Memories of matches
Text/ Song Jizong
One day during the Spring Festival, in Huining Ma Yinbao Food City, accompanied his son to dinner with several of his comrades-in-arms, and the waiter brought a box of matches when serving tea. Seeing the long-lost match, I immediately picked up the matchbox, looked left and right, and loved it.
The waiter said amusingly: "This uncle seems to have feelings for matches."
I replied to her: "Matches used to be an important tool for making fire in the lives of our generation, and without matches, we could not light a fire and make food."
After the enthusiastic waiter listened, he took six boxes of matches and said, "Since my uncle has feelings for matches, let's send you a few more boxes one by one."
I took the six boxes of matches home and kept them. Today, when I see it again, the memory is like waving its wings, flying before my eyes, flying to yesterday...
"A boxy house,
A hundred dolls live in a house.
The two black walls are divided into left and right,
The dolls rushed out one by one."
In childhood memories, people guessed this riddle with each other in the laughter after tea and dinner, and the guessed laughed and did not speak, and the guessed head was tilted and pondered. At first, I had no idea what the riddle was about, but then, slowly, I learned that it was about matches.
I don't know if young people have seen matches now, but my peers must know about matches. Matches used to be called "foreign fire", a thin wooden strip with sulfur at the top, and took it to the black phosphorus rubbing skin outside the matchbox and gently swiped it, "whooshing" a sound and catching fire, bringing light and warmth to people.
So, why is the match also called "foreign fire"? During the Qing Dynasty, some Western developed countries introduced matches to China, especially in the 1840s, after the signing of the Sino-British Treaty of Nanjing, Western speculators sold matches in large quantities on the mainland, and the term "foreign fire" went away and was passed down.
However, according to historical records, in the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, the scholar Tao Gu had a folk account in his "Qing Yilu" that the folk used sulfur-coated wooden strips to ignite fires. Later, in the Ming Dynasty, the matches described in Tian Rucheng's "West Lake Tour Zhiyu" were like today's matches. It can be seen that very early on, our country had its own matches, but the closed and corrupt and incompetent Qing government could not develop its own industry, allowing foreign goods to invade China, and the silver of white flowers flowed out of the country.
The memories of matches are still fresh in my mind.
From the time I remember, I always saw my father finishing his farm work, holding a long dry cigarette pot in his hand and smoking with matches. Sometimes, when I forgot to bring matches or there were no matches in the box, I said to me, "Go to the outhouse and bring me the fire." I took it back to help him light it, and watched him smoke like a "bar click", and I was very happy.
My father's generation, my childhood, my adolescence, has always used matches.
At that time, it was the era of agricultural cooperatives, and the fathers and elders who participated in collective labor, but all those who smoked smoked, they all held dry tobacco pots, and of course, they also smoked paper cigarettes. Not everyone carries matches, often you bring them today and I bring them tomorrow. When labor breaks, fathers and elders have to smoke a pot and smoke, "who has a fire"? With a shout, someone immediately said yes: "I have.". Those who wanted to smoke came together and gathered around the man.
The person carrying the match draws a match and first lights a cigarette for someone else. A match can only be lit at most two pots of cigarettes and burned out, whether it is a smoker or a smoker, the action is fast. The rest of the people who did not light the pot mouth, the mouth of the pot to the mouth of the pot, borrowed fire from each other. Often, the person who helps people light cigarettes finally lights their own cigarettes.
When I was a child, I often saw adults gathered around to borrow a fire and light a cigarette. Looking back now, I feel that the fathers and elders who are usually bitter but full of spirits have a warmth in their hearts and have friendly feelings for each other. Today you bring matches, tomorrow I bring matches, public and selfless. Year after year, day after day, is a microcosm of warm country life.
A match can give people warmth, and indeed, in my memory, the scene of people of my father's generation borrowing fires and lighting cigarettes is warm. That faint flame warmed their hearts to each other and connected their common feelings. As they sat together, small matches became the key to their words. They are dutiful, real, and generous, and there is no other high-minded discourse except pastoral, crops, and daily labor. Then, each of them clutched the smoke pot and dispersed, walking with such contentment, so freely, and the wisps of smoke left behind them were swirling around the sky of time, forever and ever.
Today, my father's generation is gone, they have worked hard all their lives, they have been poor all their lives, they have no desire for money, they have no material pursuits, they just want to eat three meals a day and live a good year. Whenever I think about it, it makes people feel sad. But one thing to be thankful for was that little match had illuminated their expressions countless times and ignited their hearts of friendship with each other.
