No one could have imagined that his father would die so quickly, and his mother, sister, brother, and neighbors all thought that he had left early. Much earlier, so that his children could not accept it. But Father, he seems to have understood a truth since the first day of the disease, that is, for normal people, death is standing somewhere in front of your life, waiting for you to approach it day by day, step by step, and when you reach in front of it, it can reach out to you, and then it will carry you away. But for a sick person, it is not only that you are walking towards death day by day, step by step, but that death is also coming to you from the opposite side, day by day, step by step. Then your life will be much shorter.
My father, he must have understood this very early on. Therefore, as a farmer and a father, he is particularly urgent to do his best to complete and end what he thinks a peasant father should fulfill in the world.
So, what should a farmer's father do in the world? In this regard, my father, like all the peasants of the North, and all the men of the North, have understood in their hearts and minds since the day they became fathers that their greatest and most solemn duty is to build a few houses for their sons, to prepare a set of dowries for their daughters, and to witness their children marry and start a family. This is the purpose, or even the only purpose, of almost all peasant fathers.
I think that because of his illness, my father saw this purpose more clearly, more intensely, and more simply: that of the many things that he thought he had to do during his lifetime, the most urgent was the marriage of his children.
To say, whether it is now or in the past, my father's illness is not an emergency, terminal illness——— or asthma that makes people wait for immediate anxiety. However, asthma is a common chronic condition that can grow from small to large, from mild to severe, and eventually to incurable cor pulmonale. In the countryside and in the remote mountainous areas, this disease is almost a must-have disease for the elderly, and it is almost commonplace for peasants who die of this disease because they are over 50 years old because they are tired and suffer from colds and frequent colds when they are young, and it is almost common for peasants to die because of this disease.
Unlike others, my father was not yet thirty years old when he got this disease. Relying on his age and physical permission, he didn't take the disease too seriously, and when he was seriously ill, he borrowed money to ask for a few pills, and when he was mild, he still worked endlessly. After more than ten years of suffering, day by day, month by month, a vicious circle, and finally when I was less than 50 years old, I had an attack every winter, just like having asthma at the age of 70. Because of this, he wanted to rebuild the house in a hurry.
In order to build a house, my father rarely added new clothes every year; In order to build a house, my father planted paulownia and poplar trees in all the places where trees could be planted in front of and behind the house. In winter, the sapling is smeared with white ash and wrapped with straw to keep it warm for the winter. When spring came, he removed the straw and planted a circle of jujube thorns around the little tree to prevent the hot hands of the children from touching the tree. My father took care of the little trees like a child who loved him, and after a few years or more, when they reached middle age and old age, they became the purlins on my house.
After all seven of my family's houses were tiled, my father was not the first villager to build tiled houses, but he was the first to leave the family without straw houses, including chicken coops and pigsties. Moreover, in the courtyard of our house, when his asthma had obviously worsened, my father still wore a warm gauze mask to protect against the cold, pulled a cart, and led our brothers and sisters to wade through the cold Yi River, which had been frozen in ice, dozens of meters wide, to a white stream ditch more than ten miles away to look for two or three finger thick red flake stones, and pulled them back to cover the yard, paving the air duct path leading to the toilet and the pigsty, so that the two-and-a-half part of the house had no place to see the soil.
Every rainy day, the streets and other houses are muddy everywhere, but our house is clean and clean. In that kind of weather, our yard was always full of village people and neighbors, who were playing cards and laughing in the courtyard and house where there was no mud and sand, telling stories, discussing fate, birth, old age, sickness and death, and taking our house and the lives of the village people besieged in that house as an example of village architecture and life.
In fact, his father's illness was caused by the fatigue of his youth, and it was he who began to build a house for his children to start a family. I was the youngest of my siblings, and in October 1984 I got married in the last two tiled houses that were built, and my father's last wish was fulfilled. So, it wasn't long before he left us alone and went to another realm, looking for another kind of peace and quiet.