Read the words and paintings on the playground

When I was a teenager, the playground of the rural elementary school was definitely a magical blackboard, and I left many interesting pictures on it and wrote unforgettable words.

The dozen or so adobe houses are classrooms, and pushing open the door of the classroom is a playground with a large area. The playground is very simple, just a little flat, no cement floor, no fine sand, a natural. When the wind blows, it will raise dust; when it rains, it will be muddy and difficult to walk.

There are more than ten rows of dense poplar bushes around the playground, and the walls make the campus safe and quiet, and my classmates and I will occasionally drill into them to hide and seek and dig bird nests. Outside the trees, there are large fields of crops, planted with wheat, corn, soybeans, cabbage, green onions; no need to hike, you can see the labor scenes of spring planting, summer harvest, autumn harvest, and winter Tibet at any time. The rich and vivid natural teaching materials can be read at any time.

Whenever the bell rings at the end of class, the students will rush to the playground, jump rope, kick the shuttlecock, play marbles, flip paper cards, watch the ants move, blow dandelion pompoms, pick the seeds of the ears; more naughty children, have the courage to poke the wild honeycomb... During the short 10-minute recess, we had a great time.

At that time, I especially enjoyed writing and drawing on the playground. First draw a bunch of squares on the dirt floor with a pencil-sharpening knife, then pick up a small wooden stick and write the new words you have just learned in the grid one by one; or draw a sparrow, a small squirrel with a long tail. Serious, focused, and excited, it's a really interesting game.

After the rain, the playground becomes soft and the wildflowers and weeds are washed more watery. Catching up on the weekend, I would run to the playground on the pretext of picking mushrooms. Then, facing the large playground alone, thinking like a designer, thinking about where to draw a village, where to arrange houses, stone bridges, creeks, willow trees, threshing fields and wheat straw stacks... After drawing up the blueprint, he began to create, taking a wooden stick of uneven thickness and changing the "building" house.

Wait until you patiently paint the old willow tree at the mouth of the village, paint the small stone bridge, and the flowing stream, a few wisps of rising cooking smoke, and the small mushrooms in the grass in the wall roots have just grown into piles... I smeared my imagination recklessly, and the wet mud was like a fine canvas, collecting my joyful paintings properly.

When the teacher assigned the essay "My Lovely Hometown", I just wrote the title, and the sentence after it, it was as if the spring water that had been stored in my mind for a long time heard the call of flowing, poured out, and in just a few moments, it had flowed into a cheerful stream of words.

On snowy winter days, we would also excitedly run to the playground, on the freely spread white canvas, with our feet to step on the crisscrossing paths; sometimes we would chase and fight snowball fights, happily rolling out a picture of the image.

When the winter vacation stops, as soon as the snow stops, I will put on my cotton clothes, cotton hats, cotton gloves, carry a shovel to the playground covered with snow, and start my "creation" on the snow.

Near the bushes, the thick snow was blown by the fierce north wind into a hard snow, which was one person high, and it would not trap his feet when he stood up. That kind of yukioka is suitable for digging tunnels. I first dug a round pit and then built a snow bunker with large square blocks of snow. Then, centered on the bunkers, dug traffic trenches, ammunition depots, and air raid shelters.

A group of friends in the village also flocked with tools, and obviously no one wanted to miss this natural treasure land. Together, we dug out the "fortifications" with great effort, set up thick wooden sticks as cannons, and lifted thin wooden sticks as long guns, like those brave and heroic PLA soldiers in the movie, imitating the sound of guns and cannons in their mouths, constantly "shooting" and throwing snow balls "grenades", shouting loudly and launching a charge at a snow hill not far away.

Each of us fell in the snow, and some of us fell deliberately, and it seemed that only then would it be more realistic, closer to the snow, and the game would seem more fun. When I captured a position, I wrote a sentence on the snow with a wooden stick: "We have won!" It wasn't until dusk that we withdrew from the "battlefield" and went home to appease the stomachs of the "grunts."

Later, a companion of that year recalled the words and paintings we had left on the playground, and asked me curiously and mysteriously: "Remember that you secretly carried us behind our backs and wrote a big 3 words 'I love you' on the snow, to whom is it a pure confession of love?" I smiled quietly and told him mysteriously that it was an eternal secret.

In fact, the "secret" that I knew about the playground at that time may just be a hazy feeling of the teenager, which has long disappeared in the maturity of the years.

The elementary school I attended and the playground that carried our countless joys have now become vegetable greenhouses. In that era of lack of cameras, the joyful scenes we had did not leave a single photograph, but all the vivid pictures and words had long been imprinted into the depths of my memory.

One day, I read Lu Xun's essay "From the Hundred Grass Garden to the Sanwei Bookhouse" and suddenly sighed: My rural primary school is so simple, and the playground is so simple, but it has not prevented them from becoming the paradise of my childhood. Years later, I can still remember the purity, the beauty, and the real joy.

Text: Cui Jianjian | Anchor: Li Linxin

Source: Pin Reading, No. 3, 2022

Editor-in-charge: Zhang Chu Tian Wen (intern) | Proofreader: Huang Chenxi (Intern)

Half Moon Talk New Media Center, Xinhua News Agency Audio and Video Department