Grandma's river

A few days ago, several cousins went to Jilin in the far northeast to celebrate their eightieth birthday. In the video sent back, the children and grandchildren of the three aunts are surrounded by their knees, and four generations are under the same roof, and they are happy. There are six people, my mother and my sister. Among them, my third aunt looks like my grandmother who left us for nearly 30 years.

Grandma liked all our nephews when she was alive. What I remember most is that grandma carried me across the river. It was a spring, and my newborn brother got sick with a cold and went to the hospital in the town. My mother was too busy taking care of him to take care of me, so she asked her grandmother who came to visit the hospital to take me back to stay.

It's about two or three miles from the town to my grandmother's village, separated by a river. At first, grandma took my hand. But when I got to the seaside, I was too lazy to go by myself.

Under my coaxing, the short old lady in her seventies waddled through the dry gravel riverbed with her four-year-old children on her back and walked slowly to the village with her old feet wrapped in the old society.

I clearly remember my grandmother walking unsteadily behind my back, panting and gently scolding me in a loving tone. "Oh, you little slacker, you little slacker, oh, it killed my grandmother."

There is a winding sand dune between Grandma's village and this river, which is located in the south of the sand dune, hence the name "Qian Qiu". Dunes were piled up for flood control that year. 1958 in the summer, heavy rain caused flash floods. The rolling landforms washed away the low mud dam in the old village and swept the earth and stone courtyards and houses in the village. My mother told me that most houses in the village collapsed, and even two families were washed away and lost their loved ones.

A superstitious old man in the village said it was a water demon, and there was an eye-catching rumor that when he went home (behind the village) to do waterproofing, he saw a porcelain plate floating in a submerged pond, holding a sword with a red silk handle on it, and the sword flashed cold light and went to the whirlpool of the submerged child. This is the fairy in the sky who wants to kill the devil. The old man vowed to tell everyone.

Rumors are rumors, and waterproof sandbars are still to be built, so now there are higher and stronger mounds.

Passing through the sand dunes, a swamp of different sizes appeared in front of us, and the village was at the end of the swamp. In winter, pools of stagnant water in the swamp reflect the broken and lifeless cobwebs. But in late spring and early summer, nature seems to be enchanted, and green reeds emerge from the bottom of the water, filling all the ponds, one by one, covering the winding gravel paths between the ponds.

Cousins and I often drill around this part of full of green, looking for suitable reeds to make reed flutes, or chewing in our mouths to suck that little sweetness.

When the autumn wind is cool, the frost-white reeds in the pond have become a happy harvest for adults. When I was a child, there was nothing to burn on the stove at home. The firewood on the mountain is collective and can't be cut casually. The crops in the field are also collective and have to be left to the livestock in the team.

Every autumn, my grandmother's village divides the reeds in this swamp into small pieces and gives them to every household. Everyone is self-reliant and cuts their own firewood. At this time, grandma and uncle sent messages to my parents to help. At the end of the day, mom and dad pushed a pile of reed unicycle, sweated through the rugged mountain road for four or five kilometers, and unloaded the small yard of their hometown in the envious eyes of the villagers.

Through the swamp and several alleys, I arrived at my grandmother's yard. Grandma's yard is very special. I never walk well. Because it is almost round, it is piled up casually with messy stones. How tall a person is, it seems that if you push it, it will fall, but I have never heard of it.

I once asked my grandmother why all the roads in the hutongs go around our yard and why other people's yards are square. Grandma told me that it was because our yard was built early and our neighbors were built later. Although I also think what grandma said is reasonable, I always think that the yard should be square. How can we let the road in the alley go so far?

This question, until today, I saw some billboards in shops along the street in the community, and I couldn't tell the colors and styles that you and I were unified, and finally I got the answer.

Grandma's house faces east from west. There are two rows of houses in the yard with three rooms in each row. The front hall leads directly to the backyard. Grandparents live in the front room, the main room is also the kitchen, and there is a heatable adobe sleeping platform. There is an empty room in the south.

