Snail Dwelling (prose)

There was once a popular TV series "Snail House", which told the story of two pairs of protagonists who fell into a dilemma in order to pursue their ideal life, which truly reflected the sweet and bitter in real life. There is the entanglement of perseverance and abandonment, there is the wandering of gain and loss, full of a kind of thinking about human nature and torturing the soul.

Like the protagonist, I have had a "house" dream since I was a child, and I long to have a house that really belongs to me. My home was bought after two generations of hard work, and it was the painstaking efforts of my grandfather and father. When Grandpa was alive, the house was destroyed by the war, and in the father's generation, there was only half a partial earthen wall left, and it was the father who picked up discarded bricks in the east and west, and even some of the bricks were picked from the graves of the dead, because of the different lengths, the thickness was not consistent, in addition to the outer wall was slightly flat, the inner wall was uneven, there were relatives who came to the house for the night, when they slept and undressed, they casually threw them on the wall, and they could hang on the wall steadily.

In the rural house size generally on the "shelf", people's houses are "eleven", rich people also build "thirteen shelves", my family only built "nine frames", this is the definition of the area, if the number of wood, my family than other people's homes to have several more "shelves", because people use good wood, not bad for a hundred years, and my family wood is a miscellaneous tree cut down in the nearby mountains, in a few years it will be bitten by insects only the outer layer of skin, so often to add some new wood to the roof, For a few years, it was densely packed with wood. There was no brick partition wall, my father used a few wooden planks to separate them from it, becoming four rooms, a family of eight, two people sharing a house, this situation continued until the three sisters got married one after another, and the three of us brothers finally had their own rooms, but at that time the house was already crumbling.

In the ninth year after my father's death, that is, in ninety-one years, our brother finally renovated the old house with a layer of white lime, and the house also looked much brighter, although it was small, but it was already very satisfied at that time. In 1997, I became a family, no wedding dress, no wedding dress, not even a decent dress, in the new room, except for a wedding bed, the others are old, the wardrobe is still sent by the second brother, which is really "marriage". I am very grateful to my wife for not abandoning me, marrying me in the face of family opposition, and accompanying me to suffer. A year later, two lovely children were born apart, while bringing happiness, living has become a problem, a family of four, there is no place to squeeze, sometimes the daughter innocently asks: "Dad, why is the family's house so big, our family's house is so small..." I have no face, only to lie to my daughter again and again: "When you grow up, daddy build you a big house..." And every time the daughter is showing off to her peers, she is always ridiculed, and some snobbish people laugh at the daughter: "As far as your father's ability, Years and horses can't cover..." Every time she heard such words, my daughter was always very sad. There was no way, I had to build a house of more than ten square meters on the ruins of the abandoned part of the family next door, which was also only half a wall, which was really my own house.

In order to change the dilemma of family poverty, in 2008, we left our ten-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son to work in Haikou, my wife just started working as a cleaner in a hotel, I worked as a handyman in a coconut processing factory opened by an acquaintance, and soon my wife quit her original job and the two came together. The owner is a villager, but also my elementary school classmates, he arranged a room for us, outside is a warehouse, inside is a few square meters of small room, can only put a simple iron bed, every winter and summer vacation two children come up, we have to make a bunk on the floor, it is going to be so, we also feel very happy, after all, a family is rare to reunite together.

Such a day did not last long, due to poor management, the factory closed, whether to go or stay, I had a hard time deciding, thinking about it again and again, and finally chose to stay, carrying only three thousand yuan, and began my entrepreneurial road. Buy your own goods and process them yourself, pack your own and sell them yourself. Sometimes two people have to be busy until late at night, but we never say tired, and even have a sense of accomplishment.

Under our painstaking management, the factory has made a small improvement. After several years of accumulation, we did everything we could to buy a small property house of 90 square meters in the city, and finally gained a firm foothold in the city and fulfilled my promise to my daughter. Just as we were looking forward to the realization of a better life, a vigorous "double creation" movement completely shattered my dreams. Life is back to square one from the beginning. I joined the army of "motorcycles", walking through the streets and alleys, running around every corner of the city, earning a little living expenses.

In 2014, a sudden typhoon "Wei Ma Xun" destroyed my ancestral home, and the "small family" I personally built was not spared. Three years later, our three brothers together to tear down the torn ancestral house, built a spacious and bright bungalow, because it is an ancestral house, according to the proportion I can only be assigned to a room of ten square meters, every New Year's Holiday two children come back, still have to spend the night in other people's homes, the old mother saw that the grandchildren have no room to live in, they took the initiative to move out, to a house that was originally prepared to be used as a kitchen to live, the family barely has a place to live. But my "little home" was completely ruined, and every time I came home, I always deliberately went there to go around, standing in front of the ruins, with mixed feelings, recalling the previous bits and pieces, infinite emotion. I know that even if I have a house in the city, my roots are still in the land under my feet, where I am just a passer-by of the city, and the leaves fall to the roots, which is an eternal law and my destiny.

Life is like this, ups and downs, not alarming, just like the drama is made up, everyone is playing their own role. Some people are born with a million family wealth, fragrant cars and mansions, enjoying all the glory and wealth, and some people toil all their lives but have nothing. Life is like this, it doesn't change anything because of you, only yourself can change you.

Life is like this, clouds or fog, after all, you have to dream, just like the story in "Snail Residence", there are dreams to be far away, and dreams can spread their wings and soar.