A premonition in spring
Text/Weekly Line
The author was born on the 16th day of the second month of the lunar calendar in 1949, a day that will always belong to spring. According to the definition of the chronicle, I should belong to the pre-liberation people. However, all this seems to have been ignored by the "premonitions" of mother and grandmother.
I belong to cattle, and my mother says I am a blessed cow. I was born at night, which is equivalent to about 9:30 p.m. At that time, ordinary people in the countryside did not pay attention to the hours when they had clocks and watches in their homes. However, just when I was born, a private school gentleman came to my house to borrow a family tree, heard my first cry at birth, and said in passing, "This child's birthday is the time of the day." Then he said a word of auspicious congratulations, and the whole family was overjoyed.
My mother said that I was a blessed cow, maybe inspired by the "haishi saying", or it may be the "feeling" that my mother identified, which could not be examined, nor did it need to be examined. My mother had a reason of her own, and she told me that the cattle of haishi did not need to plough the land to pull the plough and suffer, which was the happy time to eat the grass (grass) in the trough. The moment she identified me was my life. My mother believed so much in the eight characters of the birthday, which is what I remember, which can be called the "only" of my mother.
Grandma was stubborn in one of her nightmares. The night before I was born, she had a dream that the yak in the family was taken away by the "old lack" (the local people's habitual name for bandits, the darkness before the dawn of the republic, the local "old lack" stealing cattle into the wind), the grandmother cried bitterly, and the family got up in the middle of the night to comfort her.
The family's cow was "led" away in Grandma's dream, but my "cow" came to the real world. Grandma thought it would be difficult for me to grow up, and I didn't know when I would be "led" away by God. Since then, Grandma has sat down with a heart disease, and has also fallen into a heart disease. My grandmother, who has always been timid and afraid of things, is becoming more and more sensitive to my headaches and brain fever, as long as I have a little pain, she will think that things are not good, and often frighten her to shiver. I was not angry enough, before the age of twenty, major illnesses and minor illnesses continued, and my grandmother's "sickness" continued to intensify and I was tortured.
In the spring of the year I was three years old, I fell seriously ill and died for 13 days without eating or drinking. At that time, there was no medical condition in the countryside, and the family was prepared with both hands. My mother carried me around for medical treatment and tried my luck. My mother was advised to say, "No, throw it away," and my mother always took me in her arms and never gave up. Grandma was so frightened that she couldn't walk, almost paralyzed. However, she still moved her trembling body to tear up a bundle of "straw grass" (straw of millet). Local children buried early will be tied with this straw. Ready to send me on my way.
However, fate arranged for me to come alive, grow up, go to school, join the army, and even get married and start a family, and have my own children and grandchildren. Her mother was relieved to say that her feelings were not wrong, until the death of the old man on March 22, 2011, when she died, she still did not forget to say the words: "Son, you are blessed!" However, Grandma's "fear" remains the same. Until her death on March 16, 1974. At that time, I was working as a platoon leader in a certain department in Hunan to carry out a national defense construction mission, but when my grandmother was dying, she chanted my grandmother's name and said that I had been "led" away, and my relatives were horrified and asked me about my recent situation in the form of urgent double registered letters.
In the past many years, my mother's words and grandmother's worries have sometimes been used as a joke after tea and dinner by my family; sometimes I have been treated as a solemn "saying"; I, since entering the ancient years, when I repeatedly chewed and recalled the old past, it seemed that I suddenly understood that the respective "premonitions" of my grandmother and mother were actually a common and bitter love and pity, just like a wisp of warm spring breeze often blowing in my heart, accompanied by hidden pain, endless remembrance and nostalgia...
(Originally written on March 22, 2022)
【About the author】Zhou Changxing (male), born in February 1949 in Huangnan Village, Nanzhan Town, Wenshang County, Shandong Province. He joined the army in February 1969. In September 1990, he returned to the local government to work for Jining Television. He is a member of the Chinese Writers Association, a senior journalist and a poet. He has published long-form reportage "The Place where Kunpeng Took Off", long-form biographical literature "Don't Get Drunk and Don't Say Qiao Yu's Love of the Great River", "Qiao Yu's Love Song", "Great Us", "Big Wave Gold Rush" and so on. He was the author of the 39-episode large-scale TV series "Dajingjiu" of CCTV, and its "Commentary on Dajingjiu" published by Railway Publishing House has been used as an official textbook by the Communication University of China. After retirement, he devoted himself to the writing of online literature and won praise from readers at home and abroad for his grounded and independent works. The concept of "work first, reader first, life first" is the motivation and goal of his efforts to cultivate the subliminal folk.