Cockroach, knowledge and childhood

Childhood events, like the release of paper kites, although gradually drifting away and becoming blurred, but as long as you gently pull, you will appear in the sky of memory.

It was a time of extreme material and cultural poverty, and for as long as I can remember, I have seen my parents running all day for their livelihood. However, the children with dishes on their faces live carefree days all day, reveling in their own happiness... It is natural for children to like small animals. My memories of my childhood seem to be associated with many small animals.

I remember in the autumn, I used to go to the countryside with my friends and catch moths in the tree pits and grass. After the white dew, the moths will chirp at night. At this time, my friends and I took flashlights and looked for clams in the courtyard where there were horns or bricks. The caught clams should be placed separately in a jar made of mud. Cockroaches are aggressive by nature, and when two cockroaches are put together, they open their sharp teeth and tear together. Whenever this happens, my friends and I gather around, clenching our fists and widening our eyes to cheer for our own cockroaches; when we see our own cockroaches defeat each other, we will have a smile on our faces. Compared with the many entertainment projects for children now, how cheap and almost no cost was to "play" at that time, and the happiness that could be enjoyed was the same...

In addition to catching clams, we are also very interested in dragonflies and knowledge. Summer was coming, and my friends and I braved the sweltering heat, with wet towels on our heads and long sticky poles in our hands, looking in the grass under the trees. Dragonfly is compound eyes, good vision, touch is also very smart, a little movement it will fly away. So after discovering, slowly approach it, gently stick its wings with a sticky rod, remove it and clip it in your hand until it is fully loaded. Later, when I heard that dragonflies are beneficial insects that like to eat mosquitoes, I stopped sticking to dragonflies.

At the turn of summer and autumn this year, I saw a dragonfly in the park and still unconsciously went to see it. I think this dragonfly is certainly not a feathered one of the year, but decades later, I still appreciate it. It flapped its wings and blew up my ethereal thoughts...

Knowing the cry, it seems to have become the "standard" in summer. When I was a child in the summer, I used to hold up sticky poles with my friends and listen to sounds under the trees. Knowing that the movement is agile, it takes a careful heart to stick to it. After sticking to the knowledge, I took it in my hand and listened to it constantly chirping, which was very proud. Later, I learned that from eggs to larvae, I had to "boil" in the soil for four or five years, and finally I could drill out of the soil one summer, climb up the tree, and molt into a call-calling knowledge. But it only lived in the sun for a month or so. It releases the energy accumulated over the years in dozens of days. The ancients believed that cicadas survive by eating dew and are very tall. The Tang Dynasty poet Yu Shinan wrote a poem about cicadas: "Drink the dew and flow out of the tong." To be loud and far away is not to take advantage of the autumn wind. The poem praises the purity and lofty ambition of the cicada. This made me awe-inspired by the cicadas. Since then, I've thrown away the sticky rod. Now that I think about it, the moment I threw away the sticky rod, I had already said goodbye to my childhood.

To this day, I am still grateful to those lovely little beings. They accompanied me all the way during the famine years, giving me joy at the same time, but also introducing me step by step into nature, allowing me to perceive the charm of life.

Author: Zhang Jingyun

Source: Tonight's newspaper