Intoxicating red sorghum

□ Zhou Hanbing

The sorghum is ripe, red and lustrous, and the sorghum is good-looking.

Just a few days after The Autumn Festival, I encountered a long-lost red sorghum in a remote mountain bay in my hometown, which spread all over the mountains. Suddenly, I saw these crops that were almost extinct, and they were one after another. I was pleasantly surprised and felt incredibly kind.

Sowing and harvesting sorghum was once an indispensable agricultural task in the countryside. Every year after the sting, the villagers will take out the seeds, turn the soil into the box, and prepare the seedlings. After the seeds are planted, about thirty-four days later, the transplanting begins.

What I remember vividly is that every household had to plant sorghum. Sorghum does not choose the soil of the field, and prefers the thin soil of the mountains, the villagers always plant sorghum on the relatively poor land, in front of the house, behind the house, on the edge of the field, even if there are only three or five trees.

These thick, simple sorghum are just as real as the villagers who run them. Regardless of the quality of the land, as long as they are planted, they will grow, blossom and bear fruit without regret, and finally give the villagers a return, without hesitation to dedicate their heavy fruits.

Sorghum is red, and the countryside becomes a beautiful scenery. The red sorghum spikes, like a red lantern, like a burning torch, like a touch of light that burns red in the sky. When the mountain wind comes, it sways with the wind and flutters out intoxicating beauty.

Villagers cut sorghum ears with scythes, carry them back with their backs or baskets, carry them home, and place them neatly in the courtyard dam to dry, or tie them into bamboo poles hanging under the eaves. These scattered sorghum ears are gathered together, becoming more and more red under the sun's scorching, and suddenly red in the sunbathe dam and under the eaves, becoming the most gorgeous scenery of the autumn farmhouse. When the grain is slightly loosened, the villagers use the leisure time at noon and evening to shed the sorghum grains and shell them into sorghum rice. This pearl of sorghum rice is full of ruddy. Pick up and smell carefully, with a faint fragrance, which is a unique fragrance brewed by rain and dew nourishment and sweat.

Sorghum rice is a good raw material for brewing, and most villagers take sorghum rice to the market to sell it and exchange it for some pocket money. But my mother was reluctant to sell them all, and always had to stay some, change her tricks to make some food for people, make mash, kang cakes, and make tangyuan.

Sorghum mash is more powerful than glutinous rice mash. It can be directly steamed with freshly shed wet sorghum rice, or soaked in dry sorghum rice for one night and then steamed until the rice grains bloom, then washed with clean water, or scattered with water, mixed into the koji, put into a basin, sealed in a jar, wrapped in cotton wool and old clothes, fermented for two to three days, and the fragrant mash is finished. A jar of mash, before and after has to melt for several days, threshing, steaming, making, waiting... My mother used her patience to brew a "unique" meal for us. This mellow aroma of mash, this intoxicating warmth, like old wine, is becoming more and more intense, unforgettable in this life.

Kang cakes, making tangyuan, it is much simpler, just need to grind the dried sorghum rice into powder, mix with water to the right time. This sorghum cake and tangyuan are a bit astringent to eat, but in that era of material scarcity, it was also a rare delicacy.

The threshed ears cannot be discarded, and are used to tie a broom after being sorted. Sorghum brooms are now almost out of people's lives, and there are only sporadic sales in some rural areas, and many young people who grew up in the city may not have heard of it. But for a long time, sorghum broom was an essential cleaning tool for every household in the countryside, economical and practical, and it looked beautiful.

The red sorghum that spread over the mountains in front of me was dazzling and intoxicatingly red under the reflection of the sun. Although this improved sorghum is far less tall than before, only more than a meter tall, most of the heavy sorghum ears do not "smile and bend", but still make me intoxicated. Standing tall, looking at the spikes "spreading red all over the mountain", listening to the rustling sound of the leaves fluttering with the wind, my heart was flying.

This red sorghum field tells the changes of the hometown and flows the blood of the hometown.

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