The village and the outside are connected by a path on the east side, like a small white snake that has never had a full stomach, burrowing out from under the old black oak tree that is said to have grown for two hundred years behind Wujiadun, clinging to the big river to the east, passing through the cemetery, plunging into the crop field, and seemingly disappearing. In fact, it is still there, and looking up at the distance, the snake's head has been placed at the foot of the river embankment, and there are still shallow marks on the slope of the embankment that has been eaten countless times by the old cow; up, it will converge on the big dirt road in the middle of the river embankment.
Of course, this is an image restoration of the path in my memory, and at the same time, there are some people in the village, saying that the restoration is that many people walk into the cemetery on the east side of the village and the cemetery uniformly arranged by the village, and the face is also like broken porcelain, and the restoration is also blurred. At that time, people were very scattered, on the path but had to converge their personality, like middle school students military training, obediently walking into a slip, who was in front of whom, consciously moving forward in turn. If you encounter a person in the face, the person has to stand on his side in the crop field and wait for the procession to pass before returning to the road.
I don't remember exactly when I set foot on this path. But the impression is that my mother drove me to the street once, and that was the first time I ate fritters with fragrant teeth. Since then, I feel that going to the street is the happiest and happiest thing in the world. Later I understood that this path, which was no different from the other roads in the village, was very different: the roads were all the same, the difference was the direction, the other roads led to the crops, and only this road was the one that the crops had been running on other roads for a long time, and it was rare to step on once, and it was the link between the village and the outside world. Before I left the village, I heard that it led to Lao Chau Street and also to the small ferry dock by the river. Enter the iron fence, take a ship, go up, you can go to Fengyang Anqing Wuhan; down, you can reach Tongling Wuhu Nanjing Shanghai.
As a child, I only dared to walk around the village, turn around under the cypress tree, support the rake handle of the chicken dung in my hand, look at the path, look at the river embankment, look farther away, and then become a statue. I couldn't imagine what it was like to be far away, so I envied the white clouds in the sky, they floated leisurely, and what a wonderful thing it would be to be able to stand on the clouds. Unfortunately, I couldn't grow my wings and didn't even have the courage to take the trail.
As I grew older, the path seemed to grow old, shrinking into a thin rope. When I was in junior high school, I began to walk this path often, and the already narrow road was eaten by endless weeds on both sides, and the dew on the tip of the weeds in the early morning quietly wet the cloth shoes, slipped the sandals, and even the trouser cuffs were soaked wet and wet.
But I finally got out of the village.
At Laozhou Middle School, I went to junior high school for three years, and graduated in the summer of 1981, and I refused my father's request to repeat my study for another year, and I also refused the hoe that my father had prepared for me. A guy in his early twenties, bold and aggressive. Just after the Spring Festival of 1983, I went alone to Dingyuan County, Anhui Province, to learn mirror making and glass cutting techniques. After returning, after half a year of preparation, I opened a glass shop on the street and was introduced to the electrical consignment business. It's just that in those years the countryside was just electrified, consumption was limited, and there was no major expansion of business for several years. Finally, in the breath of the 1990s New Year, I took eight young people from the village and chose to go out.
Walking on this path, my mood is actually very contradictory, this is because although the road in my hometown is narrow, it is still familiar and practical to step on, while the road outside is unknown and lost. I wrote "The Village Behind Me" two years ago, which was the best footnote to the mood at that time.