
When I was a child, my family's old house was different. It is located in Chenguan Village, Fujing Commune, Shenqiu County, on the west bank of the Zhai River, which belongs to the outside of the village, and the terrain is nearly three feet above the road and nearby neighbors. The courtyard wall is just over a meter high, but from the outside it looks more than a person tall. Six old houses with rammed earth have stood in the wind and rain for nearly 100 years and have lived for four generations.
Because the water area of the Zhai River in the north is wider, only our family lives in the east of the road, the river surface in the east of my house is not wide, at most it can only be regarded as a wide ditch, and not far from the south is a Yangguang River, we are used to calling it the South River. It can be said that my house is surrounded by water on three sides and by the road on one side. But the road was not very wide, it was a country road, at most six or seven feet wide, and it took a lot of uphill to get to my house, and it was as high as six steps.
Before the liberation, bandits were rampant, and the villagers had no guns and ammunition, only broadswords and axes, and the villagers of Chen Guan dug deep ditches around the village in order to protect the village.
The outer walls of the wall are planted with bamboo, and the villagers regularly cut the roots of the bamboo into stubble to form thorn piles, and cut down bamboo poles to make pikes to prevent bandits from entering the village. The wall is two zhang high, six feet wide, there is a path on the top, it is for the patrol officers to walk, when patrolling at night, they hold torches in their hands, carry the pickaxe, find that there are hands to pick up the wall, or there are grappling hooks, ropes, without warning, they go up directly to cut down, the gangsters fall from the wall of the bamboo thorn pile, the result can be imagined.
The blue waves ripple in the Yangguang River in the south of the wall, the light green river water runs through the Zhai River for a week, the water quality is clean and clear, the bottom of the water is full of fine sand, like the site of grinding wheat in the countryside, the porcelain is flat. In the summer, people love to swim and splash there.
When I was six or seven years old, I played in the water with my friends in the South River, and often my older companions would find human heads, skeletons, arms, thigh bones, and rusty machetes from the bottom of the water.
The villagers left a gate in the northwest and northeast corners of the stockade and installed a drawbridge. On weekdays, the drawbridge was lowered to make it easier for the villagers to enter and exit, and when the bandits came, they hung the drawbridge to block their invasion.
Today, the Zhaihe River is still clearly visible on the satellite map, and 80% of the Zhaihe River is still intact.
Later, many immigrants came from other places, and they all lived outside the village. Until now, they are still accustomed to calling the inside and outside of the village.
The Zhao family came to Chenguan Village first, and lived on the west side of the Zhai River, and the people surnamed Li, Zhang, and Yan lived in order from east to west. Because the surname of the village is Chen, and the topography of the village is next to the Taoist temple of Yang Guanghe's "one view in ten miles, one temple in five miles", so the village is called "Chen Guan" village.
The people surnamed Zhao all migrated from Shandong, so the people surnamed Zhao, who is known as the Han Dynasty in Shandong, all have thick eyebrows and big eyes, burly figures, and powerful martial arts. Few of the men in our family are less than 1.8 meters tall, and they are all standard Shandong men.
My house is 40 meters long from north to south and 20 meters wide from east to west. When the grandfather split the family, the grandfather offered to get this house, which is a wasteland that has never been inhabited since ancient times.
Since it has been a wasteland for many years, there are many other species that live and breed here, especially snakes and weasels, and I often see some snake skins on the walls or in the grass. Once, I took out six small "duck eggs" from a hole in the wall and went to talk to my grandmother, but she told me that they were not duck eggs, but snake eggs, and told me to put them back in their place. A few snake eggs are similar in appearance to duck eggs, except that the skin is a little soft and tough.
In the summer nights, I slept with my grandmother on a small bed in the vegetable garden, and my long hair would fall down at the head of the bed, and sometimes the weasel would think that my hair was hay, the best material for its birth and nesting, and in the middle of the night, it would pull my hair and pull it outward, and I would scream in fright, and my grandmother would desperately drive it away and hold me in her arms. What I fear most is the weasel stealing the chicken at night, and the miserable wail of the chicken is creepy and terrifying.
