(Prose) Yo Yo Willow Tea Aroma

□ Chen Funian

I grew up with a passion for tea, but our hometown doesn't produce tea. Under the snowy mountains of our hometown Qilian Mountains, nourished by the unique earthy atmosphere, a unique willow grows, the leaves are turquoise, and there is a faint natural fragrance in the mouth, which is placed in a teapot and the sweet snow water of Qilian Mountain is formed into an indescribable leisurely fragrance.

This is willow tea. Willow tea has the effect of clearing heat and diuresis, cooling and relieving heat. It has nourished countless ordinary and tenacious lives in the past years, carrying the taste of life.

As a post-60s generation, I have witnessed my fathers and fellow villagers tasting the sweetness of willow tea in the scorching sun, and the deep memories left by drinking hard when hard work and sweating like rain.

I remember that at that time, the production team practiced collective labor, and the fathers and fellow villagers worked at sunrise and rested at sunset. Busy farming changes with the seasons throughout the year, sowing, fertilizing, weeding, watering, harvesting, hitting the field, ploughing the land, stubble after stubble, endlessly. After school, children are tasked with carrying water, collecting manure, shoveling grass, grazing and collecting ears of wheat during winter and summer vacations. Especially in the summer and autumn season, when the sky is dark, people begin to work in the fields, carrying scythes, hurrying through the rugged sheep gut trails in the countryside, harvesting, pulling, grinding and returning to the warehouse, and handing over the grain to the public grain piece by piece. Immediately after the start of farmland water conservancy construction, the villagers carried shovels and hoes, pushed on their own wheelbarrows, pulled on the production rack cart, and opened the prelude to farmland water conservancy and peacebuilding and field preparation.

At that time, the production tools were simple, there were no excavators, bulldozers, transport vehicles and other mechanical equipment, and some were just old-fashioned unicycle wooden carts and rack carts, digging with shovels on the flat ground, raising them vigorously into the distance, and digging with hoes. In the distance, in a field, groups of people are like ants that are only moving, one milling and one milling, from near to far, from high to low, transporting loess, so that the original uneven land has become a large terrace, flat and wide, water-resistant, thick and fertile large terraces, laying the foundation for a sustained harvest in agriculture.

In the hot summer, it is most appropriate for hard-working villagers to quench their thirst with willow tea. Every year on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month of the lunar calendar, when the incense is at its peak at the Yunyu Temple in Qilian Mountain, people from nearby Wuwei, Shandan, and Sunan come from all directions and crowd in the Yunyu Temple to burn incense and worship the Buddha, praying for a year of smooth wind and rain, good health and happiness for their families, and also picking some willow tea by the way. June 6 willow tea is the most tender, greenest, the strongest color, the purest taste of the season, take home washed and dried, steamed in a cage, stir-fried in an iron pot over low heat, the best willow tea is concocted, put in a clay pot for later. When drinking, grab a handful of willow tea, put it in an iron pot, add the sweet Qilian snow water, boil for a while, and finally pour it into the amphora jar, mix it with sugar, and carry it into the field. Such willow tea, green in color, sweet and delicious, to relieve the heat, natural innocence, health and environmental protection, is an excellent drink for the rural people. Drinking moist willow tea, the dark skin of the villagers and the clay pots are reflected, you bowl by bowl, the tea water swaying with a thick face. At the end of the work, the tea pot is at the bottom, the bottom of the jar is deposited with a thick layer of tea leaves, the frugal farmer refuses to pour it, the rough hand reaches into the jar and pinches it into the mouth and chews it into the stomach, which can fill the hunger and nourish the stomach, killing two birds with one stone. Unconsciously, on the way home, it is already sunset, the twilight is heavy, after eating and falling asleep, immersed in the sweet dream fragrance...

Every time I go back to my hometown, I have to stand on the slope beam and look out, the terraces are flattened, and some of the people who used to straighten out the fields have grown old, some have followed their children away from home, and some are still left in the village...

The former sheep's gut trail has been turned into a cement avenue leading straight to the door, and most young people have left their hometowns, moved to other places or went out to work, or moved to the city to live in buildings. With the construction of new rural areas, government subsidies have been concentrated and built one after another, beautiful and beautiful model houses, and the quiet village has become lively again.

When the sky was high and the clouds were low and the birds were chirping, I returned to my hometown, and I wanted to see the labor scenes of the predecessors working together and laughing, and it seemed that I saw the layers of wheat waves that rippled around the village, as if I smelled the rice cooked by my mother and the golden wheat aroma on the ground, and the fragrance of willow tea overflowing from the mouth of the clay pot.