During the Qingming Dynasty, I reminisced about my uncle's life

When I was young at home, like most rural children, I didn't care about wearing, I didn't like to pull out the heel frame when I wore shoes, and my mother would say when she saw it: "But you are as lazy as your uncle." ”

Every time my mother saw me doing something lazy, she would repeat this sentence, and over time, my uncle's laziness left a mark on my mind.

What does uncle's laziness look like? When I remember, my uncle was about forty years old, a thick image of a farmer of that era, naked in the summer, or wearing a white vest with many holes, military yellow pants, no belt at the waist, tied with a blue cloth strip, and a cigarette bag pinned to the waist. As my mother said, he didn't like to wear shoes on his feet, and he pulled them like slippers, no matter what new shoes or old shoes. His voice was vague, and the language always kneaded like dough in his throat first, and then it came out of his mouth for a while, and even his nephew sometimes had to adapt for a while to understand what he was saying.

He used to be very talented, well read, and in the 70s he was selected to go to a flying academy, studied for a while, and said that because his hearing was not very good, he wanted to change his major. I don't know why, he came back, and after he came back, the village arranged for him to be a teacher in the primary school. It may be that he thinks the children are not easy to discipline, and he only worked for a short time and did not go.

At that time, my grandfather was injured in a young war, and in his later years he lay in bed all day and could not move, so he went home to farm. When I reached the age when I should get married, because my family was really poor, my grandmother had no way to marry my third aunt to Liuzhuang in the form of a change of relatives in exchange for my concubine.

Neither my concubine nor my grandmother was very sensible, so there was constant quarrel in the family all day. When I was a child, I used to live in my grandmother's house, and sometimes they quarreled over a little needlework. His uncle was caught in the middle, and at first he had beaten a concubine, but to no avail, he avoided family wars. Therefore, in the late quarrel, there was no uncle figure.

Uncles and concubines are not very sharp people, so planting crops is not very good, at that time the grain is produced, after handing over to the public, there is very little left, every year after the Spring Festival, uncles will come to my house to pull wheat. I remember that it was the late 80s, and when I went to my grandmother's house, I could still eat the nest of sweet potato noodles and the pot stickers of sweet potato noodle stickers.

Two cousins explained to me that the name of this pot sticker is "Black Two bia", and two of the three-word names cannot be found in the dictionary. The first few times I ate it was sweet, it was delicious, I ate more, or I ate cold ones that were not so tasty.

The uncle and father fought in stubbornness, and the two men teamed up to make bricks and tiles on the river, day and night. I remember those years, when it was about to rain, I panicked and gave them a hand and put a plastic sheet on the bricks. After covering the bricks, everyone walked home like a chicken in the soup, along the slippery river embankment. About three or four years of brick blanks, and then help each other burn brick kilns.

When my father was cooking the brick kiln, he liked to take me to sleep in the field, and the night was very quiet and dark. Many years later, my father also said that he had one night when he got up at night to burn brick kilns and saw a very bright light falling into the field in the wild north. He suspected it was gold, but he didn't dare to look for it. Folklore says that gold can move around when buried in the earth, because it is a treasure, and it will glow at night. But most people think that's nonsense.

The uncle's family first prepared the materials for building the house, and then beckoned relatives and friends to help, then it seemed that the salary for building a house was not high, and relatives and friends came to help only manage eating, smoking and drinking tea. Only the big workers will give some money. On the construction site where my uncle's family built the house, I don't know why, the second uncle and my father had an argument, and since then the two families have cut off contact. Later, I heard my cousin say that it was the second uncle who looked down on my father and said a few hurtful words. Second uncle, I vaguely remember his appearance, like to talk, the mouth is wrapped in a few silver teeth, when talking eyebrows fly and dance, silver teeth are exposed to the lips.

Later, the second uncle did not go to his uncle's house to help, and after the uncle's house was built, he still lived in the loess house in the back. Probably that same year, my aunt picked up my cousin again.

The cousin is not born to the uncle, but the uncle is also regarded as a pearl in the palm of the hand, and the poor have a way of loving the poor, which also develops the cousin's wayward temper.

The two cousins were already very tall at that time, because the concubine was tall, my two cousins raced one tall, the second cousin went to Guangdong, others directly called him "Gao Lao", many years later, the people around him did not know his real name, and the opening was Gao Lao.

In the early years when the uncle and the concubine got married, the two people did not have children, and the second aunt had already given birth to two daughters and two sons, so she gave the younger son to the uncle. My cousin went to my uncle's house for more than two years, and my aunt had her own child, and my second aunt asked for her own child back. My aunt gave birth to two sons in a row.

The second cousin went to Guangdong to work with people at the age of sixteen or seventeen, but he was not a pragmatic person, he earned money to eat, drink and play, and he did not want to get married, and as a result, his girlfriend could not wait for him, and he did not learn the real skills. It was after he was in his 30s that he returned to his hometown to learn an electrician and then broke into Guangdong. Harvested love, had a son, but did not marry, the wife ran back to her hometown. Probably because her cousin brought her back to see the old adobe house on all four walls of the house. At that time, the eldest cousin had already married and lived in the new house built by his uncle in front of him.

