Author: Zhu Xiaolian Illustrator: Huang Shan
When the last grain of grain was loaded into the basket from the ground, the sky was already covered with fiery red sunset, and the old cows finally unloaded the heavy shackles on their backs, and were now lying under the peach tree leisurely chewing their mouths.
The men sat on the rice field that had just dried the grain, lit a cigarette, took a deep breath, and then slowly spat out a long wisp of smoke, and the mud rice field that had been turned by the old cow was shining, and the cooking smoke reflected from the light was slowly spitting out by the chimney, slowly and lazily, which indicated that the Dongting people were going to usher in their long and comfortable agricultural leisure time.
The agricultural leisure season is a time for people and livestock who have worked hard for a year to recuperate, do not have to get up early and work in the dark, what they have to do every day is to live leisurely and recharge for the hard battles of the coming year.
At this time, many families planned to take advantage of this leisure time to buy new agricultural tools for their families, and the craftsmen in the village began a new round of busyness.
The first person to be invited into the house by his parents was a master craftsman who made special bamboo tools.
The master smith was a cousin of Dad's, a few years older than Dad, and his thin, thin, dry body was like a piece of shredder in his hand. Because he was too thin, the cheekbones of his face protruded, and the layer of skin dutifully clung to the high bulging cheekbones and deeply sunken cheeks.
Many years have passed, and we no longer need to ask the master to come to the door to do these guys, and it is difficult to see each other again. But the big camel on his back and the dry but dexterous hand like a bamboo branch flew in my mind from time to time, flying out of the multicolored butterflies, over the golden desert, and stopped on the camel's bulging hump.
Inviting craftsmen to come into the house to do things is very grand in the countryside of the ninth year, which is a symbol of the family's economic strength. Similar to the current concept of consumption, once you have money in your pocket, you want to buy and buy.
For the simple peasant family, the pockets are slightly inflated, and the first thing that comes to mind is to quickly buy tools to do farm work.
Craftsmen also had a very high social status in that era.
In order to let the master immerse himself in work, my parents work food every day, and every time I am happy, not only can I say goodbye to the vitamins in the vegetable garden for a short time, I can eat meat at meals, and no one cares.
Mom's most important job every day was to elaborate three meals a day, and Dad was occasionally sent to the mountains to cut bamboo and move bamboo, and as soon as I finished my homework, I became my uncle's most loyal audience.
Every time my family has to hit it, it is nothing more than a rectangular flower basket, an oval carrying basket, and a flat round sieve.
The tools of the smiths I saw were simple, a knife with a dark back and a sharp knife blade.
Every day when I came home to finish my homework, I crouched down next to my uncle to see how he turned a bamboo that had just been separated from its roots into a farm tool for its contents.
Only to see him holding a contempt knife in his right hand, and holding a straight and round bamboo in his left hand, with a little force from the middle of its end, the bamboo cracked open, and then turned the back of the contempt knife downwards, and with a gentle stroke, a piece of bamboo soon split in two, "like a broken bamboo" more or less.
In order to weave baskets of different shapes and sizes, it is also necessary to cut the bamboo into narrower bamboo pieces, and after a while, a bamboo piece has become a bamboo piece piled on the other side of the body, but the most amazing thing is to peel the finger-wide bamboo pieces into soft pieces.
Draw one out of it, hold the knife in your right hand, the blade is inward, the fingertip of the left hand tightly pinches the end of the bamboo piece, stabs, the dark green bamboo piece separates a gap from the bamboo strip, and then uses the sharp edge of the knife to pry left and right, and the hand assists in going downstream, so that the bamboo skin bamboo heart is cut open, divided into green green bamboo pieces and yellow yellow bamboo pieces.
Green bamboo pieces are smooth, soft and elastic, and can be used as raw materials for weaving small, rounded agricultural tools, such as baskets, while hard and strong yellow bamboo pieces have become the only choice for utensils with a slightly larger size and no too many edges and corners.
How a master's craftsmanship is, whether he has solid basic skills, is also in this thin layer of green bamboo.
