Childhood lights

I was born with a fear of the darkness, and when the night comes, I cry when I don't see the lights.

At that time, the countryside often lost power. One night, the lights were bright, and suddenly the brush was all dimmed, and there was no light, and my heart tightened, and I was stunned in place, crying. Not long after, a little fire arose in the back room, and from the beginning of a small bean-like blue dot, it slowly jumped into a pale yellow teardrop, and Grandma came from the back room with a kerosene lamp, which was as dark as water, and retreated wherever the light passed. When a slender and brilliant tail fin crossed the air, the darkness quickly filled and devoured everything in the back room. Kerosene lamps were placed on the living room dining table, and the mottled and heavy table board held a small blue-turquoise glass bottle, with a thin waist and a large belly, and a small rope-like core coiled in the belly, topped by a rusty crown, and fireworks stood on it. A thin trail or two of black smoke drifted upwards, like the writhing tail of a small black tadpole in a pond, smoked with a glass cover.

This small firework, rippled with layers of warm yellow halos, frightening off the persecution of darkness. My heart was settled.

When it was time to go to school, I often got up in the dark to read in the morning. There was no first rays of sunlight and the stirring of the wind, the darkness outside the window was still frozen there, there was no sound, and the air still revealed a cold breath. As soon as I got up, Grandma on the stove was already busy.

The home's earthen stove, made of red soil and bricks, is lined with a straight chimney. Cook porridge in the morning, make fire and firewood, I don't know how many peaceful years have passed. The mouth and inner walls of the stove are exceptionally dark and solid in the smoky fire. The vigorous orange-red flame reflected on the mottled stucco wall, trembling slightly like playing frame after frame of old film, like a jump of thought. I sat on the old wooden pier, with my back to the firewood branches, facing the beating light of the stove, reading the book word by word, and the flames seemed to jump with it, occasionally adding firewood and turning, accompanied by the explosion of the wooden branches, and a few light sparks flew around. Not long after, the pot grunted and boiled, the lid of the pot was lifted, and a smell of rice filled with the steaming water vapor, and Grandma hurriedly scooped up the newly ripe rice grain and knocked an egg to hide in the residual heat of the rice grain.

The porridge was ripe, no more firewood was added, and the fireworks at the stove gradually stopped, at this time the genius outside was just about to turn gray white, and the roosters in the distant house were singing sonorously. At this time, pour a spoonful of home-brewed soy sauce on the bowl of hot rice porridge, and the more you chew the teeth, the more fragrant the rice grains become. Inside the earth stove pile, the dark red charcoal lay quietly in the embers, gradually darkening.

Day after day, I snuggled up to the light of the stove and read in the morning, and gradually grew up. In my memory, I don't know what year and month, the fire of morning reading slowly turned into the light of an incandescent lamp.

When I grew up, the crux of my fear of the dark was completely gone. But I suddenly missed the tearful kerosene lamp in the dark room, the little flashlight in the bamboo forest night road, the movie fluorescence of the night sky where light and shadow intersected, and the pages of the book that were red by the flames... It turns out that every darkness of childhood is accompanied by lights.

The lights seem to be born with darkness, not for confrontation, but to protect the child's long night of warm wishes.