Distant potato blossoms
Author: Xiao Fuxing
In the Northern Wilderness, the westernmost part of our team is the vegetable field. The most grown in the vegetable patch is potatoes. At that time, each family did not have the pleasure of keeping the land, and the whole team had to rely on this vegetable field to eat vegetables. When the potatoes are harvested in autumn, people from each family come to the vegetable field, carry the potatoes home one sack after another, and put them into the cellar. Potatoes are the housekeeping dish of northeasterners, and the vegetables eaten in winter and spring are basically it.
Potatoes bloom in summer, potato flowers are not large, not conspicuous, to say good,unable to catch up with lentil flowers and melon flowers. Lentil flowers are brighter than potato flowers, purple and shiny, bunch after bunch, dream-like strings of small stars, swaying with the wind, very elegant look. The flowers are bright yellow and yellow, the color itself is jumping, extra eye-catching, the flower plate is large, it is very ostentatious, and there are often bees flying on it, buzzing, and singing for the flowers proudly. Compared with them, potato flowers suddenly stood in the limelight.
Potatoes occupy the most area, planted on the far edge of the vegetable field, and outside is a wasteland. In front of the half-human-tall barren grass, the potato blossoms became more and more weak and insignificant. In the first few years of coming to the Northern Wilderness, although in the summer when the potatoes were blooming, I often went to the vegetable field to help work, or went to the vegetable field to pick vegetables for the Zhiqing canteen, or came to steal tomatoes and cucumbers, but I did not pay attention to the potato flowers, and even thought that the potatoes did not bloom.
The first time I saw and met Potato Blossom was in the summer three years after I came to be in the Northern Wilderness, when I was working as a teacher in the elementary school where the team went.
In the elementary school, except for the principal and me, all the courses from the first grade to the sixth grade were taught by me and the principal. The principal is in charge of the lower grades and I am in charge of the upper grades. Students in the third grade huddled in a classroom, often pressing the gourd and making a fuss. It should be said that I am still a responsible teacher, and I like such a group of noisy but lively and cute children, so when I found out one day that a girl in the fifth grade had not come to class for many days, I was very worried. When asked, the student shouted: Her father will not let her go to school!
Why not come to school? The main reason in the local area is that there are many children in the family, life is difficult, and the average family does not let girls go to school, help with work, and share the difficulties of the family. At that time, my heart was full of self-righteous feelings of compassion and the passion of young people, hoping to help this girl and persuade her parents to at least let the child go to school for a few more years. So, on an afternoon when there was no class, I went to the girl's house.
She is the eldest daughter of the old Li Tou of our team's vegetable field, and her home is on the far side of the vegetable field. It was a field carved out of the wasteland, and thatched huts were built with pigtails. That afternoon, Old Li Tou's daughter was helping his father work in the vegetable field, and the old man saw me and shouted "Teacher Xiao" at me, while running from the vegetable field. Her body was covered with grass, her feet were covered with mud, and her face was covered with beads of sweat under a torn straw hat. I thought to myself, this kind of work should not be done by a child of her age.
I followed her into the vegetable patch and found her father, Old Li Tou. Old Li Tou was not good at words, but he patiently listened to me and said the words that persuaded his daughter to continue to go to school, and then turned over and I can't help it!" Her daughter looked at me and at him again. My stomach was all clean, and I didn't know what to say anymore, but I was unfavorable. The extreme pressure of local farmers' lives may not be what we intellectuals can imagine, and in the face of a heavy life, compassion does not show any weight.
That afternoon, I don't know how I broke up with Old Li Tou. The feeling of losing before playing a few rounds made me feel a little frustrated. Old Li Tou's daughter had been following me and sending me out of the vegetable patch, and I didn't dare to look back at her, feeling a little sorry for her. She was a sensible little girl, and she went to school late, so think of how she looked that year when she was thirteen or fourteen. When she walked out of the vegetable field, she comforted me and said, "It doesn't matter, Teacher Xiao, it is also very good to work in the vegetable field." You see, these potatoes bloom beautifully!"
