Nostalgia for the wall calendar
Author / Hong Luling
Originally published in the city supplement of Xiamen Daily
A friend gave me a desk calendar. On the cover of the calendar are colorful fields, and farmers are working hard, reminiscent of the joy of the harvest. What a beautiful and artistic calendar! But somehow, I suddenly remembered the wall calendar when I was a child.
Courtesy of the author
At that time, my family had a grocery store. At the end of the year, my father would go to the office of the association of individual industrialists in the town to get the wall calendar of the village's grocery stores, which would be distributed by my family to each grocery store. The village is large and populous, and twenty years ago there were more than a dozen grocery stores in the village, large and small. At that time, I was eight or nine years old, and I liked to ride my bicycle around the village. I begged my dad to let me distribute it, get on my beloved bike, and follow the route my dad had planned, a bit like the courier I have now.
I would love to divide the wall calendar, because the grocery store owners see me smiling, maybe the wall calendar makes them feel the joy and blessing of the New Year. Later, every time they met in the village, they would laugh and say, Oh, the child who issued the calendar was a child of so-and-so' family.
If the wall calendar is to establish a window of communication with the outside world, then the used wall calendar becomes a bag of books, helping me open the door to knowledge. When I first entered elementary school and brought back my new books, my sister used expired wall calendar paper to help me pack textbooks.
The wall calendar paper is smooth to the touch, has a certain hardness and is not too thick. After a while, the majestic mountains and rivers on the wall calendar, the colorful flowers... It became the protective film for the new textbook. I carefully rubbed it, writing the subject and name one by one.
Later, I learned to pack the book skin myself. Put the spine of the book on the wall calendar paper, such as measuring the height of the book, fixing the length, and then opening the cover of the textbook to measure the width, usually one page of wall calendar paper can be wrapped in three books. Watching the wall calendar paper become a protective layer for textbooks, I always feel full of pride. Until now, I still treasure the textbooks wrapped in wall calendar paper.
Those expired wall calendars are also cut into book wrapping paper, so as not to become waste paper, which can also help them extend their life. Now that I think about it, when I was young, I was worried about the beautiful pattern on the wall calendar, and I was concerned about the happiness of distribution, but I never really cared about the long list of numbers under the wall calendar pattern. Suddenly feeling so much is not so much a nostalgia for the old days as it is about truly feeling the passage of time.
"What in the world urges people to grow old, half chicken and half horseshoe." The new calendar has opened a new page, and I have copied a small poem by Feng Jicai on it: How fast the years are, oh another year; the flowers and leaves are all gone, and only the poems are preserved. In the new year, we should cherish the years, work hard, and use actions to turn each day into a wonderful moment worth remembering.
author
Hong Luling, a post-90s author, loves literature. A cup of tea, half a volume of poetry, like to meet a better self in the text. His works have appeared in newspapers and periodicals such as "Being a Man and Living in the World", "Junior High School Students' Heaven and Earth", and "Xiamen Daily".
Readers
Lin Yanyan is a first-class teacher at The Xiamen Women and Children's Activity Center.
Produced by The New Media Center of Xiamen Daily
Audio production: Huang Xiaoqing Xu Mengjie Cover image source Xiamen Daily Picture Center
Editor: Chen Shaoying, Lu Tingwen, Duty Editor-in-Chief: Lin Yanzhen
Xiamen Daily original works, without authorization, shall not be reproduced, violators will be investigated!
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