Picking up manure (the past is like smoke)

In the seventies and eighties, the grassroots structure of society was the people's commune, the production brigade, and the production team, that is, the three-level ownership, and the team as the basis. Our brigade consists of four natural villages, each of which has several production teams. At that time, the land was barren, the crop harvest was low, and the average yield of wheat per mu was two or three hundred catties.

As the saying goes: A crop and a flower depend on dung, and planting without dung is tantamount to fooling around. In order to increase grain production, all production teams regard manure accumulation as an important task. As soon as spring begins, they begin to make manure and accumulate fertilizer in full swing, organize male laborers, and transport the wall soil and dry pit mud of collapsed houses to the open space at the head of the village by land truck, mix them with wheat oranges and wheat bran that moldy cattle do not eat, pile them into a round pond or square pond more than one meter high, pour pig manure and cow dung, soak and ferment them with water. At the same time, the production team leader arranged two honest people who were slightly older and not afraid of dirty smell, holding scales and notebooks every morning, pulling the modified ammonia bucket with a ground row truck, collecting urine from door to door, and then pouring it into the fermentation tank. On hot days, the grass is crushed and thrown into the pool. After a little longer in the sun, the fermentation tank stinks, flies fly, and the pungent stench can be smelled from afar. The students in the village basically walk around to and from school.

When I was in the third or fourth grade, I was about 10 years old, and I was in the school of the main brigade (now called the administrative village). Our village is separated from the school by a river, and if you don't wade across the river, you need to walk three or four miles, and the wading water is only about two miles. At that time, there was morning reading in the morning, three times a day, walking more than ten miles a day, always walking and running on the way back and forth, and the rain and snow did not stop.

I don't know who came up with the idea to let the students pick up the manure in the morning and hand it over to the school for a penny and a pound, and a production team sent someone to collect it. In this way, reading in the morning has an additional task of picking up dung.

As a student, who can not listen to the things arranged by the teacher, let alone earn money, the students are very happy. After telling my parents after school, my father found me a broken dung basket, the outside of the dung basket was sewn with a layer of plastic sheeting, and the bottom was padded with cardboard. At the same time, my father also found a wrench for me, which was equipped with tools to pick up dung.

At that time, I often exchanged eggs for pencils and notebooks, and money was very valuable. My classmates and I were not so much interested in picking up manure as we were in money. Since the school arranged this beautiful event, I got up before dawn every morning, carried a dung basket to pick up dung, picked up a circle of dung, and then carried it to school. At the designated place, there are two people responsible for collecting manure, one is responsible for weighing and the other is responsible for recording. After weighing, pour out the dung, weigh the empty dung basket again, calculate the net weight, and then put the dung basket in the designated position and row it, and then enter the classroom to read in the morning. After school, I went home with an empty dung basket. In order to pick up more manure, it is still early on Sunday morning, so in general, Monday is the most manure.

In the first few days, I didn't know where there was dung, I always looked for it aimlessly, and I didn't pick up much dung; later I found that there was more manure around the firewood and straw stacks and collapsed houses, and the free-range pigs and dogs had a habit of pulling here today and pulling here tomorrow. But the good times didn't last long, and the students all knew where there was a lot of dung, sometimes they got up earlier than me, and often picked up the dung, and sometimes they couldn't pick up the dung, and many times they only picked up half a catty of dung a day.

Picking up manure is also a good season. I think it's better to pick up manure in winter, although the weather is cold, just get up in the morning, the north wind blows, shivering with cold, ears and face like a knife, so that there are chilblains, but animal feces are also frozen into a piece, with a hook of a wrench, you can hook into the dung basket, the key is not very smelly. It's not so good on a hot day, the smell of feces is unbearable, especially the thin, it stinks so badly that it makes people sick to their stomachs when they see it, but when they think that it can be sold for money, they endure the smell, bury it with soil first, and then use a wrench to put it into the dung basket.