If the knife is too thick, the green bamboo pieces that are peeled off will be too thick, the flexibility will be much worse, the weaving process is easy to break, even if it is woven into a finished product, it will crack at any time during use, shortening the service life of agricultural tools. If it is too thin, it is difficult to separate from the bamboo. Often peeled into the middle, the bamboo strip bids farewell to the matrix and becomes a victim of art.
This process alone is enough to fascinate me, often following my uncle's hands as he crouches, stands up, and circles. I saw that Uncle Bo clenched his teeth, his eyes narrowed slightly, and his long thin fingers squeezed the end of the bamboo piece tightly, because of the excessive force, the rounded fingers became flat and pale.
The first knife is crucial, it determines whether the bamboo piece will be passed down from generation to generation as a work of art, or whether it will be burned as firewood.
The knife was slowly picked up, and my heart followed suit.
Very good, the start went well, I breathed a long sigh of relief, from half squat to full squat.
I saw the knife swaying unhurriedly from side to side in my uncle's hand. The green blades shook and jumped happily to the rhythm of the knife.
Suddenly, the knife stuck in the middle of the bamboo piece, and the pieces that should have been green and yellow were confused, and more and more hard yellow mixed into the soft cyan.
I bounced off the ground with a whimper, staring nervously at my uncle's fingertips and knife edges to see if he would correct it immediately or if he would be wrong.
As a result, the uncle decisively discarded it, and I wondered: "As long as you cut off this layer of yellow with a knife, can't you?" Why throw it away, what a waste! ”
Uncle's eyelids were not raised, while quickly looking for new objects from the bamboo pile, he replied briefly: "The pieces that are cut out twice are not the pieces themselves, they may break at any time, if they suddenly break in the process of weaving, they will have to be reworked, it is better to throw them away as soon as possible." ”
Listening to my uncle's words, although I had great sympathy for the abandoned one, I could not do anything about the survival of the fittest in nature.
However, I still did not give up and continued to ask: "Then how can I ensure the integrity of the tablets?" Just try it one by one? ”
Uncle did not answer me this time, but shook his head, and began to repeat in his hands the action of starting the knife, swinging, swinging, succeeding; starting the knife, swinging, swinging, failing.
Perhaps, many truths cannot be said in words!
When the tablets are fully prepared, the next time to come to life, although not as intense and exciting as the previous step, but watching the four sharp corners of the basket gradually take shape from the uncle's hand, and then the fat belly also began to appear, as if giving birth to a new life, it was as happy and exciting as giving birth.
At this time, the uncle sat down, wearing a dark blue apron around his waist, and on the ground next to him was a tree stump, which was the force point he used to cut bamboo and cut bamboo pieces.
Carefully polishing the green sheets that stand out after a thousand selections is a necessary process before weaving.
Gently scrape off the waxy bamboo powder on the surface of the green skin with a knife edge, and then carefully polish the small burrs around the blade, because when the fingers move rapidly, even a thorn as thin as a cow's hair will cause damage to the master smith's hands without any protection.
Wear gloves, I used to think the same way, but Uncle said, wearing gloves, although the hand can be exempted from a lot of suffering, but it is also clumsy, a pair of clumsy hands can not make up good things.
After polishing the green sheets, the weaving work officially began.
With several pieces of bamboo of the same length and length evenly placed on the ground, and then use the same length of bamboo pieces to cross up and down horizontally, the number of vertical and horizontal bamboo pieces is equal, one root is intertwined up and down, and each other will combine a hollow mouth, the base will be completed, the future of this basket to fill dry beans, wet water weeds are no problem, those words are where the water seeps out.
The extra bamboo pieces around the base are vertically up, which is an important part of the body of the basket, pick up the cut pieces, choose an entrance, the head of the piece is stuck between the vertical bamboo pieces, and the other end passes up and down from the vertical bamboo pieces, the process is extremely fast, only to feel the cyan ribbon flying up and down on the yellow fence, the end point of a piece is also the starting point of the next one, the horizontal green pieces are surrounded by a vertical yellow, flying, flying, the round belly of the basket is presented in front of our eyes.
