Original novella "Five Tastes of Life"

- Thirteen

Life is a mirror, you cry to it, it cries at you; you laugh at it, it laughs at you!

Happy families are all similar, and unhappy families have their own misfortunes.

- Caption

Chapter IX

1

"Count yellow... Count the cuts..." A cuckoo chirp made farmers realize that the summer harvest was coming every season...

Yuan Chentu looked at a large piece of golden brilliant, ripe and full of wheat fields with great excitement, it seemed that this year was a bumper harvest year, you can eat white-faced steamed buns at once, when you think of this, Yuan Chentu has an indescribable excitement and bitterness in his heart. He had planted his own crops all his life, and it was now his greatest wish to eat enough. The summer harvest battle of "Dragon's Mouth Eating" is about to begin.

For a small mountain village born in Qianshan Village, a remote and poor village with long years of drought and little rain, the villagers have been resting at sunset all year round, and they have worked hard in the fields in the wind and rain, but they cannot exchange for the food and clothing of the whole family. The scenes of the rural people's difficult and compassionate lives have left a deep imprint on his heart. When will such a day end? When will the villagers be able to eat and wear warm, live like a decent...

Every year in the cold winter month, people wear worn-out and thin clothes and shiver with jelly, but in their hearts they expect that the sky will fall thick snow. Because "this year the wheat cover is three layers of quilts, and the next year the head pillow bun sleeps." ”。

Now it's finally time for the harvest. The whole village is filled with a joyful atmosphere. Every household is prepared with sickles, squirrels (Longzhou dialect, that is, tools for cutting wheat), whetstones and other tools, ready to do a good job, early to cut their own wheat and take it back, so as not to rain and mold the wheat, a year's hard work will be wasted. The hardest thing under the heavens is the peasants who face the loess and work hard all day!

2

This is the summer vacation busy season after the middle school entrance examination, Yuan Jinshui bid farewell to teachers and classmates and hurried home to help his parents collect wheat. As soon as he returned to the village, a rush of heat was in full swing, and the scene and atmosphere of the dragon's mouth grabbing food and harvesting wheat deeply infected him, and he wanted to join it immediately...

On this day, with the fiery sun overhead, Yuan Jinshui and his brother carried water and meals prepared by their mother to deliver food to their father, who was cutting wheat in the field. Along the way, watching the scene of every family cutting wheat in full swing and sweating like rain, Yuan Jinshui and his brother could not fly to the ground immediately and quickly helped their parents cut the wheat field.

When I arrived in the wheat field, I saw my father Yuan Chen tu leaning over his thin body, struggling to wield a sickle and cutting the wheat quickly. The rows of wheat bales cut and tied into bundles are lined up in rows, which is very beautiful. Perhaps tired, the father stretched out and looked up to see them both.

Yuan Jinshui and his younger brother took advantage of the gap between their father's meals to pick up the scythe and learned to cut wheat. He grabbed a tuft of wheat in his left hand and cut the base of the wheat with a sickle in his right hand, "Rub... rub... Rub...", a small handful of slowly cut wheat, a long time to cut a bundle. Binding wheat is a technical job, he bundled several times can not be bundled well, the father laughed and said: "This work looks simple but there is a trick, when putting wheat, you have to put a handful of wheat crossed, when bundling, you have to put the waist (Longzhou dialect, that is, a similar rope made of wheat straw, used to bind wheat) to the wheat head, so that the bundled wheat is bundled and stacked (Longxian dialect, that is, the cut wheat bundles are piled into a pile to prevent rain). I saw that my father skillfully laid a "waist", and three times five divided by two tied wheat. Yuan Jinshui stood it up and watched like a scarecrow as they sweated and fought in the fields and the hot summer of this "dragon's mouth"...

After half a month of hard work by the family, Yuan Jinshui's family finally achieved a bumper summer grain harvest this year. The round and round bags filled with wheat in the wheat field (longzhou dialect, which is a kind of agricultural tool used to hold wheat in the field outside the house) and the neatly stacked wheat bags show people the joy of the harvest. A year's hard work finally paid off, and Yuan Chentu, who had been sad all day, finally showed a long-lost smile on his face.

(To be continued)

On the night of the seventeenth lunar month of the lunar calendar, it is in Xi'an