Only then did I realize that what we had just walked into was a potato field, and the potato behind her was blooming. I also discovered that the torn straw hat she was wearing on her head was surrounded by a garland woven with potato flowers. It was the first time I'd seen potato blossoms, so small, too small to be noticed. The small pale blue flowers, strung together like bunches of spikes, clustered together, are indeed very beautiful, but under the scorching sun, like fading, some dim. I looked at her and thought that she was a child after all, and she still cared about potato blossoms.
For some reason, since then, potato blossoms have had a melancholy feeling in my heart that I can never forget. I remember that in the summer of the year I left Beidahuang and returned to Beijing, I specially invited a few friends to take a few photos in this potato field on the team. However, the potato blossoms cannot be seen clearly in the photo, they are too small.
In the summer of the previous years, I had the opportunity to return to the Northern Wilderness. Crossing the Seven Stars River and heading straight for the production team where I used to be, I saw at a glance that the potatoes in the potato field on the team were blooming. Decades have passed, and the potato field is still on the far side of the team, and the outside of the potato field is still a wasteland surrounded by barren grass. It really feels like time is frozen here.
The only thing that had changed was that the thatched huts of the old plum head next to the potato field had long been demolished, and the newly built houses on the team were neatly arranged on both sides of the avenue in front of the team headquarters, and a row of poplar trees towered into the sky, palm-sized leaves fluttering, blowing cool winds. I asked about old Li Tou and his daughter. The old man on the team told me that Old Li Tou was still there, but his daughter was dead. I was very surprised, his daughter is not very old, how did she die so early? They told me that she married and moved to another team, gave birth to two daughters, did not argue, did not go to school well, dropped out of school early, one married early, one ran outside with a boy on the team, did not know what to do, never returned home, she was angry to death.
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I went to see Old Li Tou, who was already sick and paralyzed on the kang, looking at me in a daze and not recognizing me. No matter what other people told him, he didn't recognize me until I left his house. Out of his house, I asked the people on the team, how did Old Li Tou get so demented? Didn't go to the hospital to have a look? The people on the team told me: What a dementia, after his girlfriend died, he kept nagging, if he had listened to Teacher Xiao's words and let the children go to school, the children would not be happy to die! He had heard many days ago that you were coming, and he was embarrassed!
In the potato field, I asked someone to take a picture of me. The pale blue, spike-shaped, tiny potato blossoms, which grow on this vast wasteland that almost reaches the edge of the sky, have bloomed and fallen like this for many years, and how many people will care about them, or occasionally think of them?
There are many poems about flowers in the world, and because of the shallowness of my knowledge, I have not seen any of them describing potato flowers before. It was not until the 1990s of the last century, when I saw the short story "Kissing Potatoes" by Northeastern writer Chi Zijian, that I knew for the first time that there were really people who were sorry for potato flowers. At the beginning of the novel, Chi Zijian used so many nice words to describe the potato flower, saying that it was "a flower in the shape of a spike, hanging like a golden bell, and a mysterious silver gray under the stars and moons." This is something I have never seen in such a beautiful depiction of potato blossoms. I remembered that I had seen potato flowers in the Northern Wilderness, but I had not carefully observed potato flowers, and in my impression, the potato flowers were very small, and the string of beads in the form of fine pieces was real, but it was not as eye-catching as the golden bell. Moreover, the potato blossoms on our team are not silver gray, but light blue. Now think about it, if the appearance of the potato blossoms on our team is not as beautiful as Chi Zijian's pen, but the color is better.
What I didn't expect was that Chi Zijian said that potato blossoms have an aroma, and this aroma is "an enduring aroma from the earth." To be honest, when surrounded by potato flowers in the potato fields of the Northern Wilderness, I have never smelled such an extraordinary aroma. All the flowers of vegetables and vegetables have no aroma and cannot be compared with the fragrance of flowers on fruit trees.
In Chi Zijian's novel, the wife of the hero who has grown potatoes all his life, like me, says that she has never smelled the aroma of potato blossoms. However, the hero affirmatively said: "Who said that potato flowers have no fragrance?" Its fragrance is special, usually can not smell, once smelled people can not forget. "Maybe it's true, I'm not blessed to be on that potato field just when the potato blossoms are fragrant."
Seeing this part of the novel, I suddenly remembered the daughter of old Li Tou, could she smell the aroma of potato blossoms? She must have smelled it.
Source: Old Zhiqing Homeland