There is a scallop-shaped bird's nest on the second purlin of my south house, which comes and goes in spring and autumn, year after year. A pair of swallows will raise five or six little swallows every year, and when the swallow parents go out to feed, the little swallows will be neatly lined up in half a circle, revealing a cute little yellow mouth. When Yan's father or Yan's mother flew back, they all stretched their long necks, opened their big mouths, and chattered non-stop. Sometimes we walk under their nests, and if we are not careful, we will be bullied by them, pull a bird droppings, and the naughty little brother will take a stick to pound them, and the mother will immediately protect the little swallows when she finds out, and tell us: they are beneficial birds that eat insects, and they are good friends of people, so we should love them.
For as long as I can remember, this yard is divided into two, there are three south houses and three east houses in the south, in the southwest corner of the yard, there is a bucket-thick "iron head jumping" jujube tree, the jujube belongs to the late jujube, you can only eat it after the Mid-Autumn Festival, the fruit is crisp, sweet and big, we all like to eat this kind of jujube.
To the north of the jujube tree is a plum tree, and every spring the snow-white plum blossoms fill the branches of the tree, and the fragrant aroma attracts swarms of bees to busy among the flowers. In autumn, the ripe plums are yellow-orange and orange, which makes people look forward to the plum blossoms. When the plums are still unripe, people who often have an uncomfortable throat come to my house to find a few, and go back to salt and plum to put a piece of pickling, which is said to cure pharyngitis and plum fire. On the north side of the plum tree is the gate where we go back and forth to the west, and there are two large locust trees planted on the left and right of the door. In front of the right side of the east house, there is a "fat gourd" jujube tree surrounded by three or four thick trees, and the north side of the jujube tree is my family's small vegetable garden.
Fifteen or six pomegranate trees are planted around the small vegetable garden, which is surrounded by three directions: west, north and east. Every year, in the vegetable garden, my grandmother will constantly change all kinds of seasonal vegetables, and she will also plant some corn in the gap between vegetables. During the three years of natural disasters, the small vegetable garden was our family's life-saving garden. In the middle of the vegetable patch there is an apricot tree and an apple tree. The apricot tree was also grafted by his brother with plum branches, and the plum apricots produced were yellow, large, and plentiful, like garlic cloves, and the branches were bent over heavily. The fruit of the apple tree, like the face of a girl, white and red, when the rain is clear, the oil skin of the fruit will reflect the golden light of the sun, as if countless hanging, red, goose yellow like agate, half hidden in the emerald green leaves, like a pastoral oil painting.
Pomegranate flowers red Mayday. My family's copper-skinned pomegranate tree begins to bear bones in the middle of April of the lunar calendar every year, buds at the end of April, and begins to compete in early May. At this time, clusters of fiery red pomegranate flowers bloom all over the branches of the tree, so that most of the garden of the vegetable garden forms a big fiery red color arch used by a couple when they get married, bright and enchanting, full of color, poetic and picturesque.
The pomegranate trees dressed in red are proudly blooming with flowers that look like five-pointed stars, and anyone who walks up to them will not stop walking and admiring them. Every time I come back from school, I would rather have dinner at the party than go to the pomegranate tree and enjoy the pristine natural beauty.
The pomegranate is slowly growing, the size of a glass ball, the size of a table tennis ball, and then the size of a small sandbag, and it can mature and go on the market after the Mid-Autumn Festival. If the pomegranate is not picked in time when it is ripe, it will crack open its mouth on a cloudy day, revealing purple-red seeds, which are as clear as pearls. At this time, my grandmother plucked all the pomegranates with cracked mouths and gave them to us to eat, saying that they were sweeter. For those big and good-looking ones, my grandmother asked my sister-in-law to pull them to the head of the world with a cart to sell them, and exchange some money to come back to subsidize the family. At that time, the jujubes and pomegranates of the sister-in-law could only be sold for two or three cents a catty, and a car could only be sold for seven or eight yuan.
There are a total of five jujube trees in my family, all of which are left by the ancestors, which is also called planting trees by predecessors and harvesting by future generations. In addition to the two jujube trees in the courtyard, the other three are located on the northwest, northeast, and southeast riverside edges. Every year in spring, the jujube tree will be dead in spring, draw out the light green tender branches and buds, produce countless fine stamens, when the flowers bloom, the little center of the flower is the favorite place of bees, attracting many bees to collect honey, I am out of curiosity, I want to taste the taste of jujube flowers, so I pick a few, try to taste it with the tip of the tongue, its sweetness is really the same as honey, no wonder people agree that jujube nectar is a first-class high-quality honey.
