"Eh, have you ever returned home in the spring?"
Friends who were getting together to discuss where to go during the May Day holiday suddenly turned to me and asked me this.
"It seems... In recent years, I have not really returned home in the spring. ”
"So, the last time you spent spring at home, do you remember what it was like?"
"That was probably a few years ago. In fact, last year's epidemic, trapped at home until March, has almost spring. There is a magnolia in front of my house that is decades old, and it will bloom in April, and a tree will bloom in pink, but unfortunately, when I left last year, the magnolia had not yet bloomed, so it was not spring. ”
"Or shall we go home this spring?"
One spring, I went home without saying hello.
In the second semester of my senior year, I temporarily went to other places to find a tutor training, ended things two days in advance, and happened to be not far from home on business, so I decided to go back home to see my mother.
I stood outside the window with my suitcase in my suitcase, like countless afternoons when I came home from school as a teenager, shouting in a voice that my neighbors could hear: "Mom— I'm back!" ”
The whole air seemed to freeze for two seconds, and then I heard a rush of footsteps from the house, the door pushed open, I saw my mother's face, she looked out hesitantly, and at the moment of confirming that it was me, joy immediately covered her eyes and eyebrows, "How come you suddenly come back, without saying a word!" There was a slight reproach, but it was clear that he could not close his mouth.
My mother, standing under the magnolia tree, smiled at me like that and reached out to take my luggage. She was so happy, so happy that she didn't ask me how long I would be back this time, but just rejoiced, as if I had returned from a long journey and never left again. The spring dusk sun sprinkled on her body, illuminating her mother's face, and the hair on her forehead swayed gently with the breeze, and for some reason, I always remembered that moment, trying to help her put her hair behind her ears.
Later, when I went to work, I officially began to return home once a year. The feeling of home, like a layer of winter filters, every year, it is stacked on top of a layer, and after a long time, when I think of my hometown, I think of the snow in the sky, I think of the new year goods in the kitchen, and I think of the bowl of hot dumplings in the early morning of Chinese New Year's Eve.
The hometown is the sustenance of the heart and the place of peace behind the body. And spring, spring represents hope, and hope always seems to be farther away. Therefore, we are familiar with wuyuan's rape flowers bloom best in a few months, know when the weeping willows on the shore of the slender west lake bloom, know that the peach blossoms of Nyingchi in Tibet can only wait for me for a month, understand that if we do not seize the time, spring will pass, and the three shrimp noodles in Suzhou can only be met next year.
I know about what flowers and grasses are in my hometown, and I know what wild vegetables are in full bloom at this time of year, but those tastes are really a bit long, so long that I dare not confirm all this with certainty, and when I talk to my friends about the day, I will only say: "I remember when I was young, there was still a grandmother on the side of the road who would sell fresh bracken, and now I don't know if there is any."
I learned more and more about the spring in many cities, but I became more and more obscure about the spring in my hometown.
It was also in my senior year when I came home that I first felt how hard my mother was trying to live a life that "didn't have to worry about her children."
Although everything in the home has not changed, there is still a completely different atmosphere from the Homecoming at the New Year, and the grass outside is full of warblers, but the house is still slightly cooler and cooler, and at that moment there is some trepidation in the heart.
Remembering a documentary called "Four Springs", director Lu Qingyi is not only the filmmaker of this documentary, but also the protagonist of the film - the son of an ordinary couple in a small southwestern town. He took a camera and a tripod of less than two thousand pieces, and spent four years recording his gentle and lovely parents, as well as the boiling fireworks in his hometown and the poetic daily life.
He photographed the gentle wind in the fields of his hometown. It was his familiar green, and he couldn't see his head at a glance, his father held an umbrella for his mother in the field reclamation, and his mother stooped to work in the field, and the drizzle poured out the real earth fragrance of life.
He photographed his parents doing what they liked. My mother was humming a song in one room and stepping on a sewing machine, while my father was dancing in another room and indulging in music. Separated by a wall, but harmonious and happy.
He also photographed swallows many times. The swallows would come every spring, making nests on the eaves, and the father would happily chant, "This year the swallows are coming again", and the mother is also happy, "a shuttle and down, a thorn will fly to the sky, and then go to the high head, oh yo, the best look Oh", but while remembering, "I call your father less happy, when these swallows leave, the heart will be gray for a few days." "Mother knows that father is sad, and it is not only the swallow that leaves the nest."
One thought a year, four springs. In Lu Qingyi's shots, he sees the years tying the feet of his parents and making them falter, he sees how time evacuates the obsession of the world, and the elderly parents face the departure of their children, and press the surging love in their hearts, as if they are no longer shocked.
When Lu Qingyi was interviewed, he was asked why he made such a documentary. He said: "I am a relatively senior North Drifter, basically only go home during the Spring Festival... Every time I go to Beijing and leave home, I only know their status by phone, WeChat, or my imagination. But actually what kind of state they will be, I don't know, I want to record these scenes. ”
In the spring when their children leave home, their parents used to live like that. Watch the patio rain, choose dishes with your wife, sing in the empty valley, sway in the fields, look at the swallows back to the nest, and hope that the flesh and bones will return to their hometown. On countless ordinary days, hang up a phone call, leave a pair of dishes and chopsticks, plant a little thought, and wait for the next winter.
"Spring at home is different from spring anywhere." There is a friend around, at the end of last year began freelancing, back to his hometown, daily leisurely wandering, especially recently the sun warmed up, every time I look at her circle of friends, it makes me envious.
"I haven't eaten the cabbage buns made at home for several years, but this year I can finally eat it", she was a little aggrieved, but then it was a happy sigh, "It's really good at home, I regularly go to the library every afternoon to write, I will go through a particularly long cherry blossom road, that road is what I have to walk every weekend when I was in high school, I like to take that road in the spring, the wind blows gently, the petals fall into snow." ”
After many years, she embarked on this road full of flowers, and the spirit and cheerfulness of her youth shone on her like the wind carrying the fragrance of flowers.
The spring of my hometown is most different from the spring of my hometown, and it is in that familiar tenderness. Like the whispers of flying swallows returning home, like half an acre of square pond stirred up by spring water, watching the huilan in the courtyard emitting a sparse aroma in the corner, watching the thorns outside the window sucking tender buds, and sitting by the window to watch the spring breeze and listen to the warblers, we have bounced through childhood and youth in the small courtyard between the square inches, feeling the beauty of the world, and have already traveled all over.
This is the nostalgia of spring. The nostalgia of spring does not whistle through people's hearts like the cold winter season. It rarely takes the initiative to disturb the heart of the wanderer, but exists inadvertently, to drink the first cup of new tea in the spring, to eat the new shoots that are young this year, to smell the aroma of flowers and grasses served by the mother on the balcony, the nostalgia suddenly envelops you, making you sigh comfortably: Everything has not changed, the spring of the hometown, it is true that I am still worried about me.
Thinking about last spring, I left home for more than a year, and the magnolia I am worried about has already bloomed this year, and the flowers are not waiting for people.
But home has been waiting for me, waiting for me to spend the spring.