Poplar tree sentiments

Poplar tree sentiments

- Forty-four of my tree

Standing in front of the window, I was amazed at the majesty of these poplar trees in front of me. These poplar trees have grown into a huge green barrier during the time I was not present. Together with the large poplar clusters behind them, my view was obscured, and I could no longer see the long, dragon-like school building a hundred meters away. The two-story small art building, which was originally in front of you, is also hidden in a green curtain, revealing only a corner of the red terrace on the edge of the barrier.

Poplar groves grow on this campus in the north of the country. Forty years ago, I came here to work, and the location of the poplar grove is still a row of old bungalows. Twenty years ago, when I left here and went far away, this wood was only planted, standing in front of my window, and I could see the early morning and dusk of the campus. Now, I am retired, returning from afar to my still-remaining little home in the north of Cyprus, standing in front of the window, in the autumn rain, I can only feel the thick green melody.

Drilling Tianyang, a main trunk grows straight up, and the side branches of the bushes only jump up against the main trunk. This is my stubborn impression of the hometown diamond poplar. These poplars in front of my window do not seem to be drilling Tianyang, but Xinjiang Yang, but it has the tall and majestic shore like Drill Tianyang. Since no one had ever trimmed its side branches, its side branches had grown so thick that they could no longer bear their own weight upright, so it bent. You see, there are now many side branches as thick as an arm, three or five meters long, bent into a large arc of one hundred and eighty degrees. As a result, the poplar that I thought could not form a large canopy also formed a huge canopy with branches and leaves. My home is on five floors, and this tall poplar barrier is already seven or eight stories high!

Autumn rain is pouring and autumn breeze is accustomed. The green screen woven with poplar leaves is quiet and slightly rhythmic in the rain.

Seeing the poplar trees, I remembered my farther home. My hometown is in the countryside of Yongji City, southwest of the mountain. In childhood, villagers responded to the call of the state to plant trees and green the motherland, planting trees on all the roadsides, and the most planted tree species were paulownia and poplar, probably because they were most suitable for the water and soil of their hometown, and they were all fast-growing tree species. Paulownia has a large canopy that shields pedestrians from sunlight. Poplars can grow to more than thirty meters high, although they do not form a large canopy, but the poplars standing upright on both sides of the road are towering into the clouds, and from a distance, the scene is also very spectacular and shocking. The north-south trunk road in the east of our village is a country road blessed with two rows of poplar trees, which leads all the way to the township and the county seat.

Poplar trees carry many of my beautiful teenage memories.

In the spring, we use poplar branches to make whistles. Cut off the young branches of the poplar tree, rub it between your hands, make the bark and the core gradually detach, and then pull out the core and throw it away, leaving the barrel bark in fact, there are two layers, the outside is a relatively brittle white leather layer, and the inside is a more resilient green fibrous layer. We cut the prepared bark tube at both ends, and flattened one end, cutting off the outer skin half a centimeter wide, and the exposed green cortex became a "spring" that could make a sound in the air. At this time, the whistle is made, and the end with the "spring" is placed in the mouth and blown, and the sound comes out. The length of the whistle should be determined according to the thickness of the branches, and the length should be proportional to the thickness. If you like to listen to crisp and sharp trebles, choose branches as thin as wheat straw and cut off about three centimeters in length; if you like to listen to low and thick music, choose finger-thick branches and cut off the length of a handful. In the charming aroma of grass in spring, poplar whistles of different sound qualities rise and fall in the field, and the whole person is flying. In the hot summer, go to the field to cut grass or dig wild vegetables, how can you bear the scorching sun overhead? Fold a few poplar branches, make a hat ring, and wear it on your head, like a warrior disguised to ambush the enemy, both mighty and cool. In autumn, when the poplar branches are long enough and tough enough, the villagers will tie their scythes to the long poles to hook the slender poplar branches, carry them home in bundles, remove the leaves, and weave various utensils with the branches. My brother is an expert in this area, and my family's grain hoards and baskets are woven by my brother with poplar branches. In winter, the roadside trenches are full of dried poplar leaves, and if you want, you can go home in sacks to burn firewood or feed the sheep.

Speaking of weaving baskets with poplar branches, I remembered an interesting thing. When I was in the first grade of junior high school, the county held an exhibition of the works of learners, workers, farmers, and rattan weaving. We were given two visiting indicators for our school, and the school gave these two indicators to our class. Therefore, the class teacher, Mr. Li Fengde, designated me to visit with a girl named Li Qinchan. It was summer, and we each rode a bicycle and drove 20 kilometers to the exhibition hall of the classroom of Hongqi Primary School in the county seat. Forty-seven years later, I really can't remember any exquisite exhibits, only that they are just small objects such as cow cages and baskets. That year, I was twelve years old, and the beautiful girl Li Qinchan was also twelve.

At the age of twelve, I went once along this poplar avenue to the county seat. When I was eighteen, I walked along this avenue to the distant north of Saibei, the city of Datong, where I am now stepping on.

At the west end of the alley in the middle of our village, there are two tall diamond poplars, which have been plunged straight into the sky when I have not left my hometown, and have become a symbol when I look at our village from afar. Standing on the high slope of loess a thousand meters away, looking at our village, the green bushes obscured the houses, and the whole village was like a green ship. The two tall poplars resemble two masts towering over a ship. Until I left my hometown and went to different distant places, what led my thoughts was in addition to my relatives and friends, in addition to the alley, there were these two tall poplar trees.

