A few days of rain made Qucheng's winter more chilly. Wet cold wind, that is the cold that penetrates the bones. Every cold winter, I always think of the cooking smoke in my hometown, think of the stove of my grandmother's house, think, think, and a warm lotus blooms in my heart.
In the 1970s, every household had a large stove, two large iron pots inlaid on the stove, and a specially prepared wooden pot lid, and all kinds of firewood were often stacked behind the stove. The place where the firewood was stacked was a great place for me to hide and seek when I was a kid playing hide-and-seek. Every day when I came home from school, as soon as I put down my school bag, I ran to the kitchen. Busy grandma is already cooking, without grandma calling, I will go straight to the back of the stove to burn the fire, one can help grandma, the other can warm my hands.
"Don't be too strong on the fire, put less firewood, and eat right away!" These are the words that my grandmother often reminds me. Think about that era of material scarcity, roasted sweet potatoes, is already a delicious taste in the world. Grandma often said a sentence on her lips: "As long as there is rice and firewood in the house, it will be solid in your heart." "What ordinary people are most afraid of is that there is no rice under the pot, no firewood to cook rice." Every day, as long as you cook in the kitchen, the expectations and hopes of a day are mixed in the fireworks that rise.
The older you get, the longer you leave home, the more you will miss the past. The red wall of the old courtyard, the spring flowers and autumn moon, the big water tank in the yard, the row of banana trees behind the yard, the memory of my grandmother's house, everything is still what I looked like when I was a child.
In my memory, there were more than a dozen goldfish in the big water tank in my grandmother's yard, and these fish were beautiful! They were like fairies, gently dancing their skirts in the water. The water in the tank is clear and green, colorful and different forms of fish, or chasing and playing, or roaming together, or competing for fish food, it is cute! The fish are free in the water, and the more people look at it, the more they like it.
I remember the heavy rain in winter. That year, I was in the first grade of elementary school, and in the morning, I was still asleep, when I vaguely heard my grandmother shouting outside the house: "It's raining heavily, it's so cold outside!" I jumped out of bed, put on my sweater and ran to the window like sleepwalking. Wow, it's a watery world outside, it's not in a dream! The rain caught the north wind, knocked on the window, made a ticking sound, the sound was very light, and it was also gentle! Fortunately, it was a Sunday, and there was no need to go to school; if it was a normal day, if you encountered this kind of weather, going to school would definitely be full of "hardships" along the way.
Time is like water, the depths of the water, are those years that cannot be picked up, from young to old, experienced joy, suffering, chaos, everything will eventually go away with the flow of years.
Cold winter days, fortunately there are still those old times to keep warm. In the dream, there are still thousands of turns, still the landscape and grass of the hometown of childhood, and the alleys are strange and smokey.