Great Plains (373)|Moving Essay (1)

Moving Essay (1)

Text/Liu Guixiang

I've moved many times, and each one has left a deep mark on the times.

In 1992, when I first stepped onto the pulpit, I taught at Yongfeng Middle School, which was 15 miles away from my home. When I first reported for duty, the leader in charge told me to move into a two-room dormitory on the west side of the school. Can one person stay in two rooms? I couldn't help but rejoice. When I rushed to the dormitory under the guidance of my colleague who had reported before me, I was instantly dumbfounded. What two mud houses they were! Not only is it low, but it is also dilapidated, and the skin of the exterior wall is peeling off in large pieces, like an old man who has been through vicissitudes and is in his old age, huddled alone in a corner of the campus. Pushing open the cracked wooden door, I saw dust and debris all over the floor, and when I coughed, there seemed to be dirt falling from the roof. To be honest, this kind of dilapidated and old mud house is rare in the countryside, but I didn't expect it to become a shelter for me after teaching. Standing in a room full of dirt, my heart couldn't help but be covered with a layer of dust, and the depression and loss in my heart were self-evident, and even a little desolate. There was no way, the school had a rule that housing was arranged on a first-come, first-served basis, and I had to move into my dilapidated new home with all kinds of helplessness when I reported late.

Later, I heard from a colleague that the reason why the faculty dormitory of the school is so tight is because the school has more than 10 teachers and college students at once, which is the largest number of students in the school. If it weren't for the Township Education Committee (then known as the "Education Group", whose office was located in Yongfeng Middle School) to transfer all the teachers with primary secondary school education who had previously taught in middle schools to primary schools, there would be no place for us at all, and I am afraid that there would not even be enough mud houses to live in. However, a colleague told me that the staff dormitory is being expanded to the east of the school, and that the accommodation should be improved in the future. Hearing this, I felt a little relieved. After that, I decided to face up to reality, accept the status quo, and start renovating my humble room.

I bought a few pretty pieces of pink floral cotton from the market and nailed them to the dirty wall around the bed. He also brought a mosquito net from his home and hung it above the bed, and sewed a piece of flower cloth with a delicate pattern on the top of the mosquito net to prevent the dust from falling onto the bed. Then I covered the broken desks that were distributed by the school with a brand new blue floral cloth. The corners of the house were cleaned, and the dilapidated wooden lattice windows were replaced with brand new white plastic sheeting. After some renovation and decoration, the room is much cleaner and brighter. The foul and rotten smell of the original house gradually receded, and the smell of fresh home made my heart clearer. In the evening, sitting at the desk and looking around at the newly renovated bedroom, I couldn't help but whisper Liu Yuxi's "Burrow Ming": "...... Si is a burrow, but Wu Dexin ...... Confucius: What's ugly? From then on, I called my humble dormitory "The Burrow".

Subsequently, I added some necessary daily necessities to the kitchen, but cooking became a big problem. In those days, there were no gas stoves, no rice cookers, and no stoves in the dormitories for single workers. Fortunately in winter, everyone can use the coal stove issued by the school to make a fire for cooking, but the amount of coal allocated is only enough for winter use, and in other seasons, teachers can only use electric stoves to boil water for cooking. However, the power of the electric stove is too large, and when it comes to meals, multiple electric stoves are used at the same time, and the school's transformer will not be able to withstand it, and there will be many tripping and power outages. As a result, teachers were forbidden to use electric stoves. In addition, the electric stove is not safe to use, and I have been electrocuted by the iron handle of the stir-fry spoon when the electric stove leaked electricity. Later, it was the third brother who sent his kerosene stove, and I said goodbye to this situation of being afraid of cooking.

Boiling water in the humble room has also become a problem. At that time, there were no electric kettles, so there was a kind of water boiling tool called "hot fast" on the stage of life. When using "Hot Fast" boiling water, you need to fill the thermos with cold water first, then insert the end of the "Hot Fast" with a heating wire into the bottle, and finally plug the end with the plug into the power supply. "Heat fast" power is not small, after a few minutes will boil the water in the thermos, but when boiling water, people should keep an eye on the side, when the water is boiling, immediately unplug and take out the "hot fast", otherwise, it will be heated for a long time, the water in the bottle will be boiled dry and the "hot fast" will be burned.

