In the imagination of the young people of Camphor Tree, our generation's life is not timely, and the children's and adolescent years are full of disasters and difficulties, and they have suffered a lot. In fact, my childhood was also happy, and Qushui Bridge is our paradise.
When the grass stream originating from the remnants of Yuhua Mountain flows to our village, it seems to have the meaning of staying, and it becomes curved and curved, and is called Qushui by the villagers we bring. In the middle of the Ming Dynasty, several bosses of Zhangshu Town funded the construction of a stone road from Zhangshu Town to Qianxi Wei and Dianxia Wei and built this Qushui Three-Cave Stone Bridge.
Qushui Bridge is a three-hole beam stone bridge with a rugged and sturdy shape. The bridge deck is paved with heavy hemp stone slabs with a deep trough on it, witnessing its vicissitudes of history.
On both sides of the Qushui Creek are dense willow trees, making the stream, which is only three or four inches wide, look unusually cool. The stream is clear and bright, and the long aquatic grass floats leisurely with the slow flowing water, and various fish pass through it. The water under the Qushui Bridge is very deep, there is no water grass, only the blue sky can be seen, and sometimes there are white clouds like horses and cattle, floating under the water. I like to see the white clouds under the water the most, often lying bare on the bridge deck, watching the white clouds torn by the ripples, watching small fish pass through the clouds. More often, soaking in the stream with the little companion, stabbing the fierce son, fighting water fights, playing hide-and-seek, not playing until exhausted, lips white will not go ashore.
As I get older, I feel that just playing with water is not enough. So, learning from the adults, I went to the stream to catch fish. I began to touch it with my hands, and I touched a lot of fish, but I couldn't catch a few in a morning. Fortunately, the willow trees on both sides of the creek almost covered the creek, the stream was really clear, the willow shade was really cool, and the joy of catching a fish occasionally made me feel very happy. Nature is so fair that we poor rural children can enjoy one hot summer after another.
After I went to junior high school, I couldn't go to the stream to play on weekdays, and as soon as I had summer vacation, I had to find an opportunity to go down to the stream, but I could only use the noon work break because I had to start work to earn work points. 2.5 cents a day, each cent worth 8 cents, only during the "double grab" period, I can earn 5 points a day, because I can grow grass faster than adults.
There were two or three hours of rest at noon, and we did not have the habit of napping, so we invited partners such as Huoru, Yisheng, Shenggen, Dongru, and Wangen to Qushuixi to "cover the fish". The "hood" is a common fishing tool used by the people in our village. With a section of camphor tree, dig out the middle part, form a wooden ring, and then insert bamboo pieces of the same length around it to form a cylinder, we call it "cover". When using it, lift the hood up to the surface of the water, and then quickly insert it into the water, and estimate whether the fish is covered by the feeling of hand. If you feel something hitting the cover, you extend your hand to touch the cover, and the fish is within a very small range and is easy to catch.
Fire is like a fish master, some people say that he carries "fishy", I am not as good as him, but stronger than Yisheng. So I proposed that three people "fight", that is, three people cooperate, and the fish caught are uniformly divided. Play guy fishing and have a good one
In the process of fishing, it will not scramble, but will be lined up in a row, and at the same time, it is difficult for the fish to escape, so that there are more fish caught. Usually, every noon, the three of us can catch a foot of pot fish. At that time, Qushui Creek not only had catfish, catfish, grass carp, side fish, and even mandarin fish, and the people in the village were very envious when they saw our adults carrying bamboo baskets to divide the fish.
Nor is the innocence of a child absolute. Yisheng's fishing ability was really poor, and after he inserted the hood, he exclaimed, "Oh, cover the big fish, come and catch it." So I dropped the hood in my hand, leaned down, reached out to touch the fish in the hood, and touched it for half a day, but there was nothing. So I angrily lifted the hood and threw it out with force, and if I thought he was deceiving people and wanted to be a good guy, I said, "Slap him!" I literally shoved myself in the face. The slap with the water was particularly painful, and my slap was hot. Yisheng smiled, and while looking for the hood that sank into the water, he said, "You are dead and alive, and you beat me to death." ”
Either way, we get our harvest equally every day. One day, Yisheng inserted the hood into a clump of water and grass, only to hear a "bang", and before Yisheng could scream, the fire screamed, "This time he really covered the big fish!" I rushed over and reached into the hood, and there was another "bang", and a mullet was agitated inside. I pressed the hood with my body, afraid that the mullet would open the hood. I let Huoru and Yisheng protect me and grabbed the mullet's gills with all my strength. But the mullet's gills were small and tight, and as soon as the mullet was lifted out of the hood, it swung hard and fell out of its hand. A large mullet escaped from my hands. I reached over and said to The Righteous Son, "Slap me in the face." Yisheng took two steps back, smiled and said, "Just leave, you didn't deliberately let it go..." His words made my heart warm.
In the 1960s, the stones on the Qushui Bridge were demolished to become the cornerstone of the "Zhong" character platform, and since then, the willow trees on both sides of Qushui Creek have become thinner and thinner every year, and there are fewer and fewer aquatic plants in the stream. The fish gradually disappeared. Later, the stream was milky white and emitted a smell worse than dung, but the joy that Qushui Creek gave us would not be forgotten.
About author:Chen Huaisheng, born on March 8, 1946 in the suburbs of Zhangshu Town, is a physics teacher in middle school culture, a physics teacher in rural middle school, and a physics teacher in the teaching and research department of the Municipal Education Commission. He joined the Yichun Regional Literary Association in 1979 and the Jiangxi Writers Association in 2007. From the end of the 1970s, he began to pay attention to the local culture of Qingjiang County, and after retiring in 2006, he compiled several local historical materials, and created a collection of essays, novellas and novels with camphor trees as the background of 1.6 million words.