The appearance of dandelions blooming

The appearance of dandelions blooming

Chen Sujin

A dandelion after the autumn rain appeared in front of me: a narrow green leaf with jagged teeth, the base gradually turned purple-red, and the stem opened a round yellow flower, the small flowers were bright and bright yellow, some were smiling, with rain, and some water spirit feeling...

I crouched down and touched the dandelion in this apple orchard under a big tree, and I wondered, it's late autumn, can this dandelion still bloom such brilliant flowers, is it not afraid of cold? But it has gone through the windy spring, through the rainy and hot summer, and now, an autumn rain and a cold, dandelion, you, now, so hardy and cool?

To be honest, I knew dandelions when I was very young, and I began to go to the fields with the children of the village to dig dandelions with three or five people with a knife or an iron spatula at home. It's just that we are in the countryside and have always called it Mother-in-Law. How it is called this name, I don't know, everyone calls it so, and other wild vegetables are good to distinguish, so, to this day, half a century later, I am still more accustomed to calling it mother-in-law, I think it is more grounded, there is a taste of earth straight to the chest.

When we were young, digging mother-in-law was mainly in the spring, because it appeared early, in the field, in the trees, in the vegetable garden of the production team, on the side of the dirt road where pedestrians came and went, in memory, it can grow anywhere, especially tenacious, growing here this year, next year will come to this place to pick vegetables, it, it is still there. At first, the earth that had melted the ice and snow followed the grass that arched out of the ground one after the other, stretched out, and the leaves with triangular serrated teeth began to stretch out, the bottom was pale green, and the top was purple red, and before the flowers could bloom, we cut it away.

At that time, my friends and children went home to their mother-in-law, washed and left for the family to dip in the sauce to eat, saying that it was a little bitter, but it was absolutely defeated. I took it home and chopped it up to feed my chickens. Because Mom and Dad are southerners, they don't like to eat raw things, including wild vegetables, and everything must be cooked to eat. I said that the mother-in-law could eat it raw, but they wouldn't let it.

When we shaved vegetables, we didn't like the blossoming of the mother-in-law at first, thinking that it was old.

On the days of cutting vegetables, we don't like the white pompoms formed after the mother-in-law blossoms, which fly everywhere when they are touched and blown.

Later, there was nothing to play, so we went to pick the flowers of the mother-in-law, to blow the pompoms on the flowers of the mother-in-law...

To be honest, how many times I shaved my mother-in-law when I was a child, I have not seriously observed the blossoming appearance of my mother-in-law like I do now. The mother-in-law blossoms, the golden color of the flower buds, and the golden yellow in each filament. The blossom should be her own highlight moment for the mother-in-law herself, the golden bloom, and the appearance is good. When I was a child, I never dreamed that when we were young, we were in the fields, woods, dirt roads, and wild mother-in-law who could be seen everywhere in the spring, what kind of baby has now become a baby? Because the efficacy of health has been repeatedly publicized, people who like mother-in-law Ding are not only the people in the village who used to use mother-in-law Ding to dip sauce in the past, now, when the mother-in-law grows out in the spring, as long as there is a place where the mother-in-law grows, there are people digging vegetables, including old ladies like my mother who did not eat mother-in-law in the past...

In the late spring and early summer, I was in the orchard of the "Golden Globe 1948 Farm" in Xi'an, Dawa, and I saw the overwhelming golden yellow, which was the appearance of the mother-in-law in full bloom, the appearance of the gathering of the mother-in-law, creeping under the tall green fruit trees, the yellow flower sea, giving people the shock and joy, can only realize, reverie... Approaching, there are swarms of bees buzzing around on it to collect honey, and you can clearly see that there is a small yellow dot under the head of the bee, which is said to be pollen...

When the late summer and autumn came, I saw a large number of mother-in-law Ding in the "Dingxin Hundred Grass Garden", this Asteraceae perennial herb settled here is Mei Zijie with the teachers and students of the University of Agriculture carefully cultivated, a large piece of golden yellow, in the autumn sun, broke into your sight, this mother-in-law Ding overwhelming golden flowers, is to be made into dandelion tea, made into Chinese medicine, made into a variety of dandelion snacks ... , I stood in front of that sea of flowers, remembering the youth of the past, Let's pick a small flower of mother-in-law and don't run wild on the head...

There is a song "When You're Old", which used to be very popular, and that was the English poet William. Butler. Yeats wrote to his favorite man, Maud, in 1893. Gang's poems. I like to memorize the original text of the poem, and recently I read the book "Letters from Grass and Trees" and saw the author mention that there was a translator who translated the sentence that is usually translated as "hang your head down, by the red-hot stove" into "hang your head down, on the grass of the red dandelion", he said he liked this more, I thought about it, yes, I also like this translation that is different from others, fresher and more free and bright than the fire!

I have never heard of a red dandelion before, nor have I seen it now, but I am still grateful to the writer for his surprise discovery and the depth of his reading, which gave me another sense of fascination with this edible and watchable dandelion!

More than thirty years ago, I saw a movie that won the Golden Rooster Award, "Bashan Night Rain". I remembered the six-year-old Juanzi who had just met her father's poet Qiu Shi, with bright eyes, holding a dandelion velvet flower in her right hand and blowing at it, the sky was full of white, yellow, pink velvet umbrellas that flew up, and the childlike song "I am a dandelion seed" floated over, floating in front of my eyes, floating in my heart, "I am a dandelion seed, no one knows my happiness and sadness." Dad and Mom gave me a small umbrella to fly in the vast world, to fly..."

Dandelions grow stubbornly in the soil, bloom into a blossom, nourish people's stomachs, raise people's eyes, raise people's beautiful yearning for life, and then, it flies and flies between the vast worlds and the earth...

I, more than when I was a child, like dandelions blooming...