The back | parents who were getting more than seventy years old were happy like children

Yao Huasong

A few days ago, I arrived home, a small village called Taojiacang in the mountains of southeastern Hubei. This is the only home I identify with in my heart at the moment, although I have been studying and working in Guangzhou for 16 years.

In the past year, during the Spring Festival, May Day, 11 and summer vacations, I have returned home four times, staying at home for nearly 50 days, and I have fulfilled my promise to go home to visit my parents on the big festival or big holiday. Don't underestimate these 50 days, I have a high probability of easily crushing 95% or more of the "split family".

I am undoubtedly lucky, first of all, thanks to my professional status as a college teacher, I have a relatively generous time to go home; secondly, it stems from my personal traditional cognition and stereotypes about my hometown and parents: where my parents are, the year is where I am; I can't stand the New Year in Guangzhou, where there is no New Year worship, ancestor worship, rice dumplings, fishing, and making all kinds of hometown food.

My parents are the most simple farmers in rural China, and their stories can reflect the history and reality of Chinese farmers.

My father was a recognized "capable person" in the village, ploughing the land, building houses, engaging in decoration, building stoves, picking up roofs, repairing electrical appliances, almost omnipotent, no one did not boast.

The father has no culture, but he will never allow his children to be uncultured. In the early 1990s, my father went to work alone in a brick and tile factory in the provincial city of Wuhan, doing dirty and messy work, taking a meager salary, and providing for me and my brother to study. Later, my brother read to the second year of high school, and I read the Ph.D. In the countryside of that era, this was a rare thing.

Because the family was destitute, my father did not marry his mother until he was 30 years old.

My mother was illiterate, she didn't read half a word of the book, and learning to recognize money was all Taught to her when I was in high school. She is usually reticent, honest, careless, often not in a straight line, cooking rice is often pasty... There are so many things like this that they are often laughed at by the villagers.

Every year on Chinese New Year's Eve night, our family roasted the fire and chatted, my father always laughed at my mother for not doing anything all year round, and my mother retorted with righteous words: "Who said, the pork you eat is not my pig?" In her mother's eyes, her greatest contribution to the family is to raise a big fat pig every year. We certainly nodded our heads in agreement collectively.

In the eyes of others, fathers and mothers are not well matched in all aspects, and their feelings are average, but in fact, they are not. People who haven't lived with my parents don't really understand the unique feelings between them.

The day after I came home, I was in the yard instructing my nephew to write, my mother was peeling onions, and my father walked over to my mother and said fiercely: "Tell you to put on your hat, you have to wear it, don't you know that your cold is just a little better?" "After saying that, my father helped my mother put on the hat, pulled the hat down hard, almost pulled the brim of the hat to the position of the mother's eyebrows, and I saw my mother's uncomfortable expression.

At that moment, I remembered that Tang Sanzang had put a tight hoop spell on Sun Wukong, and my father hoped that his mother would not casually take off her hat and insist on wearing it for a few days before the cold could be cured.

The afternoon before yesterday, I had taken a shower in the fire house, preparing to wash my clothes, when my mother saw me, and she came over with a washboard and washing powder, meaning to wash for me. But this scene was bumped into by my father, who carried firewood into the house, and he secretly pulled on his mother's sleeve and signaled her to go out, but I still found it.

Of course, I did not blame my father in the slightest, but was touched by this kind of care for my mother. "Your son is in his 40s and still can't wash his own clothes?" Do you still want to wash the old woman who is nearly seventy years old? Like what words! "I guess my father would think so, and I am proud and happy that my father thinks this way.

Another time, the child's mother cut a few apples, and the son wore a plate containing apples and distributed them to the whole family and gave them to the mother. When my mother was ready to eat, she was stopped by her father: "You coughed badly last night, can you still eat cold?" After saying this, the father took the apple from his mother's hand and went to the kitchen to boil the boiling water and soak the hot apple.

The above are just a few fragments of what I have experienced and observed in the past few days. I believe that when I am not at home, the same or similar fragments are played out every day, and this is the daily routine of my parents for nearly half a century, under the same roof.

"Going home with your parents" is an abstract expression, how to implement and cash in? Here's a look at my personal experiences in recent years.

Share the housework and be considerate of your parents. I am very unaccustomed to the practice of going home and treating myself as a guest and a relative. When we cook at home, usually my mother and I take the children to the vegetable patch to pick vegetables and wash them in the river; when we come home, my daughter-in-law and sister-in-law are responsible for stir-frying, my mother burns the fire, and when the dishes are ready, I instruct the children to wash their hands, set the dishes, serve rice and pour wine for the adults.

For example, when the family grilled lamb kebabs, my brother was responsible for grilling, my daughter-in-law, sister-in-law and children were responsible for wearing meat skewers with sticks, and the children desperately fed them into their parents' mouths, "forcing" them to taste.

The children wanted to eat "soft mustard" (a delicacy in my hometown), my mother and I would take the four children and look around happily, and we spent a pleasant morning in the mountains. From time to time, the mountains are filled with the hearty laughter of mothers and children.

In the evenings of the past two years at home, I would eat melon seeds and peanuts with my parents in the fire house and talk about the things I did when I was a child. Where possible, I take them to walk and see places they've been or stayed in the past, and accompany them to find and relive memories of the past.

For example, on the fifth day of the first lunar month last year, my father and I came to the long-abandoned Da'ao Shanshui Energy Pumping Station two kilometers away from home, and my father told me about the spectacular scene of the hometown government gathering the strength of the whole town and building a large number of civil engineering.

It was 1966, and our village ushered in a development turnaround: Haoshui County decided to build a water pumping station in the Da'ou Mountain within the scope of our village, and the initial idea was to build a comprehensive water conservancy project, with specific functions covering pumping, power generation, processing (rice milling, wheat milling, bran, etc.) and irrigation, etc. Later, due to insufficient funds, it became a regional water conservancy facility for pumping irrigation.

At that time, the policy was called "water mountain", that is, the irrigation water around it was pumped from the water pumping station to the mountain canal, and then the water was diverted to the village fields. My father said that the Da'ao ShanShui energy pumping station is very famous, no one knows, and children in all directions and eight miles come to play and visit almost the only veritable "industrial enterprise" in the northern part of our county.

Whenever he talked about these things he had experienced, his father couldn't help but raise his eyebrows.

When the mother happily leads her four grandchildren out in search of food, when the father talks endlessly about the old things, when the parents who are in their seventies are happy like children, I think this is high-quality companionship.

Responsible Editor: Wang Lei Photo Editor: Chen Feiyan

Proofreader: Ding Xiao