To Mother | Wei Jun: The Depth of Maternal Love

Wen | Wei Jun Editor| Swallow Photo | Network

The spring wind blows from the wheat fields and from the villages, like a mother's hand brushing her face, warm and kind. The spring wind smells of cabbage, the smell of elm money, and the smell of locust flowers, which is also the smell of mother. The spring wind blew my mother's scattered hair, and the thousands of strands of hair turned into all kinds of kindness and love to feed me and care for me. Whenever the sunset is stained with red smoke, and the smoke above the village is thick, I can always see my mother standing at the entrance of the village, calling me back into her arms.

Mother has no name, she is as small as a grain of grass in the field. However, her mother is not afraid of the wind, frost, rain and snow of the world, she is strongly rooted in the same unknown countryside, striving to bloom life, clutching the sun and moonlight, having children, and building a home for a simple woman.

In this small world, there are ups and downs, there are tribulations, there are struggles, there are gains, and there are joys. Every footprint of the years has been engraved on the mother's face, and the layers of wrinkles are buried with countless wealth and treasures, vicissitudes and honors. If life is a seed, my mother is my original soil. My mother gave everything she had, cared for me and accompanied me to take root and grow strongly.

My mother's family is in Liuzhuang, south of the city. Before liberation, Grandpa had more than a dozen acres of land in his hands, and he also had a good carpenter's work, and his life was relatively rich. Since she was a child, her mother has been skillful and has learned a good female red. My ancestors were poor peasants for generations, and their lives were miserable.

After liberation, Grandpa's family was divided into landlords and the property was confiscated. At that time, no one wanted to marry the daughter of a landlord.' Finally, the mother married the father of the poor peasant component. The mother, who grew up with no worries, stepped into a new home that was destitute, and the embarrassment could be imagined. The lack of money did not make the mother sad, she and her father paid more hardship than others.

Her mother begged her grandfather to help her build a spinning wheel. During the day she and her father participated in the field labor of the village collective, and at night she sat in front of the spinning wheel and spun a ball of cotton wool into silk thread. These threads became our shoes, socks, and pants, but the mother herself was reluctant to use them. She exchanged these hand-knitted things for chai rice oil and salt.

When he was studying agriculture in Dazhai, his father learned the craft of weaving. Every night, every day of the farm' leisure, the mother sat opposite the father, one weaving, one weaving basket. They strive to run this home with a posture of comparison, catching up and surpassing.

One year, our family set up a piece of land that my mother regarded as a treasure. As soon as she and her father had time, they went to the ditches in the fields to pick up dead leaves of wild grass and make fertilizer. From planting and fertilizing, to fine harvesting, when encountering drought, you also have to carry your shoulders to water. She took good care of this small piece of land, harvesting the family's vegetables, fruits, and grain rations from this land.

When the days were a little more relaxed, my mother planned to raise pigs. That spring, my mother took out the family's money, borrowed a little more from my grandfather, and bought a baby pig. The little pig's dark fur and cute eyes, our brother and sister are also very happy about its arrival. Mother was busier than before, squeezing time out of the already intense productive labor, digging wild vegetables in the fields and ditches, and coming back to mix some wheat bran to feed the pigs. Usually after eating, my mother also carefully brushed the pot, pouring the residual food in the brush pot water into the pig trough. Our brother and sister are naturally also my mother's little helpers, and after school, we go to the ditch to look for pig grass, come back to wash the roots, and chop them into the grooves. Because my mother said, when the pigs are sold, buy us books, buy toys, buy new clothes.

These roughages make the pigs grow slowly and cannot grow up until the Spring Festival. Taking advantage of the good price of pork during the Spring Festival, the mother will ask someone to kill the pig, sell the good meat, leaving the pig head and pig offal, which the family can enjoy. The few dollars that these porks are exchanged for are not dare to spend at will. The mother should be carefully separated, buy new clothes for the family, buy New Year goods for the Spring Festival, buy gifts from relatives, and more are used to buy seeds, fertilizers and pesticides in the spring. During the years when the penny was broken into eight petals, my mother worked hard and carefully ran this ordinary home. Although we do not have a prosperous and rich life, the family respects and loves each other, warm and harmonious.

The mother was skillful, and in the era of lack of material life, the female red learned in the mother's family played a big role. When my mother married into my family, she slowly contracted the clothes, shoes and socks of the whole family, old and young. In an era when daily necessities are rationed by the state, it costs a lot of money to buy finished clothes and pants. My mother spun herself and weaved the fabric herself, and then groped for tailoring and making clothes. Later, my mother found that the cloth shop of the supply and marketing cooperative would deal with some of the remaining cloth heads, usually tens of centimeters to one meter or so, but the price was much lower. My mother bought them to make tops and pants. It's easier and more comfortable than clothes made of old cotton, and it's cooler.

