedantic farmer, who had a very poor ability to survive in that era, and thanks to the sympathy and help of the villagers in the village, the two could barely survive. Later, life became more and more difficult until there was no food to eat. My mother once recalled to me that one Chinese New Year's Eve evening when she was eight or nine years old, the sound of firecrackers outside had been sounding one after another, and grandpa and she were sitting in the darkening room (no money to buy foreign oil to light the lamp), no rice noodles, no way to cook. Looking at each other for half a day, Grandpa sighed, got up and went to the pickle jar to catch a salty knot, changed the water in the pot and boiled it several times, until the salt taste faded and could be eaten, and the two of them ate it as Chinese New Year's Eve rice. Mother said that for some reason she had been clearly remembering the back of her grandfather's sobbing neck when he brushed the bowl on his back, and every time she thought about it, she felt very uncomfortable for her grandfather.

Later, Grandpa really had no choice, so he sold the house and led his mother to live in the horse number of the production team, feeding cattle and horses and other livestock in exchange for accommodation for the two of them. My mother did not go to school and could not read, but she had a flexible mind and sharp hands and feet when she was young. When she was older, in addition to helping her grandfather feed the animals and clean the horses, she was often called to the house by the women of the village to help spin cotton, weave and dye cloth, collect shoe soles, etc., in exchange for a few meals or old clothes. She said that once she helped the family to remove and wash the quilt for two days, not only did she eat for two days, but finally took out a pair of old liberation shoes for her to bring back to her grandfather to wear. When he returned, Grandpa put on rubber-soled shoes that leaked big toes and heels and said, "This shoe is strong, and it can be worn for several years." Grinned and touched her head. My mother said that my grandfather died early and did not wait for her to go filial piety, but at that time she was really happy, and it was really happy to make the family happy!

Mother often said that she really grew up eating a hundred meals and wearing a hundred clothes, and she was full of gratitude to the people in the village. Later, after my father and our family moved to the county town to live, my mother always invited the family to dinner whenever she met the villagers in the city on the street who rushed to the market or ran errands. These spitting, loud and noisy guests came and went, which brought great distress and shame to me when I was in junior high school. Once, she actually brought a leprosy orphan from a village she met on the street to her home to eat for a few days, which caused the dissatisfaction of her family and neighbors in the same building. The countryside of the mother's childhood was extremely poor and backward and ignorant, and the villagers had pure and kind sympathy for the mother who lived even poorer, but also had cruel insults and oppression. When my mother was twelve or thirteen years old, she reached the sensitive adolescence, began to recognize people's eyes, and had humble self-esteem. Mother said: When she was helping other children of the same age get dressed and went to school, she was not envious, because she felt that she could do more farm and manual work than them. But most people don't allow her to eat together, some are better, they will be served out for her to eat alone, and sometimes they have to wait for the family to finish eating before calling her to eat leftovers. When eating leftovers, only adults are fine, and if there are children of the same age, she feels humiliated. At that time, the men in the village would often flirt with and molest the little girls, most of them taking advantage of each other verbally or touching them, and generally laughed and ran away when they were scolded. Once, when she was drying beans in the production team field, her mother was touched, and she scolded her back, not wanting the man to slap her in public without hesitation. She ran back crying, but when she saw grandpa in the distance in front of the horse's door, who was hunched over the hay. She recalled: "I stopped crying, as if I was at peace all of a sudden!" Wiping away tears and turning his head back to the team, he just wanted not to deduct work points, and dried up half a day! There is another thing that impressed my mother very much, she told me many times, and every time at the end, she always added a hateful sentence "Liu xx is really bad!" As a concluding remark. This Liu xx was the captain of the production team at that time, and his mother and several small friends of the same age went to the field to pull weeds, and each of them stole two corn cobs and placed them at the bottom of the basket, which was covered with weeds to barely hide their eyes. When he came back, he was stopped by Liu xx at the intersection. "We had seven or eight children, and he just turned over my basket and grabbed me and said you were a thief, stealing the corn from the production team. So many people, catch me alone. It's not because your grandfather is pedantic, he doesn't care, only bully me! My mother was finally in the hospital, I was in bed, and somehow talked about the past, and she recalled again: "In the evening, the whole assembly of the production team was held, and I was asked to stand on the platform and criticize the fight." Your grandfather rushed to the front of the stage and puffed up and knelt down for him and said, Nizi Fourteen's daughter, next time do not dare to commit another crime! Liu xx still let people drag me to the stage to criticize the fight. I stood on the stage with my head bowed and watched your grandfather kneel in front of the stage for a whole night until the end of the conference. In the end, the mother still said: "Why is Liu xx so bad!" I asked my mother, Liu Xx, what she was doing now, "I haven't seen him in years!" This bad man should also let him get cancer and suffer this sin! Isn't it a bit of a shame for me to say this? My mother asked me with a smile.