After being pollinated by bees, the jujube flowers gradually grow to the size of wheat kernels, grow to the size of neem dates, and then grow into a large jujube like a small apricot. When the jujube grows to a large white shell, one side is white, and the side of the rising sun is dotted with coffee-colored patterns, and then it will become red on one side, white on the other, until it becomes all red. Because there are early and late, the growth time is inconsistent, and some of the early-ripening dates will become stiff and full and fall to the ground.
At this time, Grandma would let us pick them up and put them together, and when we had saved too much, Grandma would put them in a jar and mix them with cold boiled water to make them, and after twenty-one days, they would start to pour vinegar.
The first and second vinegar were put in the jar by my grandmother and kept for daily use, and the three-drenched vinegar was the best drink we carried to school. Fill a bottle before school and save it for when you're thirsty at school. At that time, drinking the three-pronged vinegar poured out by my grandmother, sour, sweet, and a jujube fragrance, it was far more enjoyable than the current drink. There are many friends who come to my house to ask for a bottle, and they will be regarded as treasures.
Every autumn, when the dates on the edge of the river are beaten, it is a more lively scene, the idle neighbors will come to help beat the dates, and the sister-in-law will ask a few of her good sisters to come over to help the river to catch dates. One day, my mother, several uncles, and aunts were beating dates with bamboo poles, and the children from that area also came to run around with us to pick up the dates scattered on the shore.
Under the heavy whipping of the mother and the others with bamboo poles, the dates hanging on the trees, green, red, half green and half red, swinged in the air like naughty boys swinging. After that, like fairies dressed in beautiful colorful clothes, they went to take a bath, and they all rushed to jump into the water, and like rain, they jumped on the surface of the river with a bang, splashing layer after layer of water. With the waves set off by the jujube fishermen swimming in the water, the jujube is like a child playing hide and seek, sometimes diving into the water, sometimes surfacing again.
At this time, the big fish in the river finally waited for this day, and like a meeting, they swarmed into the crowd and greedily opened their mouths to swallow dates.
At that time, I don't know if there were fewer people or more fish, I suddenly heard Zhao Qixiang's aunt "ah", and a silver carp weighing three or four catties broke into the sieve where she was fishing for dates, turned over and jumped into the water, which startled her. After a while, I heard my sister-in-law shouting: "Where are you going?" Then, excitedly and excitedly shouted: "I catch a big fish! I catch a big fish!" Everyone looked at it, only to see the sister-in-law clasped the mouth of the bamboo basket upside down on her chest, her head on the bamboo basket, and her two arms tightly hugged the basket and said: "It wanted to run, but it was blocked by the basket tie." When I hugged it to the shore, I was really unhappy to see that it was a big carp weighing four or five catties! After a while, Zhao Qilan Gu also caught a silver carp weighing three or four catties, and for a while, everyone didn't know whether to catch the fish or the dates, and it was not until about three o'clock in the afternoon that the dates were fished, and they also accidentally caught four big fish.
The jujubes that were fished up were sent to the villagers in the entire alley of Luxi, and half a basket was given to the one person who helped, and the rest of the jujubes were spread out by the mother on the mat, and then pulled by the sister-in-law to the head of the world to sell after drying. In the evening, grandma will steam half a pot of syrupy dates for us, sweet, soft and glutinous, so that we can all eat enough.
On the riverside behind our east house, there are many wild trees and wild vegetables, including stinky wattle, yellow artemisia, mugwort and dandelion, plantain, broom seedlings, gray cabbage, etc., as well as the tsubaki tree, elm tree, neem tree, and locust tree planted by the grandfather's generation. Among them, locust trees are the most. There is an old locust tree, tilting its head towards the river to the east, under this old locust tree, there are always one or two small pots of the same size of the old turtle, love to come out at noon in the spring to autumn period, show their heads in the water, leisurely and happily bask in the sun, as long as it is sunny, every day. I struck it with dirt, and it immediately shrank its head, and then stretched its head out again, and paddled to the bottom of the river with all four feet, but in a moment it surfaced from the other side, and showed its pointed mouth and two nostrils the size of mung beans, and stayed there proudly, looking at me with disdain, as if it were angry. Because of the rising sun on the west bank of the river, it will slowly climb to the halfway point of the river in spring to lay eggs. After the eggs are laid, they are buried with earth. I don't know how long it will take, a nest of fifteen or sixteen small turtle babies the size of copper coins will come out of the mound. The turtle babies out of the shell stretched out their heads and crawled into the water like a race.
