"Memories Related to the Sea" | text: Liu Xiaoning
"She looked so peaceful and serene, curled up in her arms."
/01/
The appearance of the sea in my heart is like the face of my mother with a kind smile, her gaze is warm, tolerant and determined to be full of maternal caresses, in such a gaze, you can become smaller, you can be willful, you can melt, you can heal, you can give up, you can pick up again, courage and strength.
The sea is not far from my home, and it looks like seven or eight miles away. At that time, I was still living in a relatively wealthy village, a half-old tile house, and in front of the door was a wall erected by my father with bricks and tiles that my father had picked up, and the pattern on it was also painted by my father. In this position I wrestled and broke my head, and even though I covered my head with my hands in a panic, the blood still flowed between my fingers without attachment, marking my forehead with a pale white scar. There were also some flowers and plants in the courtyard, which were lost from my memory early.
Life is moving forward, memory is also moving forward, piles of memories, buried by the dust of time, the old is squeezed away by the new, the new soon becomes the old, like the footprints on the beach, the waves are surging with enthusiasm, kissing the beach over and over again with the tip of its tongue, licking away the tattoos of time and shadow imprinted on its body, pain and joy through the washing of the tide, all turned into nothing.
The old family is used to calling the sea rush shanghai in the literal sense, and ask you if you are in Shanghai today, that is, are you catching the sea today?
My first time in Shanghai was without adult supervision. My brother was eight years old, I was six years old, and my eight-year-old brother took his six-year-old sister and walked behind a bunch of half-headed boys' butts to the sea.
In my mind, the sea is a distant and untouchable mysterious paradise.
/02/
The sea is to the west of the village, and it has to cross a wide channel. That seventy or eighty degrees of high slope, sloping down, waiting for the older one to ride a bicycle, the wind from the high slope to the river valley glide posture, to the childhood memory to install a pair of big bird wings. The river has been dry for a long time, and the blue-black silt has cracked into thousands of strands of veins, intertwined with grass roots, weaving wind and rain and vicissitudes into a potholed black brocade, inlaid on the earth, drifting far away, floating farther away.
Crossing the river was a muddy path like a field grid, the veins of the path were as dense as the crops, the wind gently beating, beating the grass leaves, the treetops, the small faces that were reddened by the sun, someone pouted and blew a breath at the dandelion in his hand, and the white feathers flew all over the sky. It's snowing, it's snowing. Beauty is free and casual, revealing the body inadvertently. The harsh sunlight made me young and unable to distinguish the road and could not see the charming tricks of nature. I felt only freedom and stretching, swimming between the wind and the wind.
That road makes people feel like there is no end to how to go.
I was tired, thirsty, hungry, and I couldn't hold on.
The sun turned into an ugly monster overhead, and the sunburned people's eyes, their legs were heavy, and their mouths were dry like fire, making people hate that they could not pick up a branch and pick it up from the sky. When we couldn't bear our thirst, we looked around for a pipe to pour the floor, and the water screamed out of the crack and put its head on the pipe, and the small stream of water with a light splashed on our faces, on our bodies, in the shiny laughter, and in the throats of hunger and thirst.
In front of it is a large area of saline alkali land, and everyone knows that a long time ago, this was also a vast ocean. The saline field is overgrown with weeds, and the poisonous mosquitoes are all big men with gray bellies and menacing threats. If you keep slapping, you'll still get attacked, with red bags bulging on your legs, arms, and face. But when I got here, the sun didn't feel big no matter how big it was, and no matter how tired my body was, I didn't feel tired. We should walk with bated breath, the mysterious paradise that has been hidden, the sudden openness between the intersection with the field of vision, because of the vast and quiet, the endless blue of the flat side stretching, surging in a certain moment.
How did I walk through those seven or eight miles at the age of six, what I saw at sea, whether the sea made me cheer, all of these mutilations that formed a blank space in memory. The only thing I can remember is that after returning from the beach, my brother and I were beaten and scolded by our mother. I remember that during the scolding, I climbed against the wall and escaped, and my mother looked for me all over the village with corn mustard in her hand, and I remember that I did not dare to go home that night and slept at my grandmother's house. At that time, I was afraid of my mother's beating. But the mother is afraid that her eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter will be swept away by the relentless waves, afraid that the two ignorant children will be lost in the endless sea and will not find a way home. The fear is that the tide is high, and we still don't know how to go ashore.
The imaginary ocean had no shape at all in the young mind, I was just an ignorant being dragged, I couldn't tell what was ahead, there was longing, there was image, there was beauty and joy, there might be above the clouds, outside of life. In the journey of life, most of the time no one is willing to take the initiative to find the road, the road is naturally placed under the feet, people consciously or unconsciously by habits and common sense, by the expectations of the conventional ancestors, by the public opinion and morality of the outside world to pull. The train of time runs wild along the predetermined track, and derailment means danger and fear of the unknown, or more with the flow, and everyone's place to go is the same, the same stubbornness and dullness.
Since that time in Shanghai, it has become the best place for me to play. The adults slowly deregulated and will tell us the tides of the sea, which day it is high and which day it is low. Every summer vacation, I almost every day nostalgic for going back and forth to the sea, the whole person is like a black iron egg. Those small soft sand, barefoot to step on and watch the sand come out from between the toes, the sparkling water is so addictive, there are small crabs in the water, clam nests on the shoal, where we can find all kinds of small creatures that cannot be named in words, we will study the shape of their nests, we will dig them one by one, go to the shoals to catch them, after catching them, some of them are smashed with stones and directly filled in the mouth to eat, and some are also taken home, so that parents can see how much we have the ability to carry back how much seafood today. But more importantly, these little creatures accompany us to play, they are natural companions and toys.
Of course, at that time, I couldn't appreciate the hardships of life at all, I didn't know how many villagers on the sea coast relied on the sea to eat the sea. I don't know that my parents once spent their school time in order to support their family hukou to catch clams and clams in the sea in order to earn a mouthful of food to survive, I don't know that my father went to the deep water at the age of 12 to catch hairy crabs in a glass box in deep water, encountered storms and high tides, and was almost ruthlessly swept away by the sea.
The sea, she looked so peaceful and serene, curled up in her arms, that you thought you had conquered her, occupied her, that you were her world. But when she was angry, how many fishing boats and fishermen became her sacrifices.
Image source network, invasion and deletion
author
Pen name: Liu Xiaoning. Words are the harbor of my soul. Usually like to observe, let a scene and a story fall a paragraph of text for the most beautiful memory.
- END -
Feel free to leave a comment to write your thoughts on the article, or to say what the author wants to say!
Maybe you still like it