Mulberry's heart
Zhao Yu
In my memory, when I was a child, there was a small courtyard under the grandfather of the Copper Yuan Bureau, and that yard was actually not regular, but there were several rows of sparse bamboo hedges inserted on the oblique mud waves. The loess in the fence grows weeds, the gentleness of my grandmother and the sternness of my grandfather, and a mulberry tree with many things hanging on my heart.
Thick canopy, thick branches, dry and cracked bark. The mulberry tree stood silently. How many wandering birds have stopped in that branch? Maybe only it remembers it. This is a mulberry tree that grows in the city, it seems to have no companions, no one has deliberately planted it, perhaps many years ago, it was just a small seed that was stepped into the soil by a foot, but when the spring rain fell, it grew into a small sapling, not delicate, as long as there was wind and rain and air, it grew vigorously. Slowly, its roots and whiskers became deeper and deeper, and it was difficult to pull them out.
A few children in the neighborhood like to guard the mulberry and wait for maturity. At that time, the children were all hungry, and even ate the buds of the yellow kudzu tree. I'm keeping it too. In the summer mountain town, the building is very hot, and I often run to the stone table in the courtyard to warm the book. Sometimes I often stare at it in a daze, and there are many questions in my little head: If we pick the mulberry fruit, will the tree hurt? Will a child raise a silkworm, pluck its leaves, and grow up next year? The tree has been in one place all his life, will it be boring? The mulberry tree did not speak, but silently put its belly full of vicissitudes into fruit, and the wind chimes lined up the calendar of the mountains and the water of the mountains and the water of the adult year after year--and its own posture gradually grew old in the laughter of the children picking leaves and fruits year after year.
The book says that the mulberry tree is full of good things, the leaves, bark, roots, branches can be medicated, decoction is clear and detoxified, and the fruit nourishes the yin and blood - but I only care about its fruit, which has a purple-red halo and has soft short hairs, like a bunch of small black grape mulberries.
To eat mulberries, you have to wait until the wheat is yellow. As soon as the spring cicadas call, the mulberries are ripe. When you wake up in the morning, the birds are crying, and the children seem to smell a faint sweet fragrance. Read under the trees in the morning, just to enjoy the cool morning breeze, listening to the rustling of mulberry leaves, and occasionally ripe fruit falling and falling in my books. Pick one up, red as onyx seductive, black as if to drip ink. Sometimes I pick a leaf and play with it carefully, and suddenly I find that the leaf surface is no longer smooth - is the pattern of the mulberry leaf a wrinkle on my grandmother's forehead?
In the summer of the year I graduated from elementary school, my grandmother sat quietly under the mulberry tree and knitted sweaters for me. As the sky darkened, a light rain fell on the low-hanging branches and quietly dripped on Grandma's already many white sideburns. I urged my grandmother to go upstairs to avoid the rain, and she stopped the sweater needle in her hand, but did not move. For a long time, she asked me softly: "Good grandson, you can't always guard your grandmother like this tree all your life." If you flew away, would you remember this tree? Will you remember this home?
Although I didn't quite understand my grandmother's heart, I was suddenly moved, yes, I was admitted to junior high school, I had to go to Marbles Stone, far away from the Copper Yuan Bureau to live and study. I never left my grandmother since I was a child! I stared at Grandma and nodded solemnly. Tears and rain flowed into my mouth, salty and salty.
After that fall, I never went back to my grandmother's house or sat under a mulberry tree. When I was a child, I always cared about my studies, my own entertainment, my own future, in my heart, I always had a dream of going further, I remember writing in the composition: The roots of mulberry trees are confined to the yard, although there are new leaves growing every year, but they can't walk out of the shallow fence. I don't want to be a mulberry tree, I'd rather be a bird that drifts from north to south and sings for every dawn. I will take away the dream of the mulberry tree, use its leaves to write poems that fly in the blue sky, and then spread it on the cape of the world.
But my grandmother, still guarding the tree, grew old and thin, and finally left me one day. With the demolition of the city, the small courtyard downstairs of my grandmother has long ceased to exist, and the colorful mulberry fruits, the old mulberry trees, the laughter of childhood, and the advice of my grandmother are forever engraved in my deep memories...
(Author Affilications:South Bank District Literary Association)
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