Now that I think about it, my mother should be an extremely useful person. When I was young, I read very well, especially well in the books I read, and the details of the books I read are still clearly remembered many years later, probably inherited from her. Although my mother had never read a book, after moving to the city, she had been rushing to do all kinds of small businesses, calculating accounts, and coming casually, which made me secretly amazed. My wife also said that your mother actually remembers that the big soup spoon for scooping porridge was bought at the Suozhen Market thirty-three cents in the winter thirty-three years ago, and the steel pot for distilling steamed buns was bought twenty-one years ago for four and five pieces, plus two cage fans one by one for seven! The bottom of the pot has been changed twice, and how much is the hoop once. Because she was illiterate, she had an inexplicable reverence for books, and even if the straw paper I used in elementary school, as long as there were words on it, she was flattened and neat, and only after I confirmed that it was useless was it lit as a fire paper. My mother was also extremely industrious, and I had never seen her lying in bed except for the fact that she was bedridden with cancer at the end. Every morning I woke up to the sound of her shouting or her labor, and every night before I went to bed, she was always busy, not sure how there were so many jobs in the house. As long as the whole family sits together and chats, she can always find some work to let everyone not idle in their hands, saying that they are busy in their hands and do not delay their mouths. During college, I talked about my girlfriend in a big city, and I went home with me, my mother was still like this, and when I chatted, I arranged the work in my hand for her, and my father repeatedly dissuaded her with his eyes and left the table in anger. Later, I fell out of love and was extremely painful, and when I was at home, my mother once asked me timidly whether people looked down on us because she arranged work last time, which made me laugh. My father was extremely lazy, and when my mother was alive, my father did not even wash his socks once. Smoking after a meal, if no one puts the ashtray in front of him, he will bounce the soot directly into the rice bowl. To this day, my wife always laments why I didn't inherit my mother's industrious genes! Later, a friend complained about his parents' vices while chatting. I talked about my father's laziness, and my friend said: That's your mother willing to get used to him! Suddenly, I had a feeling of sudden enlightenment. Mothers have always had a heartfelt admiration for their fathers. I had seen photos of the two of them young, my father was more than one meter and eight meters tall, with a Chinese character face, a sword eyebrow and a high nose, and a dignified appearance, and he was the first college student in my village. And the mother's usual appearance, the family situation is not only poor, far below the poor, and uneducated. How did they come together? This is yet another amazing story.

It is said that when my mother was sixteen or seventeen years old, although she looked ordinary and lived with her grandfather in a horse, she was skillful, clean and sharp, hardworking, and very famous in the village. She said that if the family was satisfied, someone would invite her to help, so she practiced her kung fu of good work and sharp hands and feet, and she was proud of it. Now that I think about it, hard work is the way of survival that she has known since she was a child, and it is also the foundation of her life, so it has formed her lifelong paranoia about hard work. My grandmother was a god mother-in-law in the village, married and mourned to see the days, summoned the soul of the child who had lost her soul, and sent money and food to the relatives in the underworld, and the whole village came to find my grandmother, and she was still the eldest daughter-in-law of our family with the same surname, and she still had a certain prestige in the village. But after marriage, she has never had children, and it is said that she has been reprimanded for seeing the fate of heaven. I didn't have my father's only son until I was in my forties, so I was very precious and kept my father studying. I lived with my grandmother for many years, and she didn't die until I was in the first year of junior high school. Her appearance, the basket held behind her head, the big blue placket, the trembling foot wrapped around her feet, the sound and smile are still vividly remembered in my eyes. At that time, there were very few people in the village who went to junior high school, and there were very few like my father who went to high school in the city. The only boy in the family was missing the help, and my grandmother, limited by her little feet, often called my mother to help at home.

(To be continued)