There was a period of suburban days, and it is quite interesting to think back.
I married in 1973. At that time, there were only two and a half houses in the family, living with grandparents, father and mother, and a brother and three sisters, there was no place for me to settle, and I had to go outside to rent a house.
The house was rented by a friend's wife in her backyard contact. This is three earthen bungalows, the middle open door, opposite the house, we live in the west, the monthly rent of five yuan (at the end of the year to pay the rent, the landlord said: "Look at you two people are very good, the rent is not wanted, the roof and the wall, spring and autumn you wipe it yourself on the line"). The friend invited the troupe's artists to paint the walls of the house blue, and a white twist pattern was rolled out of the rags, and two water-gouador curtains were hung on the windows, making a new house. Early the next morning after the marriage, I suddenly saw my wife in tears, and I asked her why, and she said with some sadness: "Now that there is not even a pot, how can we eat in the future?" "I realized the seriousness of the problem: not only was the pot and stove not built before marriage, but even the rice noodles and chopsticks were not prepared. On that day, it was from the "major discovery" of my wife that I suddenly "woke up" to the fact that my life had entered a new starting point - from this moment on, the "life" that the elderly often hung on their lips began.
After the winter of the second year, our daughter was born, adding new fun to the family and to the "days" to come.
The house does not pay rent, which is equivalent to living in vain. I can't always live in other people's homes like this, so I decided to build two houses of my own - the so-called family, in addition to having a wife and children, I must also have my own nest.
At that time, I was working in the hospital, and I heard that the nurse in the outpatient injection room, Xiao Xiejia, wanted to sell the first half of the compound set, so I went to her house and discussed with her mother to buy it. Finally, it was negotiated and sold for 240 yuan. If it were now, these few dollars would not be nothing, but at that time, my monthly salary was only about forty yuan, and my wife was more than thirty yuan, which was undoubtedly a big amount for us. Our husband and wife have just entered the society, and we can't come up with so much money at once. I borrowed it from East and West, but it was still not enough, I really couldn't do it, so I took off a piece of Tiankonuo watch that my father gave me when I got married, and sold it for one hundred and fifty yuan, which was enough land money. To be honest, watches are extremely important to a doctor, even indispensable, but at that time, they had no choice but to burn their eyebrows. With the land in place, two new houses would have to be built on it, and a larger sum of money would have to be made. In desperation, the wife returned to her mother's house and took all the savings of the family totaling seven hundred and fifty yuan. When I had the money, my father led me to the timber company to choose wood, and I went to buy red bricks, cement, and sand, all stacked on the ground where the house was built.
It's already a suburb of the city, very remote. Behind the Xiao Xie family's house, there is an east-west gravel road that leads to the gate of the tuberculosis specialist hospital (tuberculosis is an infectious disease, so it is necessary to stay away from densely populated areas). Along the wall of the east courtyard of her house, along the narrow laneway to the south for a hundred and eighty meters, it is the wilderness. Building materials are stacked in empty yards and need to be taken care of at night. I wore a half-cut leather jacket with Lanni noodles (which I gave me labor protection when I went to daqing to work as a health doctor) and spent the night lying on the pile of freshly cut brown rice straw in the hospital. On a late autumn night, there was a cold silence all around. In the deep and dark sky, the Milky Way hangs obliquely and the stars twinkle. In the distance, from time to time, there was a dog bark or two, as if to remind me that I was not far from the fireworks world. With my head resting on both arms, I looked up at the sky and thought to myself: Every little star in the sky that blinks is actually a planet much larger than the earth, and I don't know if there are people living on it. Do they want to build a house? What kind of material should I use to cover it? And at this moment, is there a person above, like me, who is also looking at the pile outside the house? In the night sky of Leng Sensen, is he colder than me?
The house was built in three or four days. Since the original money was not generous, the house was framed, and it was already spent before it was all completed. As a result, the outer wall is neither brick cracks, nor plastered ash on the inner wall, and between the brick cracks of the bare wall, there is light inside and outside, and starlight can be seen at night. Soon it will be winter. It felt that the winter of this year was particularly cold, although the interior was supported by a stove, but the west wall was still covered with a thick layer of frost, the electric light was on, the crystal wall was white, and the silver star was shining, like an ice house in a fairy tale. In the two houses, only the entrance door is installed with a door leaf, and the other three doors in the room are only a frame, no door leaf. It was too cold, so I had to hang a thread blanket on the door frame to block the wind. At that time, my daughter was only two years old, and I was afraid that she would freeze when I slept at night, so I had to put her in the nihon leather jacket, tie the button, and cover her feet with a small quilt to survive the cold winter. Later, my daughter has always been very hardy, I think, is it related to the fact that she has experienced such a cold since childhood?
