Text: Jiang Wei
Figure: From the network
Living in the countryside, there are always unexpected troubles. At ten o'clock last night, everything was packed up and the children went to sleep. Half asleep and half awake, the eldest daughter suddenly exclaimed: "Mom, hurry up, turn on the light, something has fallen." ”
I climbed up, scrambled to touch the mobile phone at the head of the bed, and panicked to unlock and open the flashlight, the process was not smooth, I spent a thousand dollars to buy the mobile phone, used for several years, often stuck, sometimes crashed, fortunately after dozens of seconds, or turned on the flashlight.
I climbed to where my eldest daughter slept, took a picture with a flashlight, and found a small earthworm, covered in dust, struggling hard. My heart pounded, I turned and took a piece of paper from my daughters' desk, forced my nausea, forced myself to endure fear, grabbed it, opened the door, threw it into the big trash can in the yard, and turned back to the bedroom.
At this time, the eldest daughter curled up in the corner of the bed in fear and asked me in a trembling voice: "Did you throw it away?" I pretended to calmly reply to her: "Throw it away, it's okay, sleep!" She said, "I don't dare sleep here, can we change seats?" "Well, well, pay attention, don't fall out of bed in the middle of the night."
Swapped places with her, she slept on the outermost side of the bed, I slept near the window, and my sister slept quietly among us. After tossing and turning for a long time, it was difficult to sleep, remembering that when I opened the window a few days ago to breathe, I found that there were many ants forming a line on the window sill.
I looked down the line of ants and was surprised to see the carcass of a squeezed gecko hanging in a gap in a wooden window frame, presumably because the window was closed the night before, squeezed to death, and then the ants smelled meat and came all the way. I poked off the gecko's carcass with a stick and sprayed the surrounding windowsills to drive away the ants.
Born in the countryside, the two girls were timid from childhood, afraid of the dark, afraid of dogs, afraid of cats, afraid of all kinds of bugs, geckos, spiders, grasshoppers, bean worms, caterpillars... In short, all kinds of fear. These small creatures, which are common in the countryside in the summer, will make them scream for half a day whenever they appear in a corner of the house.
Every night before going to the bathroom at home to take a shower, they would stare wide-eyed, deliberately looking for a gecko on the window to see if there was a gecko lying on the window, and if there was, they would scream and run away, and I would let my husband take the paper sticking to the fly and stick the gecko.
More times, my husband was overwhelmed, calling our mothers and wives cowards, and teasing me that the woman in my daily life would be scared so ungracefully by a gecko. After a long time, I didn't bother to ask him for help again, and I drove the gecko away with a stick.
But looking at the frightened little eyes of my daughters, I was very distressed and helpless, blaming myself for my incompetence and not being able to give my children a better living environment, so that they are full of fear and anxiety every day or night today. The only thing I could do was to try to clean up my house as much as possible, but occasionally there were still some "little clever ghosts" in the corner.
But this is the first time we've experienced a live earthworm falling out of bed like last night. Maybe the window behind the house is the vegetable garden, the day before yesterday I just turned over the soil to sow seeds, this earthworm took the opportunity to run out, several times dying struggle, crawled into the window along the gap into the house.
In the morning, on the way to send her eldest daughter to school, she told her all the way not to tell her sister about the earthworms that fell on the bed last night, otherwise it would leave a shadow on her heart.
Isn't there a shadow in my heart with my eldest daughter? Alas, the days of being plagued by insects in the countryside, hurry up and spend it!