My grandfather and brother are four years old. He is the eldest son. He studied and taught in a private school, and was often invited to write and draw, which earned him a certain prestige in the village. Other brothers are also very strong, and they are respected people in the village, and later people are also thriving. So, that's why my mother always proudly said "she belongs to a big family".

Unfortunately, my grandfather died early in his fifties, before my mother got married. My mother told me that my grandfather accidentally cut his arm skin by some dirty branch, and then he festered and died. After my uncle bought two precious penicillins from the city, although he got better for a short time, he was powerless after all. Now that I think about it, it is still because the medical conditions were too poor at that time.

Because I have never met him, my grandfather only exists vaguely in my imagination, but I have many memories of the house where my grandfather lived. What impressed me the most was grandma's twentieth birthday in the twelfth lunar month. Some adults sit around the foggy stove in the hall to cook, while others sit around the red iron stove with a small door burning wood to drink tea and chat. A group of our cousins split up in the front yard and backyard and had a good time.

I like to run to my uncle's house in the backyard, where there are endless treasures I want to explore. There are many wooden cabinets in my uncle's house, and there are many wooden drawers in the wooden kitchen. When you open them, you will find many "antique toys" inside, such as broken magnets, gray nails of different lengths, broken bicycle chains, an irregular piece of leather, threads of different colors and large and small glass medicine bottles. Every time I go, I can find gadgets that make my children shine.

Cousin made a pistol with bicycle chain, wire and rubber band, put a match on it and bit the hen in the yard. The hen giggled and flew out at once, and then attracted cocks and hens all over the yard.

Our laughter and the crow of chickens immediately drew the sound of grandma pushing the door, and then she pretended to be angry and scolded: "I found it (beaten)!" " Hens are good at laying eggs, and I won't beat them if they are killed! "

I envy my cousin for making faces and smiling proudly. So, I "stole" the chain from my uncle's locker several times and went home to play with my pistol dream with my friends.

Childhood dreams are fleeting, and years always slip away quietly.

In a blink of an eye, I was admitted to the technical secondary school where I ate "national food". My uncle was overjoyed and bought a delicate suitcase to send me to school. A suitcase in the early 1990 s, which is almost half a month's salary of my uncle!

In that dusty and dim hall, grandma looked at the brand-new white suitcase with pink flowers on it and said to her mother, "Oh, great. You can ask Xiao Wei not to forget his uncle! " Mother smiled and took Grandma Bai and said, "Don't forget my uncle, even if I grow up, I won't forget my mother!" "

After all, isn't mother the smoothest and strongest bridge between us and grandma's house?

1998, I got married, and my mother arranged for me and my wife to go to my grandmother's house to see her off. It was early winter, but the snow covered the ground and covered the Qian Qiu River early. My wife and I stepped on the snow in the riverbed carefully for fear of slipping. My mother in her fifties, with a straight back and steady steps, left us far behind.

Mother is such an unwilling and unyielding character. She often teaches my brother and me that "it doesn't matter if your father and I are tired in our crops, as long as you study hard, there is hope" and "study hard and have a good future".

Mother's personality, on the one hand, is influenced by the family environment. Grandpa died early, and she and her sisters provoked the burden of life early. After marriage, her father was too passive in the village to confront Nuo Nuo, so she felt inferior in her bones. This sense of inferiority is usually manifested as external sensitivity and strength in personality. On the other hand, I think it may really benefit from the shade of family style. Grandpa exists in her memory as a cultural person in the old society, and my uncle was a leather worker in that era. The glory of the family was deeply imprinted in the mother's heart and became a river of hope for her to resist that difficult time.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that one cannot step into the same river twice. When my wife and I were chasing my mother who had walked carefully and quickly through the valley, an idea flashed through me, which made me look back and take another look at the river in front of the mountain: it still winds from the valley in the northwest, winds a silver belt around the small village in front of the mountain, and floats to the southeast sea as if nothing had happened. However, my grandmother has been carrying me across the river for many years.