When I saw the poplar trees, I also remembered the people and things in this ancient city outside the seychelles. In 1979, when I was eighteen, I left my hometown for the first time, crossed the provincial capital taiyuan, and came to study outside Yanmen Pass. Outside the cold and desolate plug, there are really many poplar trees, but most of them are large-leaved poplars with broken branches. When I graduated and came to work at this school, several large-leaved poplar trees on campus were very lush. However, the poplar does not have soft and slender branches, cannot make whistles, and cannot weave utensils. Compared with the hometown of the Diamond Tianyang, I don't know how much worse! Moreover, every spring, the caterpillar-like soft tidbits float all over the garden, and to be honest, I don't like the gray "caterpillar". Fortunately, however, in addition to this not-so-nice poplar, there are also many tall almond, elm and locust trees on campus. The sight of the red apricot branches in the spring gives people hope and warmth like the rustic and warm people here.

At that time, except for a newly built three-story office building, the rest of the campus was a slope-roofed bungalow built in the fifties. Faculty dormitories, student dormitories, classrooms, libraries, canteens, rows and rows of bungalows cover most of the campus.

In the faculty dormitory, there are not only a few of our newly arrived young college students after the Cultural Revolution, but also a few old teachers who are single and separated from each other. Because this school had been separated from one school a few years ago, there were teachers from another school living on campus. The other school was where I interned, so I knew most of the teachers who lived here. There is a small geography teacher named Lei Fuzuo, a native of Jiaocheng County, who seems to be in his sixties, has not yet retired, and always likes to sing small songs when eating in the canteen, and his voice is really good. What I remember most clearly is that he sang "Jiaocheng Mountain", the lyrics are different from the popular, it is original. His song "Hanging a red light in the courtyard, the New Year is really happy" still seems to haunt the ears. There is also a teacher Yang Wenzheng living in the same row of rooms, who is not tall, a Sichuan Leshan person, the leader of the language group, and does not smile. The young people of our generation who grew up during the Cultural Revolution missed a lot of cultural knowledge. Once I read the sentence of "Zhu Zi Jia Xun", "A porridge and a meal are not easy to think about, and it is difficult to think of things with half a thread and half a wisp", and I don't know who Zhu Zi is. I went to consult Teacher Yang, and I said, "Teacher Yang, is the author of "Zhu Zi Family Training" Zhu Xi?" Teacher Yang said in a very heavy Sichuan accent: "It is not Zhu Xi, it is Zhu Bolu, a Qing dynasty scholar." "From then on, I learned that there was also a literati named Zhu Bolu in ancient China. There was also a tall English teacher named Li Wenxi, who did not know where he was, but only heard that he had originally studied Russian and had worked as a translator for Soviet experts in the 1950s. Later, Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, the Soviet Union withdrew the experts, and he came to the school as a Russian teacher. After the cancellation of russian classes, he changed to English. He once humorously showed a russian phrase to our young people: Don't and choke to death! "It makes us laugh. The teacher Lin Yi who lives next to me is a chemistry teacher, a native of Nanjing, with a bad heart but a good heart. Dressing is always very exquisite, love to raise flowers, a pot of blue moon season, a pot of yellow moon season, often moved out and placed outside the window sill to snort the sun, to the lonely campus to add a lot of color. In the row behind us lived a young female math teacher named Shen Xia. She was a teacher at another school and an office colleague at the time of my internship. Later, I was assigned to this school and saw her again. Thirty years old, tall, fair-skinned, a big beauty. It is said that when he was a student, he used to play Tie Mei and was famous here. Her husband, surnamed Dong, is a radio fan and can assemble her own small TV. Once, the collar of my clothes was torn, and I was reluctant to throw it away, so I went to Find Teacher Shen to help me repair it, and Teacher Shen was very happy to help me turn the collar over. Now that I think about it, how inappropriate it is for a single man to find a woman with a husband to mend clothes. However, at that time, people were really very simple! Teacher Shen's husband is from Beijing, and it is said that she later followed her husband back to Beijing.

The above few old predecessors should have been ancient. Even Teacher Shen Xia, who was still very young at that time, should have entered the age of ancient rarity now. Is she okay now? Standing in front of the window, I could only see this huge green screen in front of me. Yes, the rows of bungalows we lived in had long since become poplar forests in front of us. The poplar forest was planted in the late nineties. When I left here for Shanghai, these poplar trees were still seedlings, and now they have become a forest, mercilessly covering the old and nostalgic things.

There are very few poplar trees in Shanghai, and if they do, they are large-leaf poplars or small-leaf poplars with outstretched branches, and no tall diamond poplars and Xinjiang poplars have been seen. Although there is a place name in Beijing called "High Poplar Tree", I did not see the tall poplar tree there. Occasionally, poplar trees are only large-leaved poplars. Some gray "caterpillars" floating in the spring are really not as good as the dense green barrier in front of me, nor can they compare with my hometown.

I was amazed by the great shore of the green barrier in front of me, and I missed the towering "mast" of my hometown. Are the hometown and the deceased all okay? I hope that the two rows of country roads towering over the poplar trees still leave me as a wanderer in the distant footsteps.

October 7, 2021 in the ancient city of Datong