The following spring, my original landlord sold his old house and wanted to build a new house, so he had no place to live, so he moved to my house. We hurriedly vacated the east house with the fire to let the family stay, and we installed a double iron bed in the west house.
It was getting warmer and the days seemed to be getting better.
For a long time after that, while paying off the debts of my father-in-law's family, we saved some money, piecemeal, and continued to build the house — because there was still much unfinished work.
Although the new house is extremely ordinary, there are two things that make me proud: one is that on the left side of the south window of the Westinghouse "living room" and in the wall separated from the corridor, an iron bookshelf is inlaid, one and a half meters wide, and one person is more than one person high. The bookshelf is welded by friends in the factory with scrap iron and hollow flat pipes, brushed with jujube red paint, and hung with a curtain on the outside, which is very beautiful and practical. I put a desk by the window in front of the bookshelf, read the writing, and the light was good. The second is that the kitchen cupboard is much larger than other people's homes. At that time, because of the lack of wood, I could not make a wooden cupboard, so I borrowed the lower half of the brick wall under the glass window of the partition kitchen, built a frame, smeared with cement inside, installed a wooden square frame with upper and lower mining on the outside, and installed two plywood sliding doors, which became a kitchen cupboard combined with brick and wood. The platform on the cabinet can place things, and the cabinet contains dishes and chopsticks, rice bowls, and cooking utensils, which not only saves wood, but also does not occupy the space in the kitchen, so that the wife is very satisfied.
After living here for a while, the neighbors knew that I was a doctor in the hospital, so no matter day and night, no matter the week, people often knocked on the door and asked me to see his children and adults. The most diligent finder is a family in the front yard surnamed Zhang - there is a girl in his family who has epilepsy.
"Dr. Li, go quickly, my child is smoking again..." Aunt Zhang ran into the door and said out of breath. I hurried over the stethoscope and ran after her. Because there were no auxiliary instruments to examine, I could not determine the cause of the seizures and could only treat them symptomatically. I gave hibernation and promethazine, and the girl gradually stopped convulsing. I sat on the edge of her house and said to Uncle Zhang:
"She had to be taken to the hospital for a comprehensive examination and look for the cause of the epilepsy before it could be cured."
Uncle Zhang sighed, "Alas! I didn't check it, several large hospitals in Harbin have looked at it all, and I don't understand the reason, just epilepsy. ”
"There are two types of epilepsy, primary and secondary. If no other cause can be found, it is likely to be primary epilepsy. ”
"Well, that's what people say!"
"Primary epilepsy will often have seizures, I can prepare some medicines such as hibernation, promethazine and chloral hydrate for her, and put them at home, when she is sick, you can call me..." I told her about the things that the family should pay attention to when she had convulsions for half a day.
Until I moved later, the girl's illness still did not heal.
My neighbor to the door, surnamed Dai, works at a livestock farm in the suburbs. The daughter-in-law of the old generation treats people very realistically, if we both have something to do, we can put the child in her house, if it is temporary, even the door does not have to be locked, tell the sister-in-law, she will sit at the door of her own house, while doing needlework, while looking at the door.
Later, Xiao Xie's mother in my backyard sold the house and moved away, and then moved in a family surnamed Wang, and my family soon got along like a family. Our daughter also became a regular visitor to his family. There was a girl named Junjie in his family, who studied photography, and in three days, he took my daughter and took her to play. My daughter became her little model and took a lot of pictures.
Life is always inseparable from such trifles, especially the construction of a new house, the work is naturally extraordinarily much, fork the courtyard wall, build a dog kennel, shed barn, dig a vegetable cellar... One after the other, you have to do it yourself. The fork courtyard wall had to use a lot of loess, at first I used an earthen basket to pick it up, and then I borrowed a trolley and dug it in the field a hundred meters to the south, pushing back one cart at a time. With soil and horns, I bought the kind of "big grass" that was rolled by the machine from the market, so that the old kitchen knife was chopped up little by little. The courtyard wall can only be forked during off-shift, and it is impossible to fork at all in one day or two days. One day off work, just in time for the wind, the sky was yellow, and the dust was flying everywhere. But life cannot be delayed. I have little strength, a "fork" mud, I have to clench my teeth to buckle to the wall, and then brush both sides together, and then take a fork of mud, similar to a small bird's nest. People say, "Take off the billet and hit the wall, and live to see the king of Yama", which is even more so for a thin and weak person like me. After working for many days in a row, I finally forked a circle of courtyard walls.