Decades have passed, and I have never seen that warm scene of rural life again. What I saw was a scene of people crowding around mahjong tables, wine tables, and casinos, each with a cold expression and a sinister look in each other's pockets; soju was used to garnish and paralyze every nerve. In their minds, there is nothing but indifference, selfishness and mutual calculation, there is no sincerity and warmth between people; there is no poetry in life; there is no feeling and nostalgia between relatives and friends.
In today's rise of electronic lighters, we should miss the simple, simple, burning ourselves and illuminating the matches of others.
In the memory, in the sixties, seventies and eighties of the last century, matches were inseparable from the lives of the farmers, and in the nineties, gas lighters appeared one after another, and small matches connected the food and clothing of thousands of households. When the slender matches "whistle" between the fingers, the ordinary often give the farmers a touch of light, people will never forget the momentary light and the simple and unpretentious spirit of "firewood".
Compared with oil, salt, sauce and vinegar, matches were more important in people's lives at that time. At that time, matches were two cents a box, and later rose to five cents and a dime. In that era of material scarcity, the whole country implemented a unified planned economy, goods were supplied, matches were also in short supply, and every household must be fully prepared, and it had to be used sparingly.
In the harsh rural life, the fathers and elders in their hometown have developed the habit of thrifty family management, of which saving matches is the most typical. At that time, there was no current electronic lighter, and I had seen my father buy an iron lighter with kerosene in it, using cotton thread as a fuse twist, and igniting it by flint. But that kind of lighter is very difficult to use, and it can't catch fire at all. As people said at that time: "When you buy a commodity, you will fight one by one, walk on the road with two dozen and one, and take it home and beat it to death."
In order to save matches, when cooking every meal, a little donkey dung or cow dung eggs are allocated from the kang cave, put on dry firewood, held back to the stove, and blown violently to ignite the fire.
In winter, there is a fire circle made of alkaline mud on the edge of the family kang, which is lit with charcoal burned from the kang cave for heating, and when cooking, you only need to clip a little spark to ignite firewood. When adults smoke, they light the pot close to the charcoal fire.
In the summer, the fathers and elders rubbed a wild artemisia into a finger-thick grass rope, dried it and wrapped it around a wooden stick, and lit it when the fire was needed. This kind of grass rope can not withstand open fire, is relatively safe, and can smoke mosquitoes on autumn and summer nights.
Matches are not only daily necessities, but also bring unlimited fun to us in childhood. Every Spring Festival, we find the rack car spokes discarded by the agricultural society, make our own match gun, put two or three matchheads into the nuts at the end of the spokes, plug them with iron nails, and then hit the iron nails the hard object, making a popping sound, and immediately, a smell of sulfur wafted in the air. What's even more interesting is that the left hand squeezes the matchbox, the index finger presses a match, so that its head is close to the skin, and the right hand is ejected outward, and the matchstick that is on fire flies out, especially at night.
In the autumn, every day after school, several children are in total, who goes to the house to get firewood, who goes to the house to get potatoes, and then burns potatoes together to eat, and when they return home at night, their mouths are often black. In those years of material scarcity, life was hard, and what we could chase was the naughty nature of children. Small matches, narrating the story of time, continuing the fireworks of the years, reflecting the colorful and carefree growth of our generation's childhood life.
Times have developed, and matches have entered history. Everything became a memory, a distant memory!
Once upon a time, the smell of matches was simple and warm; it was clean and thick compared to the sharp and poisonous chemical smells of today.
The smell of matches is the index of farming culture, the long breath of yellow soil and crops!
My father and his elders had been dead for many years, but I always remembered the smell of sweat on them, but the smell of simplicity. From them, you can feel the pulse of the whole earth, and you can smell the breath of the whole earth!
Today, who still has simple and bright matches in their pockets?
Who still smells of matches burning?
It was already midnight, and after feeling it, I was given seven unique songs, entitled "Wing Matches". (Chinese New Rhyme)
There is no contention in the sleeping box,
The first round waist is slimmer and lighter.
If you need to keep warm and remove the darkness,
Burn yourself up and offer light.
April 16, 2022
About the Author:
Song Jizong, a native of Pingtouchuan Town, Huining, Gansu, is a member of the Huining County Writers Association. Life motto: Where the footsteps cannot go, the eyes can see; where the eyes cannot see, the state of mind can be reached. When a person has a dream, he can say: where his footsteps cannot go.