When the body is finished, it must be locked, the tool of the lock is still a piece, which master smith uses a rope to lock the mouth, it is going to be laughed off the teeth, the mouth is locked tightly, these little guys who are horizontal and vertical will perform their duties peacefully, once they are released, they will jump down like a loose field, and the body of the basket will be destroyed as quickly as a sweater.
The mouth is locked, and all the processes of a basket are almost completed at this time, but at this time, the basket is still just a fat tumbler, and it must be placed with four more feet to stand firmly, and the material of the four feet is still bamboo.
Choose a section of sawing down from the bamboo body, one with a bamboo knot, the bamboo knot is the hardest part of the bamboo, carry the weight, and then cut the upper part of the bamboo knot into a short and suitable triangle, from the side, the foot of the basket is somewhat similar to the wine mention.
The pointed part is inserted into the body from a corner of the base, and the big fat man grows his first foot, and after all four feet are fully grown, the uncle will throw it a few times, which should be the inspection link.
When the basket stood firmly on the ground and all four feet landed, the uncle began to prepare to load the big fat man.
The big fat man's hand is the lifting ring, which is where we can use our hands and arms in the future.
Yes, the raw material of the tihuan is still bamboo, remember the yellow bamboo pieces that were left out in the cold on the other side? After enduring the humiliation for a long time, I finally waited for the opportunity to appear.
The uncle picked up a piece of yellow bamboo and stroked it on the top of the basket, determined the length, pressed the yellow bamboo piece on the stump, clicked a knife, and the excess part was submerged into the sea of victims.
One end is inserted into the body of the basket from the locked mouth, and the other end is inserted across the past and into the other side.
In this way, an arch bridge is erected above the round opening of the big fat man, and the power of a bamboo piece is tiny, and it may take the efforts of a family of yellow bamboo pieces to bear a heavy future.
The second bamboo piece joined, it can not use the same starting point as the first one, its starting point is not far from the adjacent, so that the two bamboo pieces will form an angle, the size of the angle determines the force point at the top of the lifting ring when lifting the weight, or the gravity is dispersed around the body.
After the gravity is dispersed, the person who lifts it is easy, and the basket will be more durable, and it will not be pulled out of the ring without any defense when you are humming and climbing the hill.
How Uncle managed to determine the angle at a glance, I still don't understand, because even after I learned geometry, adding countless auxiliary lines could not calculate the degree of the angle, and even later, I thought it might be a physics problem.
In this way, the baskets, flower baskets, and sieves of the outer green and yellow gradually filled the corners of the walls, and after a week, the uncle packed up his bags and waved goodbye to his parents happily, and rushed to the new home that had been booked.
Mom and Dad looked at the baby in the corner with satisfaction, and their gentle eyes caressed the little things that still smelled of fresh bamboo.
From their eyes, I seemed to see green seedlings, yellow beans, the sweetness of rice mixed with the fresh and mischievous running and jumping in the field.
Mom and Dad carefully hung the basket and sieve high, waiting for the moisture in the bamboo to evaporate, so that it was lighter to use, and as these big and small fat people hung high like lanterns, the table of my family also returned to its former simplicity.
Later, there were several shops selling grate products in the town, and what they needed could be bought immediately, and the price was not expensive, and since then, many families have no longer asked the master to come to the door.
Later, fewer and fewer people farmed the land, and the use of agricultural tools was extremely limited. The dark-backed, snow-white knife was placed in the corner of the uncle's house, and the dust on it grew thicker with his age.
The grates that my mother had bought from the town had long since disappeared, and now all that could be found in the house was uncle's work, the base was worn out, my mother wrapped it with wool a few times, the ring was broken, and my mother tied it with a rope.
The cyan skin has long faded to a mature yellow, and when lifting heavy objects, the basket will also make a creaking sound following the rhythm of the footsteps, like moaning, like singing...
The torrent of time washes everything in the world, some disappear with the wind, some sink to the bottom of the sea, some are occasionally remembered, and some shine.
The times create craftsmen, and craftsmen weave the Chinese dream.
Baskets and baskets have gradually withdrawn from the stage of history, but craftsmen who have the spirit of excellence like their uncles have influenced generations of people.
About author:Zhu Xiaolian, a Chinese teacher who loves life and also loves writing.
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