One day, after dinner, I had just boiled the water, and a colleague called me outside the door, so I stood at the door and chatted with her, chatting and chatting, and the two went to another colleague's house together, completely forgetting about boiling water. When I returned to the dormitory in the evening, I suddenly remembered that I hurriedly cut off the power and unplugged the "hot fast". As a result, the water in the thermos was almost dry, and the lower half of the "hot fast" bottle was also reduced to ashes in the bottle, but fortunately there was no circuit fire. Thinking about it now, life in the Humble Room was really hard, but the living conditions of the teachers at that time were probably like this, and there was nothing to complain about.

In front of the burrow, there is a vacant vegetable patch, which has been reclaimed by the old teachers who used to live here. When spring came, I had never grown vegetables before, let alone done farm work, so I decided to give it a try. I brought the most viable bean seeds from my home, asked my family about how to grow them in advance, and planted a large plot of beans. In my spare time, I follow the example of an old teacher and carefully manage the vegetable garden. Soon, small shoots seemed to break through the soil overnight. This group of cute little students ordered me to be surprised and delighted, happy that I had won the first battle of vegetable planting, and surprised by the tenacious vitality of the seeds. This life force deeply shook and stirred my heart.

Under the guidance of an old teacher who has experience in growing vegetables, I used wooden sticks to build a support for the grown carob seedlings. After that, the carob seedlings grow vigorously. After a while, as I wished, tender beans began to grow on the carob seedlings. Soon, each seedling rack was hung with long beans, which were more gratifying than the growth of beans in the old teacher's vegetable garden, which could not help but attract the teachers to stop and visit. A young colleague couldn't help but joke: "The little woman who is not diligent and does not distinguish between grains has become a master of vegetable planting!" "Indeed, the carob seedlings seemed to favor me extraordinarily, each with its long vines sticking out and crawling all over the racks. They worked hard to grow, and after picking one stubble, the fat beans soon grew a new stubble, and I couldn't eat them all, so I beckoned my colleagues to go to the vegetable garden to pick them together. The green bean orchard in front of the humble house not only brought me the joy of a good harvest, but also added vitality and fun to the humble humble house.

Half a year later, an older female colleague got married and moved into the school's newly built dual-staff dormitory, and the school informed me to move into the room vacated by the female colleague. So, I said goodbye to the Burrow, to my garden.

Although the new dormitory has only one room, it is more spacious than other single-staff dormitories in the same row. It is said that this large single room was built later than the houses in the same row, and at that time, in order to increase the living area, it was lengthened by two meters in front, so it was more comfortable to live in. I joked with my colleague who entered the school in the same year, "You're coming from behind!" I said, "I have come to this end, and I will no longer have to eat dirt in the burrow." "Later, in a conversation with a colleague, I learned that before I moved into the Burrow, there was another female colleague who had lived there, and there were snakes crawling in the house, and they didn't tell me because they were afraid of me. It was definitely a terrifying thing, and if I had known before, I would have been terrified day and night.

Moving into a new home and feeling better. So, I moved the tape recorder from home into my new dormitory. Although this recorder has been used for many years, the playback effect is still good. Since then, there has been a lot of music in my dormitory. At that time, the most played songs were the songs of the "Four Heavenly Kings", as well as Fei Xiang's "Hometown Clouds", Qi Qin's "About Winter", Ye Qianwen's "Rolling Red Dust", etc., which I really never got tired of listening to. When I'm not in class, I often sing along with a female colleague who likes to sing in my dormitory with a tape recorder. These popular songs have brought a lot of joy to our extracurricular life. Of course, Richard. Clayderman's piano pieces "Autumn Whispers", "To Alice" and "Destiny", violin concerto "Liang Zhu", and erhu solo "Erquan Reflecting the Moon" are also my favorites. I still have more than 30 tape tapes that brought me pleasure and enjoyment, and it contains not only beautiful music, but also unforgettable youth memories of a generation.

The new dormitory has a row of more than a dozen rooms, all of which are occupied by single colleagues. When summer comes, the room is relatively hot, and at dinner, everyone likes to bring out the food, get together, and talk while eating. At this time, an extremely hilarious scene often happens.

