A few days ago, I had something to do, I took a few days off, and I went back to my hometown.
Leaving the comfortable air-conditioned room in the hot and hot weather and rushing hundreds of miles of highway back, the taste is not to be described in detail. When I returned to the clean and tidy little yard and opened the car door to the ground, the hot air came to my face, as if I had come directly to the Flame Mountain, almost didn't burn me, and felt that I was only one bottle of cumin away from the delicious.
It was the farm wild tea prepared by my father that lasted my half life.
He made homemade tea early on, which was my favorite drink when I was a child. The scientific name is half-branched lotus, which is a plant with small purple flowers that can be used as Chinese herbal medicine.
This kind of tea is very common in the mountain countryside, often mixed in the lush water and grass, the stem is small and small, weak and windy, and the purple flowers bloom one by one.
I remember when I was a child, herding cattle and sheep to do farm work was the fate that every rural child could not escape, and I was no exception. My family had six cows at that time, each much taller than me, and some with long, pointed horns. Little me, with a big cow, in the vast world of the mountains, feel people and nature up close.
When the wind is gentle, the sun is faint, and the cows are at ease eating grass and not running around, it is time for us to rest. Someone grabbed a handful of stones of the same size and played a game of scratching; Someone brought a playing card with a green pattern, sat on the floor and started playing; There are also people who look for sweet and clear spring water that seeps out of the crevices of the stone walls at the mountain stream to quench their thirst...
And my favorite is to look for a cluster of skinny little half-branched lotuses hiding in a place where water and grass are abundant. Every time I see a small purple flower sticking out of my head, I must be happy to raise my eyebrows. Pick a large handful and bring it back, dry it under the guidance of your father, it is a natural good tea, an artifact to relieve heat and heat, and the money is not changed.
People eat grains, and there is no one who does not get sick. For rural people, minor diseases do not see a doctor, but rely on the body to heal itself, or seek their own remedies.
For example, if it is windy and rainy, there is a headache and brain fever, dry weather has a toothache and red eyes, and brewing some tea herbs comparable to Traditional Chinese medicine will have an unexpected effect. Who doesn't have some lotuses, wild chrysanthemums, and summer dry grasses at home?
Regarding the half-branched lotus, there are many records in ancient books, and it has a lilac figure in works such as "Hundred Herb Mirror", "Chinese Pharmacopoeia", "Nanjing Folk Herbs", "Guangxi Medicinal Plant Atlas", "Nanning Medicine Chronicle" and so on. In the "Compendium of Correction Materia Medica", it is described as follows: "This grass blooms purple-white flowers, grass purple-red, paired leaves, adopted in July and August." ”
Half-branch lotus is spicy, bitter and cold, with the effect of clearing heat, detoxification, hemostasis and swelling, mainly used for throat swelling, hot poisonous carbuncles, venomous snake bites, etc., in addition to treating various bruises. There is a basis for using it to make tea as medicine.
This is the wisdom of life that belongs exclusively to the old farmers, and it is made of local materials. In the era of material scarcity, money is not easy to earn, and it is spent every penny. The so-called patrons eat mountains, rely on water to draft water, hard-working and intelligent working people with the smallest cost of living to maintain survival, simple and tenacious.
Even today, I no longer need to soak half a lotus to clear the heat and detoxify, it is still my favorite. It seems to see it stretching in boiling water, and the bitter and slightly sweet taste climbs up the tip of the tongue, and the past that belongs to childhood will come to it.
Green trees cover the small villages lined with stone houses, the big leaves of poplars that beckon in the wind on the side of the road, the meandering streams that flow clear to the bottom, the tireless singing throughout the summer, the sweaty figures in the fields wearing straw hats, the children who climb trees and take birds into the water to catch fish, the old people who sit against the wall and sit in the sun and nag...
After finishing my work, when I was leaving, I looked at my father's gradually old and rickety body, still busy preparing the specialties of the farmhouse for me, and I had an inexplicable feeling in my heart.
He counted one by one, this is the sister-in-law's special leek flowers, spicy and under the rice, this is the mother's pickled salted eggs, the taste is very positive, this is the yellow peach picked from Nanshan, fresh varieties, the juice is full...
I suddenly said, Dad, bring me some half-branched lotuses! He listened, and quickly used a green tea box, specially filled for me, it turned out that he had dried it in advance and prepared it, just waiting for me to come back and get it. Children travel thousands of miles, parents worry, only these native products, these half-branched lotuses, can bring their love to a long distance.
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