Time flows unhurriedly. Mothers are mastering more and more skills. In the summer, my mother would cut the rotten cloth shoes we wore, cut them with bigger holes, and imitate the style of sandals on the market and turn them into cloth sandals. In the winter, my mother tore off the bracts on the corn cob piece by piece, sewed them together piece by piece, turned them into cotton boots, and sewed the soles under the boots. These corn bract boots are more than a dozen layers thick, a little bulky to wear on the feet, but very warm. Mother also spun corn bracts into thick fiber ropes and wore them into curtains and hangings. He also bought dyes from the shops and dyed them in various colors, and handed them over to the commune's foreign trade office, which was a small income.

In the impression of our brothers and sisters, my mother did not idle. She was like a top, busy day by day. In her bones, there is a precipitated Chinese people's industriousness and kindness for thousands of years. My mother always worked hard and complained without complaint. She often warned us that hard work is a blessing. He also said, O man, there is no suffering that cannot be endured, only blessings that cannot be enjoyed. Under the influence of my mother's personal practice, in the words of my mother's earnest teaching, I learned to be diligent and work hard. Decades later, I also had my own small career, a happy little family, all thanks to my mother," all thanks to her great grace.

When I was a child, I only knew that I was hungry and looking for my mother to eat, and when I was cold, I asked my mother for clothes, and I didn't know what my mother was experiencing in the quiet time of these years, and I didn't think about how much anxiety and worry there was in my mother's heart, nor did I remember how many sleepless nights my mother had survived, how many spring sowing and autumn hiding.

Mother is like an iron man, even like Superman. Mother satisfies our needs with a thin body. What my mother used to say was a no-no: I'm not hungry, I'm not thirsty, I'm not cold, I'm not hot, I'm not tired... Even when she was sewing clothes for her grandchildren in reading glasses, she heard us persuade her to rest, she still said, I am not old.

Time is a monster, it urges us to grow up, but in the mother's sideburns to produce gray hair, unconsciously the mother has slowly aged. Ever since I went out to study in high school, I've been getting away with my mother a lot less. When I was navigating the world, when I was concentrating on running my own small family, I often forgot my hometown and forgot my mother. But my mother, as always, worried about me. Now whenever I think about it, I am ashamed and blame myself.

After the year of confusion, I also warned myself again and again to accompany my mother more, but the fly camp dogs in the world are always entangled in the footsteps of returning to their hometown. I can only complain on the phone in my spare time. But the mother said generously, knowing that you are busy, don't worry about the family, I am fine, I am not by your side, you have to take care of yourself. I burst into tears. Loving mother, I should have taken care of you, but you are still thinking about my body.

Ever since I entered the city, my mother never wanted to bother me, and when she encountered a small illness with a headache and fever, she always went to the health room to get injections and take medicines. Even once, I learned from the neighbor's wife that my mother had just been in the town health center for a week because of gastroenteritis a while ago. I asked my mother about it, and she said that I could walk and take care of myself, and I couldn't trouble you and delay the affairs of the public family.

I remembered that when I was a child, I was often sick because of my weak health. Every time, my mother was furious and asked the doctor behind my back to find medicine. Sometimes the sun is shining, sometimes it's full of stars. I was in my mother's arms, on her back, and I could feel her heart beating with my breathing. O strong mother, she forced herself into an iron man and made steel.

I persuaded my mother to come to town and live with us. She still stayed in the old house on the grounds that the air in the city was not as fresh as in the country, or that she did not know the people around her. In fact, she just doesn't want to be idle, she has her own plans. Grow some vegetables in the fields of the countryside, raise some chickens and ducks in the courtyard, and when I meet neighbors who have entered the city from the village, I will let the family bring me fresh vegetables and fresh eggs. In her eyes, it was as if I was still a thin child in need of supplementation. Mother, who gives up herself, loves me, protects me, loves me, and this sentiment is higher than the heavens and is in harmony with the earth.

The mother is the boat in life, facing the wind and rain, sending the children to the other shore; the mother is the big tree in life, cold and summer, shade the children from the cold; the mother is the lamp in life, accompanied by all the way, warm in the heart; the mother is the light in life, after the wind and rain, to meet the sun; mother's love is like water, manna moisturizes the heart; mother's love is selfless, grateful for the long-term existence of the heart. For generations to come, bow down to the mother.

Author: Wei Jun, a native of Cao County, Shandong Province. Love literary creation, embrace the world with warm words. His works include essays, novels and poems published in Shandong Poetry, Ginseng Flower, Shandong Prose, Peony Evening News, Lu Southwest Literature and other online publications. The essay "The Second Master's Dry Cigarette Bag" won the second prize of Shandong Province to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Party.

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