The worst thing is digging a vegetable cellar. At that time, a straight barrel-type earthen cellar was built, with a small mouth and a large bottom, about four or five meters deep. This kind of cellar, dug deeper, you have to put a flat burden at the mouth of the cellar, tie the rope, people grab the rope, step on the cave wall, and put it down little by little. Dig out the soil and put it into the "Feeding Ro" (Russian. small bucket), pulled up by the person above and poured out. One day, I dug half a mound of soil at the bottom of the cellar, grabbed a rope and climbed up from it, trying to help my wife put a wooden box in the house to a high place (because of the weight, she could not put it up). As a result, when I bent down and moved, I suddenly felt unbearable waist pain, I gritted my teeth and lifted the wooden box to put it away, and then I fell on the kang, I couldn't move, and even the toilet needed someone to help me. I asked my wife to go to the hospital for a leave of absence and rest at home. My wife couldn't help but go to work, so she had to put her daughter and son at home to take care of me. My daughter was five or six years old at the time, and she played with her brother while making me a "little messenger." I lay on the south side of the kang, the north side of the kang against the wall, side by side a pair of wooden boxes, the boxes are stacked. The two children played and played, knocking the quilt down and pressing it underneath. I gritted my teeth and got up and pulled the two children out of the futon. They were very happy, giggling and laughing, while I was in so much pain that I didn't dare to move. One day, when I saw my wife off work, I said to her, "Why don't you burn the kang with more fire?" My wife reached over and touched the underside of my mattress and said, "It's so hot, why don't you say it's not hot?" When it's hot, you'll bake the mattress! "I reached out and touched it, but it wasn't, it was hot. I suddenly realized that my leg had lost its pain. I plucked a kang broom with my hand and pricked my calf, wooden, and didn't know the pain at all. "The problem is serious!" I felt a sudden fear of paralysis in my heart. I told my wife to hurry up and go to the hospital, let the ambulance come, and pull me to the hospital for a check-up. The next day, I went to the hospital to take an X-ray and found no abnormality. The director of internal medicine and the director of surgery gave me a check-up, and initially suspected that I had low back pain caused by rheumatism. Back home, I started flipping through the pages, and finally, the diagnosis I gave myself was "lumbar disc herniation." In the 1970s, the disease was not common, and there was no good means of diagnosis and treatment. I was bedridden for more than half a month, and the symptoms gradually eased.
Although living in the suburbs is remote, the surrounding neighborhoods are harmonious and the children have fun. When I was all right off work, I hid cats and cats with them, either hiding in this house or hiding in that house, and even the large cupboard of brick and wood structure became a place for Tibetans. Once, my son and I hid cats and cats, and I hid them in a large vat for him to find, but he couldn't find them in the outhouse, and he cried out in a hurry. In the summer, the wife put water in a large wash basin, took it to the yard to heat up, and then bathed her two children. They sat in the basin playing with the water, not to mention how happy they were, and the courtyard was full of laughter. In those years, there was nothing delicious in the house, and when my daughter was a child, she didn't have enough milk to eat, so my wife bought that kind of large biscuit, put one in an enamel teapot, soaked it in boiling water, blew it dry, handed her a spoon, and she ate it spoon by spoon herself. In winter, when the stove was raised, I buried the potatoes in the ash pile and gave them both to burn potatoes to eat; or I cut the potatoes into thin slices and put them on the lid of the stove, and the browned gabas were burned on both sides, and the two children ate them with relish, as if enjoying the best food in the world.
Because of the remoteness and sparse population, we had a dog in the yard and named it Ah Huang. Ah Huang is not big, but he is very popular. My wife's work has to work two shifts in the morning and evening, the morning shift is not light, and the evening shift is more than ten o'clock before she leaves work. The home is far from the city, and it is particularly remote, and I have to pick her up at night. By that time, my daughter had grown up and sent her to my mother's care, leaving only my son at home. In the evening, I had dinner with my child, played for a while, coaxed him to sleep, sat at his desk and read until ten o'clock, and then set off to pick up his wife from work. When I left, there was no one to look after the house, so I had to lock the child in the house alone. Ah Huang seemed to know what his duties were, and as soon as I was discharged from the hospital, he left the kennel and lay motionless in the doorway. When I returned, before I could turn the gravel road into the laneway, he had already jumped on the kennel and jumped outside the courtyard wall to pick us up. It wagged its tail all the way, ran forward and after, very happy.
