Text: 辰萧
When my father returned to the county seat from the countryside, he couldn't help but sigh softly when he talked about the old house, saying that it had been uninhabited for a long time, and the wooden planks in the attic of the old house were about to be hollowed out by termites.
Speaking of attics, think about the number of times I've been to the attic after I got married, I've probably been to the attic once or twice. And the only time or twice did I suddenly go up to the attic when I wanted to dig through the old photos stored in the small wooden box.
It's not that I hate my attic, it's that the old attic is really empty. Except for the small wooden box that accompanied his mother's marriage, even the pots and jars that had been placed in the attic had already been moved into the new house by his mother.
If the ladder to the attic could be as convenient as the stairs of today's commercial houses, maybe I would have made a few more trips to the attic, but my attic still uses the single-frame wooden ladder that has worn out over decades and is almost antique. When I was younger, I climbed upstairs and downstairs a few times a day, and it was as simple as monkeys scurrying up and down trees. Now, I haven't been in the attic for more than 20 years, and once in a while I climb it again, my feet are really a little shaky, making people feel that I have lived in the attic for a year in vain when I was young.
Originally, the attic was inhabited. According to the habits of the people in the village, most people who have an attic only store the old things that they are not in a hurry to use on weekdays in the attic, or store all kinds of New Year's goods in the attic when the New Year is approaching. Such as those ploughs and rakes, as well as peanuts, saltwater beans, and sunflower boys. Oh, and it's probably the rice candy that almost every house has to store to entertain guests during the Spring Festival.
Of course, my attic also stores these things, but that's not the main function of my loft. Because of the poverty of the family and the small house, after my parents were born one after another, the only small room of less than ten square meters could not fit us down, so my mother had to clean up the attic, and then put an old-fashioned wooden bed in the attic. After that, my father took my sister and me to live in the attic, and the small room downstairs became a sleeping space for my mother and two younger brothers.
Seeing this, you may ask, since the room under the attic is so small, how can there be people living in the attic after putting so many clutter? Yes, the room is small, but the space in the attic is much larger than the double space of the room under the attic. Because under the attic, in addition to the small room, there is a hall shared with my uncle, and a long narrow passage shared by my family and my uncle's family. In fact, to put it bluntly, this house with an attic is simply owned by our family and my uncle's family. It's just that the originally larger house was divided into two parts, one belonging to my uncle's family and the other to our family. The part that belonged to my uncle's house was the more upright two rooms and the attic above the room, and the other part belonged to our house, with a room and half a hall and half an aisle, and an attic of the same size as my uncle's house.
For as long as I can remember, my sister and I have lived in the attic. When we were younger, my father and I lived together. When he was older, his mother added a wooden bed to the attic, and his two younger brothers moved to live in the attic, and my father naturally returned to the small room under the attic to live with his mother.
Later, when my two younger brothers had grown to the same height as my sister and I, they were embarrassed to spend the night in a house in the village with a relaxed room, and the attic became my sister's private domain. For a long time, some old men in the village saw that my sister and I liked to call us young ladies who lived on the embroidery floor, and we were so embarrassed that we were very inferior.
It wasn't until my sister and I got married that my two younger brothers went back to living in our attic.
In 1995, I saw that the eldest brother had reached the age when a rural guy should marry a daughter-in-law. But the attic could not accommodate the new daughter-in-law, and in desperation, the mother had to borrow money from relatives and friends, and after adjusting a vacant lot next to the attic with several families in common, she invited a stonemason to start building a new house in the autumn of that year.
A year later, when the new two-story building was completed, only my father and mother were the only ones who actually moved into the new home. At that time, when the foundation of the new house had just been laid, the eldest brother enlisted in the army and became a recruit who had to serve in the army for three years. The younger brother also failed to enter high school after the high school entrance examination, and followed some young students in the village to work in other places.
As a result, a huge new house also looks empty. Because there was no longer a need to live in the attic, my mother called my father to move the wooden bed in the attic into the new house, and the rakes and jars in the attic were also moved into the new house along with the wooden beds. Only the ugly black little wooden box, probably full of my sister and me's old books and some photos from high school, was too heavy, and it was still in the attic.
After I got married, I would go home several times a year during major festivals such as the Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, and Spring Festival, and my sister has been making a living in other places since she got married, and relatively speaking, the number of times she has gone home is only a handful. If it is easy to buy a ticket, you may return home once a year, but if you find it difficult to buy a ticket, you may not be able to return home once in a few years.
After all, I don't need to go to the attic anymore, and naturally, every time I go home, I almost don't go back to the attic except to stay in my parents' new house.
Once or twice, I climbed the wooden ladder to the attic again like I did when I was younger, and I really wanted to look through the photos I took at school when I was younger, so as to get rid of the nostalgia of wanting to see the old beauty again.
Later, I took all the pictures from the little wooden box in the attic with me, and I never went to the attic again for all the rest of the rest of my life.
Today, the newly built houses of the old family are empty there, not to mention the old attic. Not only does my family no longer live in the old house, but even my uncle's children have moved out of the old house and are all working in the county to make a living.
Since that year, he went to the army as a soldier, and after changing jobs, the eldest brother was assigned to work in a unit, and then married his daughter-in-law, and then lived with his daughter-in-law in the county's mother-in-law's house. A few years ago, the eldest brother, who had a little more money, bought his own new house in the county seat, so every time he went back to his parents' house, he was like a guest, and he hurried back again.
And the younger brother, not to mention. After more than ten years of work, the total number of days I went home is so many times. Before starting a family, the younger brother worked outside, and after starting a family, the younger brother took his daughter-in-law to work outside. Today, the younger brother's children are all five years old, but the younger brother and sister-in-law are still working outside, and the children have been handed over to their mothers to take care of them from the moment they were born.
Last year, in order to make it easier for my younger brother's children to go to kindergarten, under the persuasion of our brothers and sisters, my father and mother took my younger brother's children to live in the county seat. The family's house was now truly empty in that small remote mountain village.
This summer, my father, who was not too accustomed to staying in the county, said that the county was too hot, so he went back to his hometown in the countryside to live alone for a while. In the end, the old man was more nostalgic, afraid that the old house that had been empty for too many years would fall into disrepair and leak, so his father deliberately climbed up to the attic to take a look, and saw the termites that were eating the floor slabs.
The old house that once sheltered our family from the wind and rain, and the attic where we lived in four of our sisters and brothers, will be like an old man in the twilight who sticks to that small mountain village alone, perhaps except for quietly waiting for the years of spring, summer, autumn and winter, I am afraid it will be difficult to go back to the past.
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