Text: Zhang Zonglong
Corn, northeast people called bud rice, northwest people called bud valley, our hometown in Shandong called sticks or sticks. When I was a child, I heard a story called the black blind man breaking the stick, which probably means that the black blind man (bear) is stupid, runs to the ground to break the stick, breaks the right armpit with his left hand, and then swings his right hand to break the left armpit, and finally there is a stick left. The purpose of the old man often telling this story to the children is to teach us not to learn from the black blind, not to use our brains, and to do things in a vacuum. But none of us listened to it at that time, and we just thought it was fun to break the stick on the ground.
Nostalgia essay: Happy times of breaking the stick
Stick, my generation has inexplicable feelings about it. It was the staple food of our childhood, and it was inseparable from the stick all year round. Pancakes with sticks, boiling sticks, sticking pot sticks, steaming stick nests, occasionally improving during the New Year's Festival, the raw materials for popcorn are still sticks. It fills our stomachs and nourishes our bodies, and it is said that we should be very grateful for the kindness of the stick. But the stick is not as soft and sweet as wheat and rice, and it belongs to the coarse grain category. When I was a child, the noodles of the stick were not finely ground, and the food made was not exquisite, no matter how to eat it, it was divergent, dry, and hard, and when I ate more, I was disgusted, and I had a repulsive mood towards it, and many people did not really like it.
When they were young, adults were enthusiastic and energetic, and they regarded the land as their life. In particular, the people of the grandfather generation have just received land from the landlord's hands, and no one is willing to treat the land like this, some people sublease it, some people leave it barren. However, at that time, due to the restrictions of seeds, fertilizers, irrigation and other conditions, many crops were not very productive, like wheat, the yield of one mu of land was only three or five hundred catties, and most of them were paid public grain, and the peasants were only willing to eat white noodles during the New Year's Festival. But the stick is different, it has a strong drought tolerance, hardiness, barrenness tolerance and excellent environmental adaptability. The high hills on the north slope of the village, the low-lying land on the south slope, and the watered land on the eastern slope can all grow tenaciously and have high yields. So when we were young, the autumn crops there were mainly sticks, and others such as sorghum, millet, beans, etc., were planted relatively little, only some corner edges or planted in the stick field, and the yield was lower.
Sticks are planted on a large area of the village's land, and harvesting sticks in autumn is the most important autumn work. When the moon turns from round to lost on August 15, when the mooncake eaten in the mouth still emits the special fragrance of green and red silk, the school will have an autumn break. Once again, the child can blend into the thick ground, burrow into the dense stick tree, and play with joy to help the adult collect the stick. At that time, there was no harvester, unlike now, which can be harvested at one time, people only need to stick and stick, stick leaves, stick skin, stick straw all crushed as fertilizer for the land, and the autumn harvest was completed like play. At that time, even if there was a harvester, the farmers were not willing to be so "bad" crops, to know that when we were young in our village, the stick can be a treasure, not to mention that the stick is our staple food, the stick leaves should be first chopped down and dried for feeding cattle and sheep in winter, the stick skin, the stick spike and even the stick basket are good raw materials for burning pots, the use of stick straw is even greater, it can be used as a fence wall, it can also be used to crush it as feed, and the pot is also the most popular when steaming steamed buns. Even the stick roots that were left in the ground were specially turned out and dried for the pot.
At that time, collecting the stick was like making a work of art, paying attention to slow work and fine work. First chop the stick leaves, then collect the stick, then cut the stick straw, and finally turn the stick root, of which the most popular stick is the most pleasing. The autumn sky is as blue as a wash, the sun is less powerful than summer, the sun is warm on the body, adults and children have changed into jackets, put their heads on their backs, carried baskets, and gone into the field to collect the yellow-orange-orange sticks that had been served by farmers for a summer. The sticks that had been chopped off were like neat rows of soldiers, holding their heads high and bulging up their full fruits for review. The adult peeled the stick skin in front of him, layer by layer, and with a clattering sound, the golden stick was like a girl out of the bath, and he showed a smiling face, and the sticks were full, thick and round, and endearing. The child clicked in the back, and with the laughter of the silver bell, the stick entered the head or the basket. After breaking a branch, we struggled to carry it to the ground and poured it into the carriage of the ground row.
Breaking the stick enjoys the joy of the harvest, but it is also full of bitterness, in today's words, tired and happy. Hungry, pick a few fresh sticks that are not fully cooked, set up a fire on the ground to grill, and soon you can eat the roasted fragrant roast sticks, which are many times more fragrant than the fresh corn sold in the electric stove in the city now. Thirsty, he picked out the stick straw that looked pleasing to the eye, straight, emerald green, kicked it down, and only took the few pieces that leaned against the roots as sugar cane, tore open the hard skin with his teeth, and ate it crisply. The head of the stick was on the tender shoulder, and the flute was carried on the thin arm, and in a few moments it would bleed, and the sweat would faintly hurt as soon as it soaked, but none of us cried bitterness. When the temperature rose at noon, we sweated profusely, so we took off our jackets and put them on the tallest stalk to attract our friends who were also working in the fields to play. At this time, the adults shouted, be careful not to sweat, fever can be troublesome. But at that time, which of us was as delicate as today's children, one by one were more skinny, running in the wild sweating, a body of dirt, going home with cold water and a flush, nothing, very few headaches and brain fever, is this related to the fact that we used to eat coarse grains when we were young?
To this end, I specifically asked some elderly people. The old people said, don't look at coarse grains are not delicious, nutrition can be rich, the big truth they can't say clearly, but they know that coarse grain cloth clothes to raise people, peasant soil kang warm people, mud in the water to educate people. The Internet also says that the vitamin content in the stick is very high, several times that of rice and flour; in addition to containing carbohydrates, proteins, fats, carotene, they also contain a variety of minerals, vitamin E, riboflavin and other nutrients. These are all things that we didn't know when we broke the stick when we were young, and we loved to eat the stick at that time, so what did we eat without eating it?
Now it is different, sticks have become an important feed for pigs to feed cattle, not to mention the people in the city, even in the countryside, there are few people who eat sticks. Now our hometown harvested spring eggs or large areas of planting sticks, but it is convenient to put away, sell convenient, the machine harvested back to dry for a day to pull to sell, there is no stick stored at home. Occasionally want to eat, go to the town supermarket to buy a few pounds of fine stick noodles, mixed with fine grains to improve, the picture is to taste fresh, change a pattern. In the city, farmers' markets or supermarkets also sell fresh sticks, which are more expensive than fruits, and people can cook, grill and stew at home. The stick noodles are also more delicate than before, you can make churn, loose rice, hair cakes, there are a variety of sticky sticks, fruit sticks, white sticks, purple sticks, the old people love to buy bittersweet, children also love to buy a taste of life.
But no matter how delicious the sticks they bought, they rarely had the opportunity to go to the fields in the countryside to experience the fun and pain of breaking sticks, let alone imagine what it was like to break a stick without a black blind man.
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