We all like Ah Huang, there is Ah Huang, and it feels much safer at night. One day, I was on night shift at the hospital, with only my wife and children at home. At about ninety o'clock, he overheard Ah Huang barking wildly, and he also made a series of whining sounds, indicating that he was extremely angry. It started out in the yard, then leaned over the door and barked. The wife was shocked: "This is someone!" She ran to the kitchen and held a kitchen knife in her hand, standing at the door listening to the movement outside. There were no voices outside, only dogs barking. When Ah Huang retreated to the door of the house and made a whining sound, his wife's hand was already trembling with fright, but she firmly believed: "There is Ah Huang guarding the door, and people can't come in..." After a while, Ah Huang calmed down and stopped calling. The wife opened the door and went out to check, the courtyard door was inserted, and there was no one inside and outside. The next day, my friend asked me, "Were you not home the night before?" I said, "Yeah, I'm on night shift at the hospital." He laughed and said, "That dog you have is so powerful that he won't let me in the door." Did you frighten your daughter-in-law, you told her, I went that day..." I laughed and said "It's okay", and didn't tell him how scared my wife was.
But one day, Ah Huang suddenly disappeared. At first, we thought it had run outside, but we waited and waited and didn't come back, so we went to the neighborhood to find it. In the alley, in the field, but nothing was found.
"Don't look for it, Ah Huang probably didn't lose it, he must have been killed by someone..." the wife said.
Yes, the wife is right, Ah Huang never ran far away except to run out of the hospital to pick us up, how could he suddenly get lost?
Without Ah Huang, I went to pick up my wife at night, and there was no guard at the door, of course, I could no longer see the figure of him running to greet me. In the past, when I came home from work on weekdays and pushed open the courtyard door, Ah Huang was either standing on the kennel or standing at the courtyard door, looking at you with his tail wagging, as if to say hello and say: "Are you back?" And now, pushing open the courtyard door, there is only an empty kennel, and there is no longer Ah Huang's shadow. The quiet courtyard suddenly lacked a sense of anger and the warmth of the yellow dog's door.
What is more serious is that without Ah Huang, there is a thief.
That night, I asked my wife and children to sleep first, and I sat alone at my desk in Westinghouse reading a book, and it was already two or three o'clock in the middle of the night, and I had not yet slept. Suddenly, I heard a noise in the courtyard, and I heard it very really in the night. "Someone's got into the yard!" I couldn't help but get nervous and thought, "How could anyone dare to steal something in this room with bright lights?" But then he thought, "He must have thought that although the lights were on in the house, people must be asleep, because they could not see the figures moving around, nor could they hear a sound... This, what to do? I thought quickly. If I went out at this moment, I might block the man in the yard, but there might be a fight, and I would have to suffer a big loss without the strength of the chicken, and even the consequences would be unimaginable. But if he doesn't go out, what if he comes in the house after a while? After thinking about it, I decided to scare him away. I gently put down the book, got up and walked around the desk, quietly stood in front of the window, squeezed the opposite sides of the two curtains with both hands, and pulled them violently to the sides. I stood straight under the window, staring out. It was pitch black outside, and I couldn't see anything clearly, but outside, I could be clearly seen. I immediately heard fluttering footsteps in the courtyard and the sound of a stack of bricks being knocked down, and it was obvious that the man had jumped out of the courtyard in a panic. I went back to the east house first, gently woke my wife up, asked her to get up, explained the situation, and then, with an iron pipe less than two meters in my hand, opened the door and went out to investigate. The wife then followed. We looked at the front and back of the house, saw no one, and went back to the house to sleep. The next afternoon, when my wife finished washing her clothes and took them out to dry, she suddenly found that the clothesline was missing. The clothesline in my house is actually a piece of plastic copper core wire, one end is tied to a tree in the corner of the courtyard, and the other end is fixed to the brick wall of the house, a total of ten meters long. Later I thought: Is this thief here to steal a wire? Or do you want to take this wire and what's next? My family's Ah Huang, could it be that this person killed him? ...... Of course, none of this is known.
Fortunately, such an episode was only this time, and the days that followed were calm and calm.
About the author: Li Hanjun, since childhood, likes to write, but reads more and writes less. And long, but a few years of knowledge, years of doctors, years of editing, with the waves, drifting and uncertain. Transferred to the civil servant, tailoring the wedding dress, Fang sat for a few years in the small jeep, and in the blink of an eye became a tian sheweng. So he buried his head in the pile of books again, and re-practiced the ink; boiled words and refined words, and talked about the soldiers on the paper, without him, sex books were born.