In the next few years, my uncle was also very diligent, raising pigs, farming, and saving all the money he earned, just to help his second cousin build the house. I remember once, my uncle took five hundred yuan from the town, came home from the river embankment, met someone asked for directions, he enthusiastically told people, people let him a cigarette, he smoked it and he was confused, and was cheated out of the newly taken five hundred yuan. He was sick for it.

Around 2014, my uncle built a new house.

I didn't go back to see him that Spring Festival that year, because my son had just been born and it was inconvenient to move.

In 2015, my grandmother died suddenly, and I took my wife and children home to give her one last trip. At my grandmother's funeral, I met with my concubine and cousin and asked about my uncle's health, and my cousin said that he was old and had leg pains and couldn't walk. That night the concubine was going back, and I said it was late, and I would drive you back to visit my uncle by the way. The concubine thought that I had also worked hard for a day, did not want to bother me, and insisted on riding the electricity with her cousin and her cousin's son for three rounds. After my grandmother was buried, I left my hometown because of my work and moved to Jiangsu. On the fourth day after my grandmother's burial, my uncle died.

Later, I chatted with the concubine, and two days before my uncle died, my second cousin just came back from Guangdong for two or three days. One night, the uncle did not have much effort to say that he was panicked, and called the second cousin to come to him, and the second cousin hurried over, it was the weather of the Waxing Moon, and while getting dressed, he was ready to send his uncle to the hospital. The uncle did not come up in one breath, and died in the arms of the second cousin.

I think back to my uncle, who didn't seem to have enjoyed a decent life in his life, and perhaps the most proud thing was that every year during the Spring Festival, the concubine would fry some small wild fish for him and fry some white meat slices. He liked to eat white meat slices, when he was a child, he beckoned me to eat, I ate a bite, slimy, can't swallow, spit on the table, he pinched it and didn't care at all and put it in his mouth while eating it, saying, This is a good thing, you baby can't eat the fragrance.

He likes to listen to plays, and he likes to discuss the stories in the plays, and one of his favorite plays is "Rolling The Barrel", because he will hum them out after listening to them, and I have learned those few sentences. He would ask me to sing it to him, probably like this: "Little Cangwa'er, I left Dengfeng County, and along the way, I suffered from hunger and suffering. The two solutions are like the ------ of the bull's head and horse noodles.

The uncle liked to listen to this, lying on a bamboo bed, supporting one of his legs, and pandering to it.

He did not enjoy life, and as long as I can remember, he basically did not even go to the county seat, and his life revolved around the crops, markets and relatives on both sides of the river.

The uncle's face is very handsome, a bit like Zhou Runfa. If he had been born thirty or forty years later, he would have been able to call himself a "little fresh meat" look. Sometimes I wonder for him whether he is satisfied with his life, or if he wants to break through the shackles of reality and fight hard, after all, he is cultured and hard-working. Or the living environment of the generations has limited his thinking, and his ancestors have been born in this land for generations and died in this land. He had a deep attachment to the land in his heart.

I used to accompany him to the field to work, in the autumn in the field of the river beach to choose tobacco leaves, he and the concubine in the two meters deep tobacco field, me and two cousins carried the tobacco leaves out of the field, put into the rack car. Stars came out, autumn insects hissed, and a signal flare flew northwest from the southeast through the night sky. I thought it was a shooting star, and my cousin explained it was a signal flare. My uncle ran out of the field and asked me, did you see the signal bomb just now? I said I saw it, and my uncle said that it was used to transmit signals when I was fighting in the past, and now I estimate that someone is transmitting someone's signal. At that time, I didn't have a strong concept of signaling, and I didn't know what to do.

In the years when I went out to study, every year when I went back to see my uncle, he was concerned about asking me how my life was? I was actually ashamed of myself, because the school I attended was not worth mentioning.

After work, there were fewer opportunities to meet, and every time he would introduce me to someone who built a big ship.

The sudden death of my uncle made me regret that I felt that such a good era, many beautiful things were the same era as him, but he had never been in contact with it, maybe his heart had long been full of peace for the world, and there was not much expectation.

When he died, except for the previous leg pain, walking was not very convenient, and there was no other disease. Dying didn't leave anyone to wait for a day. I think that his way of walking has something to do with his forbearance in life and the virtues accumulated in plainness. In life, although life is bitter, he never wants to get ill-gotten gains, he never seeks wealth, and he never covets happiness. If you have cigarettes, you smoke them, and if you don't, you grow your own tobacco leaves. There were two times when the two of us were together, and someone else poured too much, and he would call me to help him drink it.

Different people are destined for different experiences, different lives. The year my uncle died, I wanted to remember him. But my uncle is an ordinary farmer, there is no highlight moment in life, ordinary life for more than 70 years, when he leaves quietly, even, I can't find a photo of him in my mobile phone.