Text/Wei Zhongyou Editor| Swallow Photo | network
Now sometimes I still burn pots in my dreams, the sound of bellows, and the whistling flames sprang out of the pot door face, as if a naughty child was deliberately making a small grimace.
Burning pot is the first lesson for the six sisters in my family to learn to work, and it is also a compulsory course taught by my mother.
The eldest sister is diligent and has learned to help her mother collect firewood and cook pots since she was six or seven years old. The eldest brother has loved to learn since he entered elementary school, and he has not burned the pot twice in the "big pot rice" era. When the second brother was seven or eight years old and enrolled in school, he began to cook on the fire of the family base pot, the mother wanted to work in the production team, and the mother asked the second brother to come back after school to help cook the pot. But the second brother is born naughty and fun, every time after school and the little classmates are not on the roof to dig the bird's nest, or climb the tree to pick mulberry, every time you go home to serve the bowl to eat, you can't avoid the mother's noise! Sometimes there was a bloody cut on the face of the arm, and naturally there were two slaps on the buttocks. But he just has no memory, and he has no patience to sit in the firewood and cook the pot.
The second sister and the third sister are three years apart, the little girl is obedient, and the two of them have begun to cook the pot since they were seven or eight years old, insisting on it every day. They burned until they were twelve or thirteen years old and went to school in a foreign village.
I am also three years apart from my third sister. The third sister's fire stick passed to my hand is also eight years old, after the start of the school, the third sister also has to go to the nearby Nanzheng Village on foot to read the fifth grade, the noon rush home to eat time is short, the family has just divided more than ten acres of Gui ren tian, the mother's tiredness can be imagined, the task of burning the pot at noon is naturally in my hands again.
When I first learned to cook the pot, I couldn't start the fire, either the matches were too short, or the fire grass was too wet. Later, when my mother was not paying attention, I took out a handful of matches and rowed them together, and the huge flame quickly led to the firewood. But I was found by my mother, who has always been diligent and thrifty, and I could not avoid staring at the reprimand and scolding me for being a loser!
I mainly helped my mother cook pot to make lunch. I came home from school, and my mother was returning from the responsibility field. She hurriedly washed her hands, the messy hair was too late to smooth it out, and even the mud on her body could not care about the beating, so she took out a piece of hair noodles from the basin and put it on the noodle case, and then found the noodle scoop and took out two scoops of black miscellaneous noodles, spread it on the white skin that had already been spread, and made a kind of tiger roll in the flower. At this time, I had boiled half a pot of water, hurriedly urged my mother to get out of the pot to steam, my grunting stomach protested, I seemed to hear my classmates outside the courtyard wall shouting that I had left for school. Even if she had a small piece of white dough, my mother rolled it into the shape of a twist and buried me in the ashes next to the stove, a pot of steamed buns, the white noodle stick buried in the stove hall was also good, pulled out of the stove hall, the smell of burnt yellow wheat was fragrant, it was the most beautiful reward.
All year round, the most difficult to burn is the summer pot, not only the day is hot, the fate is that there is no firewood to burn, most of the burning is wheat straw, the fire is not strong, steaming a pot of steamed bread to burn two large bundles of wheat straw, encountering cloudy rain, smoke in the mother's cough one after another, I was also smoked straight tears and runny nose, often cooked a pot of steamed buns, I crawled out of the stove fire nest have become a big flower face.
Eight or nine years old is the age of greed, whenever I hear my friends outside the door calling me out to play, I always have an itch in my heart, I always feel that the pot is always not open, and the water vapor is slowly steaming and rushing. On two occasions, the steamed buns were not steamed, and it was really impossible to eat, and the mother angrily placed the pot and steamed it twice, and was scolded and delayed school. Later, my mother carved two marked bars for me on the pot table, which one to reach in the winter and this bar in the summer. Don't let you go out and play, let alone want to eat!
Since then, in accordance with my mother's request, I have done my best to complete the task. In order to quickly complete the task, I also invented the stealing of kerosene lamp oil to ignite the fire, the candle head to attract firewood, and the implementation of the shell preparation method, that is, before burning the pot to roll a handful of firewood, first soft and then hard, first easy and then difficult, a small string, the stove is no longer cut off, always the stove is burning, a boom to the end. Every time my mother praised me for my flexibility, she always gave me a handful of soybeans, corn kernels or peanuts, and let me burn some ashes out of the pot and put them in the brazier and roast them, which was the most beautiful snack in childhood.
During the wheat harvest or the busy season of the three autumn farmers, I also had to help my mother cook in the evening. What's harder to cook is cooking. A few times when I finished eating at noon and going to school, my mother gave me the task of dinner: in the afternoon, I would collect the southwest beans and go home late, there were not many steamed buns, you learned to paste a few tortillas and steam them!
The first time to learn to make tortillas, that is, curious and dare not be sloppy, according to the mother's preaching procedures, scoop on two floating corn flour, water little by little, it is difficult to make a dough, a piece of dough in the hand to shoot, the dough is always slippery, always do not listen to fiddling, not to mention round, the pentagon can not be done, try to paste the edge of the pot, sneak loach like slippery bottom of the pot, only to think of the pot to heat up, so quickly make a fire to cook the pot, wait for the pot to steam before lifting the lid, carefully paste the cake, sure enough did not fall off the pot.
When the family returned home for dinner, they opened the pot and picked it up in the basket, and the tortilla was simply a basket of broken bricks and tiles. Some of them were also burned more than half of them, lest they be scolded if they were not cooked, and I finally added a few more sticks of firewood. Xu is a family tired and hungry, still praising me for making tacos that are delicious.
When I graduated from elementary school, I also learned the skills of mixing knotty soup, making steamed buns, and rolling noodles, and I really got my mother's praise in front of my neighbors. Wu Lun did a good job, and finally helped her mother to alleviate some of her labor.
Although the pot is a simple labor, it has exercised my hands-on ability and made me appreciate the hardships of my mother's family life.
The new era has long entered the electrification life, even the countryside is rarely built a large pot to cook, the villagers no longer have to smoke for three meals a day, the pot utensils have also become the decorations of the rural memory museum, these ordinary living utensils are now children can not experience the fireworks perception, the pot has become an unforgettable memory for me.
Author: Zhongyuan Painter Friend, formerly known as Wei Zhongyou, Yuncheng people, members of Shandong Writers Association, Shandong Photographers Association, like literature and photography, once served as the executive editor of "Yuncheng Literature and Art", there are essays, poetry in the newspaper.
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