The silver carp in the water often hold high jumps, long jumps, and sometimes jump, jump halfway to the shore, roll over, get covered in mud and jump into the water. It's like they're in a competition, to see who jumps high and who jumps far. Of course, there are also some stubborn and competitive fish who jump up for a long time and get lost and can't jump into the water. So, it became our prey.

One day, I was playing by the river behind the east house, and I came across a silver carp weighing about three pounds and jumped halfway to the shore, so I quickly stepped forward and held it down, and buckled the fish cheeks and went home, and my grandmother kept praising me for my ability. After eating the sweetness once, as long as I have time, I will hold the mentality of waiting for the rabbit, go there to wait, go to the river and wait for the fish.
Sometimes, I will learn from others, make a thin coarse cloth pocket for carrying fish, put some buns or bones, chicken intestines, grass in the middle, and then put half a brick to sink, put the fish bag in the water, wait a while, pick up the fishing stick, carefully lift the rope in the middle, and quickly lift it when I vaguely see the cloth bag, at this time the water in the pocket gradually leaks to the left, and the small shrimp and small fish are jumping around in it, making a dying struggle. But there is nothing they can do to break through the "cage" and return to its wide waters, which can only obediently become our delicacy in the end.
The south house in our family is a house built by my grandfather with acacia grass, which is far stronger and more durable than building a house with wheat straw. It is resistant to sunlight and rain, and was the best material for building a house at that time.
There is also a characteristic of locust grass, for a long time, in case of rain, it will produce a kind of fungus, grow a piece on the house, piles of "ground skin", thin, dark green, like kelp but thinner than kelp, like seaweed and thicker than seaweed.
At this time, Luxi's Chen Cuilan and Aunt Yang would come to my house with baskets to help and help harvest in the house. Hua Niang used a rake from the house to peel off the ground, we cleaned up on the ground, and then after each of the families had a share, they went to the Nanhe River to wash it. However, it can never be washed, because the dust scattered in the air has already grown inside, put onions, ginger and garlic and fry them with oil, a smell of seafood comes to the nose, and it tastes like a unique delicacy in the world, very chewy, we will rush to eat.
When we eat, we love to go to the door with the rice bowl, and I love to carry the rice bowl to the second mother's house on the other side. It was the hometown of my second uncle, the general of the New Fourth Army and the former deputy political commissar of the Sichuan Military Region, Zhao Zhuoru, and at that time, only Erniang lived there.
The second uncle and my father are the same brothers, and after graduating from Huaiyang Normal School in the early years, he devoted himself to the revolution, and during the anti-Japanese period, he led the tour guide to fight in eastern Henan and western Anhui, and developed the base area. Organized and participated in the battle of Anziling. After the surrender of the Japanese invaders, Chiang Kai-shek instructed Hao Pengju to occupy Xuzhou, and the second uncle accompanied the chief of staff Song Shilun to talk with Hao Pengju, after that, the second uncle was stationed at the Hao Pengju headquarters in the name of the representative of Commander Chen Yi, and participated in the talks between Commander Chen Yi, Rao Shushi, and Shu Tong three times, and made contributions to promoting Hao Pengju to lead the troops to revolt. After Hao Peng's uprising, the second uncle was immediately appointed as the secretary of the Xuzhou Working Committee, and the news spread to his hometown, and he was widely rumored by the hometown people, and became a big official who "sat in Xuzhou" alongside historical figures. In four or seven years, the second uncle served as the secretary of Shen Qiu's county party committee. Later, the second uncle went to the southwest with the army, and successively served as the commissioner of the Sichuan Luzhou area and the Yibin District Administration, the president of the "Sichuan Daily", the deputy political commissar of the Sichuan Provincial Military Region, and the secretary of the Commission for Discipline Inspection.
In the spring of 1996, the second uncle returned to his hometown to visit relatives at the age of 81. In the morning, I went to visit him, when the second uncle and uncle Zhao Xingmin, the third uncle Zhao Qisan, they were talking freely in the guest house of Yuheng Company, the second uncle talked and laughed, and his voice was full of anger. After seeing me, the second uncle said affectionately: "Girl, I came back last time and had dinner with your father, but I can't see each other again when I come back this time, your father is a genius, but he died too early, it's a pity." Today, the second big university didn't prepare any gifts, so I'll give you a painting!" his orderly took paper and ink from the car, and the second uncle swayed in a dashing manner, and in an instant, a pair of verdant and energetic ink plum pictures were born, and the second uncle inscribed the poem with great interest, "Eight years to surrender to the enemy, three years of war and stubbornness." The old man is still here, painting the country with a wave!" In the afternoon of the same day, the second uncle and his party drove back to Beijing.