At the gate of the school lived a teacher surnamed Zhang, thirty-five or sixteen years old, who always spoke and acted slowly. Mr. Zhang's wife opened a commissary at the entrance of the school, and every time there was a meal, Mr. Zhang would walk back to the commissary from the office to eat. When he passed by our dormitory and saw everyone gathered for dinner, he came over with a smile and said seriously: "It rained heavily that day, and the toilet in our school was flooded." Ouch, those maggots crawled out, and my feet were full of maggots, and when I squeezed, ......the female teachers "ahh Teacher Zhang took square steps and went to eat satisfied. After being "disgusted" a few times, when everyone was eating, whenever they saw Teacher Zhang coming with a smile on his face, they would stand up with the bowl, laugh, and disperse in a hurry. Mr. Zhang's vivid "scene reproduction" once became a joke after dinner. In fact, everyone knows that it is a fabrication by the humorous teacher Zhang. But every time I see Mr. Zhang's chubby, cute and cute smiling face, I still can't help but think of maggots squeezed out of his feet, because in those days, it was not uncommon to see maggots crawling all over the ground in public toilets.

A year later, the new rows of staff dormitories to the east of the school were fully completed. In the order of entering the school, several colleagues in the same row as me were the first to move into the new single-staff dormitory. I didn't move into the new dormitory until another six months later, which was vacated by a colleague who had been transferred, and the room I vacated was assigned to a later teacher. This kind of seniority division system is still relatively fair and reasonable, so the teachers have no complaints when they move the house, and some are just excited to move into a new home.

The design of the newly built single-worker dormitory is more reasonable, dividing a large room into two rooms, one large and one small, and the small room on the north side can be used as a kitchen, so that the smoke will not be floating all over the house when stir-frying. After moving into the new dormitory, I immediately purchased a gas stove that was not widely used at the time, and started a new life of stir-frying and cooking with gas. The new dormitory has been cleaned up and tidied by me, and I feel refreshed to live in it. Unfortunately, a large open space in front of the dormitory is filled with construction waste, and there are no trees or people growing vegetables, which makes people feel a little empty and desolate, which is somewhat inconsistent with the new dormitory area. Why not plant some flowers and beautify the environment? It occurred to me on a whim. Flowers were still rare on campus at that time, with only a few hollyhocks scattered in the corners of the campus. So, I decided to plant flowers in front of my dorm room. What is good to plant? Let's plant the moon season. Yueji is the city flower of Binzhou City, which is not only beautiful, but also overflowing with floral fragrance and refreshing. Its style of "having a cold plum and staying in the evening festival, but also with the peach and plum bucket" makes me particularly admire. There is also the canna with "wet red makeup with rain and green sleeves in the wind", which deeply amazed me when I first saw it. I had made up my mind, and after much inquiry, I finally bought a moon tree and a canna seedling at the market, and carefully planted them on both sides of my house. However, when digging the pit, it was found that the excavated soil was mixed with some white lime, which should be the waste of building the house. Everyone thinks that it is difficult to grow flowers in this kind of soil, and I can't help but worry.

The first thing I do when I open the door every morning is to check the condition of the two flowers, to see if their leaves are wilting, and I am really worried that their roots will be burned by the lime. But what is surprising is that the two flowers not only survived tenaciously, but also grew buds one after another when the flowering period came, and then bloomed delicate flowers. The canna stands on the right side of the door, the leaves are green and fat, and the flowers are bright red and gorgeous, which is particularly lovely. The seven or eight pink moon flowers blooming on the left side of the door exude a rich fragrance, which can be smelled from a long distance, attracting people's admiration. This really responds to the sentence "Talented people appreciate each other when they see each other, and the world is this flower." "I love these two flowers even more and take good care of them. I think that flowers that bloom so passionately in such inferior soil are truly a wonder among flowers. At that time, I even thought of the Hundred Flowers Fairy in "The Story of Autumn Weng Meets Immortals", could it be that the flower fairy patronized my new home? These two "flower fairies" have spent a very happy life with me.

Later, when I was about to be transferred out of school and moved to another country due to marriage, an old teacher transplanted two flowers in front of his house with my consent. At that time, looking at the two "flower fairies" that were poached, my heart suddenly emptied, and a kind of reluctance and sadness instantly surged into my heart.

Nowadays, every time I read Jiang Jie's poem "A Cut of Plums", I can't help but think of the days when I planted flowers in Yongfeng Middle School. It is true that "the streamer is easy to throw people away", but whether it is the wind fluttering, or the rain is Xiaoxiao, whether it is a red cherry or a green plantain, what I always miss is my fragrant moon season and delicate canna.

More than three years of campus life and the experience of moving three times have left too many youthful imprints. Although those old times are long gone, those unconnected, leisurely and leisurely youth years have always been the most innocent and beautiful memories.

About author:Liu Guixiang is a teacher in Zhanhua District, Binzhou City, Shandong Province, and a member of the Shandong Writing Society.