Although it is better to pick up manure in winter, there are exceptions to everything, I don't know when I will encounter the shit that has just been pulled, the weather is cold, the frozen soil cannot be planed, and I can't bury it with soil, and I don't want to give up, so I only have to find some dead grass and broken leaves nearby to cover it, and then pick it up into the dung basket in one go.

Collecting manure is hard, but it's also fun. Because I always want to make more money, buy some delicious food, pencils, notebooks, etc. Every day I pick up a few catties of dung, I write them down in a notebook, and I often add up how many catties I have in total and how much I can sell it. Sometimes before going to bed, I still think about the patterns of different denominations of RMB, thinking about what to buy with money, the more I think about it, the happier I become, the more I think about it, the more I secretly make up my mind that I must get up early tomorrow, and unconsciously enter a sweet dreamland.

I don't know if it was because there were too many people to pick up dung, or for other reasons, there was a few days when I got up very early and walked around the village, but there was no gain, and I didn't want to go to school with an empty dung basket, so in order to sell more money, I started a bad idea, first turned home, took advantage of the parents' inattention, hurriedly jumped into the pigsty, put pig manure with a shovel and pestle, put it in the dung basket, or went to the corner of the sheepfold to pick up some sheep feces and eggs, and then carried them to school. Although this kind of clever practice is only two or three times, it is particularly impressive.

Winter goes to spring, cold comes and summer. In less than half a year, I collected more than 120 catties of dung, and I could earn more than two cents a piece, which was a big number in the mid-to-late seventies. But compared with the students who picked up 1780 pounds, there is still a certain gap.

One afternoon, I heard that the money for collecting dung was going to be distributed, and the students all entered the classroom early, and the young and beautiful female homeroom teacher, smiling, holding a heavy schoolbag in one hand and a notebook in the other, walked up to the podium and put it on the lecture desk, the schoolbag contained tickets and coins, bulging, about half a schoolbag. The students were staring intently at their school bags and couldn't wait for the money to be distributed. Whoever the teacher reads his name will go to the podium to receive it, and at the same time announce the number of catties and money. When the teacher read my name, my heart was pounding, and I felt that my long-awaited wish had finally come true, so I hurriedly got up, walked briskly to the podium, took the money from the teacher's hand, and counted it before putting it in my pocket. On the way out of school, don't mention the joy, walking and jumping, and afraid that the money in his pocket would fall out, he ran while pulling one hand into his pocket and covering it, and when he returned home, his palms were sweaty.

With money, I didn't sleep well all night, and I always thought about spending it, and this money really came in handy. The next day, I heard that there was a family in the village who wanted to sell the long-haired rabbits that had just come out of the nest, so I invited a few classmates to their home, and the hostess was at home. In order to reproduce, after bargaining, I spent nine cents to buy a female one, with long ears, pure white hair, and red eyes, which is very cute. On the way home, one hand gently grabbed the rabbit's ears, and the other hand supported the rabbit's body, lest it be crowded, and carefully carried it home. This rabbit later became an important source of income for me to buy pencils and notebooks. After that, he spent a dime at a small vendor and bought a handful of ripe peanuts in the shell, which was regarded as a treat for himself. The remaining two cents and more than two cents bought pencils and notebooks one after another.

Since cashing in the RMB, I am more enthusiastic and motivated, and seeing dung is as kind as seeing money. However, such a good life was not very long, and in less than two years, for some unknown reason, the students' excrement was stopped. Although I no longer have to think about getting up early to pick up manure, I have also lost a good opportunity to make money.

Su Shiyun: The silt gives birth to lotus flowers, and the dung soil produces mushrooms. I was too young to have such a Yaxing, and I couldn't write poems and praises, but I knew that dung could buy money.

Decades have passed in a blink of an eye, and Qingsi has become gray hair, and she is getting old. I often think of picking up dung when I was a child, and I think of that happy time, when the scenes of picking up dung linger in my mind like silk, as if it happened yesterday. Admittedly, it was an unforgettable time in my life.

Author: Creekside Grass