I like to listen to Erniang tell the story of Erbo's resistance to Japan and killing the enemy, and I like Erniang to teach me all kinds of common sense in life. Later, Erniang was taken by Zhao Minglan's eldest sister to live in Zhengzhou for a long time, and I had to transfer the place to eat.
To the north of the gate of my house, on the edge of the river, is the dining ground of our entire Hutong people, and every time it is time to eat, men, women, and children carry bowls and snort porridge or noodles as they walk. It's as if whoever doesn't go there to eat will not be able to eat the food, and they won't be able to eat it.
Everyone gathered together and looked for their own positions, some squatting against the root of the wall, some leaning on the roots of old trees, and some sitting directly on the edge of the river, taking off one of their insoles under their buttocks, and of course standing accounted for the majority. Everyone ate while chatting with the sea and the sky.
The content of the adults' chats is all anecdotes, parents' shortcomings, and news from the village or the village, and the children listen attentively to the adults' conversations with their ears open, and they have long insights. Uncle Chen Bingqian's house is in front of the walled gate, far away, he also loves to come to our dinner, in order to facilitate and save trouble, simply use a small red tile pot to serve rice, Zhao Mingyou's eldest brother can string three or four cakes with a chopstick. Some people are reluctant to go home after eating, and their bowls are dry. In addition to heavy rain and snow, the sun and the month are like this every year.
My family is from the sixth production team, and all the households in Luxi are from the seventh production team, and sometimes the seventh team has distributed vegetables, and each family will take some to give to my family, and my family has received more vegetables than they have shared. When it was time for our team to divide the food, my mother would also ask us to send some to each family. The neighbors respect each other, help each other, unite and fraternity, and live in harmony with each other, so that the whole village is envious, and they all say that our Hutong is a treasure land of outstanding people, and every family has government cadres and state-owned enterprise workers.

When I was a kid, I was happiest about playtime after dinner. Zhao Sanyun is a child king, he often leads the male babies in that area to fight, he himself plays a leader of the People's Liberation Army, others play soldiers, find honest ones, play villains, if you don't do it, you have to quit his team. In order not to lose the opportunity to play the game, the honest child can only obey him, against his will, pitifully to play the little Japanese and the badass.
In acting, he will also arrange roles for his partners according to each person's personality, hobbies, and specialties. In "The Case of Quanmei", he arranged for himself to be the protagonist Bao Zheng, and the others played the dynasty, Ma Han, Zhang Long, Zhao Hu...... , in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", he asked my brother to play Zhao Zilong, and he played Guan Yu. In "Journey to the West", he played the role of Sun Wukong, holding a wooden stick, wearing a bed sheet, scratching his body for a while, scratching his scalp for a while, and then hitting the eye patch, blinking his eyes, that funny performance and grimace made us laugh, all laughed out of tears, laughed and bent over.
Boys act and play, sometimes I play hide and seek, eagle catch chicken, high jump, handkerchief and other games with my best friends Aiqin, Xiaoxing and others. Adults couldn't sleep because of our trouble, some carried dolls for a few months, and some pulled two or three-year-old children, chatting on the side, watching us play games, happy together. We play until nine o'clock in the evening, and when there is a moon, we can indulge in playing until more than ten o'clock in the evening. At that time, when there was no TV, no mobile phone, and no other entertainment, we could still have a full play, a happy play, and a wonderful play.
As the years go by, we grow up, and the past quietly becomes a memory.
Today, all the old people I used to live in have passed away one after another, and some of my friends have married away from home, some have moved to the city, and some have moved outside the village. Every time I return to my hometown, I see the ancient trees at sunset, the old houses at dusk, the depressed and silent courtyards, the dry ditches in the east and the riverbed that has been partially filled in in the north, and there will always be some melancholy and loss of "dead vines and old trees and crows".
The take-off of the motherland and the wave of entrepreneurship have involved the young people in the old house alleys into the rolling torrent of going out to start a business, and they are playing an important role in major cities and on all fronts, becoming the mainstay of local construction.
My family's old house is still quietly located on the west bank of the Zhai River, silently witnessing the changes of the times and silently telling the vicissitudes of history.

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About the Author:
Zhao Li, female, 72 years old, graduated from high school, likes to record the bits and pieces of life with words