Ah! Lyrical prose of hometown

My mother called to tell me that the family's old house had been dealt with and that they bought a house with a mortgage in a city more than a hundred kilometers away. There was obvious joy in her voice. After I put down the phone, I felt empty for a long time. From now on, I could never go back to my hometown. My parents were not there, not to mention I didn’t have any relatives.

As long as I can remember, I have lived in a barren and closed-off corps company. Since the day I went to school, my parents have been nagging me to study hard and stay away from this ghost place. They farmed diligently and hard all year round, and were often so tired that they refused to get up from lying down, so they could barely support a family of five. The years of hardship made my mother rickets in her forties. The serious salinization of the land limits the cultivation of a single crop, either cotton or wheat. Occasionally, a little sunflower or corn is planted in any year, but the yield is not high. At that time, there were basically no modern agricultural machinery, and there were no hired workers. It was difficult for children to "stand by" while their parents farmed. After school and during holidays, they had to go to the fields to farm, sowing in the spring, weeding in the summer, and picking in the autumn. I once thought I was a child growing up in a cotton field.

There are dozens of sparse households in the company, all with mud houses. They are cool in the summer and burn coal for heating in the winter. My house is on the roadside leading to another company. The courtyard is empty and there are no walls. There is a courtyard in front of the door. The vegetable garden covering half an acre is called a vegetable garden, but in fact it contains not only vegetables, but also some elm trees, angustifolia trees, and poplar trees planted by our three siblings and our parents. I like the elm tree the most. Every April and May, the tree is covered with green elm coins. My mother asked us to carefully pick them off, wash them, mix them with green onions, flour and eggs, knead them together, add salt and clear oil, and put Steam it in a pot and it will be cooked in about ten minutes. Yuqian rice is fragrant and delicious, leaving a fragrance on your lips and teeth after eating it. To this day, I can still recall the faint fragrance that lingers on my taste buds. On a hot summer day, it feels very comfortable to enjoy the coolness under the elm trees while swinging the cattail leaf fan.

The life of a farmer is busy and simple. In addition to carefully tending the fields, during this period, they also have to grow vegetables, raise chickens and feed pigs, have a vegetable garden in front of the door, and cut out a small amount of trees to occupy an area. In the vegetable field, before starting work in the morning and after finishing work in the afternoon, parents often squat in the vegetable field, fertilizing, watering, weeding, and loosening the soil. As the saying goes: growing vegetables is like embroidery. Whether the vegetables are good or not all depends on the skill. In my impression, among the neighbors, my family’s vegetables are the best. This is mainly because my parents are extremely diligent. They cultivate ridge after ridge of gourds, beans, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and celery. I was very organized and couldn't finish the food, so I was sent to the neighbor's house where there were many children, sometimes a few eggplants, sometimes a bag of spicy peppers, or a handful of cowpeas, packed with the square scarf my mother wore when working in the fields, and I went happily.

Every year, the family raises ten or twenty chickens, all of which are chicks hatched by their own hens, and then the old and new ones are replaced. Eggs for hatching chicks are always carefully selected. The mother always holds the egg in her left hand, with her right hand above her left hand, and opens the cover to carefully check whether there is any shadow in the egg. The black shadow will be used to hatch chicks. If there are not enough eggs at one time and the hens are eager to nest, they will exchange them with neighbors. When I was a child, I was very curious and couldn't figure out why some eggs had shadows and some didn't. While my mother was away, I secretly took two kinds of eggs and repeatedly shined them in the sunshine under the skylight. The divided eggs were misplaced. One year, less than ten chicks hatched out of a clutch of more than 20 eggs. The parents were depressed for a long time.

Evenings in the countryside, especially in summer and autumn, are like a natural symphony, with cattle and sheep bleating, crickets singing, and frogs croaking. Once I was alone in the yard in a daze, and I accidentally discovered something interesting. There were some restless chickens. They didn't want to stay in a good chicken nest, and insisted on flying to the elm tree to rest. The elm tree is not high, but the branches are uneven in thickness, and they fly to the thin branches. The ones that are on top will fall off, so they fly again. Of course, some of them make accurate judgments and succeed in the first attempt. Looking at the funny scene and listening to the crow of the chickens, I couldn’t help but laugh. I was very happy, especially when I saw some chickens, as if they refused to admit defeat. children, again and again, until they get their wish. Is sleeping in a tree so beautiful? I raised my head, half of the moon slowly climbed up, the bright stars were embedded in the dark blue sky, and the surrounding gradually became quiet.

I used to be poor and rarely ate meat. On Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day, I usually killed chickens to improve my life. When I was a child, I looked forward to festivals so much. I planned early on which festivals to celebrate. My mother was different when killing chickens. Before killing them, she would grab the chickens and chant softly. I leaned closer and heard: Chickens, chickens, don’t be afraid, you are in the world of the world. A dish that goes here this year and comes next year. I repeated it three times and started to do it. I laughed and asked my mother if she could understand. The mother undoubtedly answered yes. After the killed chicken was scalded twice with boiling water, my sister and I began to pluck the chicken feathers. After that, my father took out a shallow porcelain plate, poured a little white wine on it, lit a match, burned the chicken's fine hairs, and then plucked them. A few fresh chili peppers, stir-fried with chicken, create an authentic country spicy chicken that will make your mouth water whenever you think about it.

In the company, almost every family raises a pig every year. They buy piglets in the spring and raise them until the end of the year and then kill them before the Chinese New Year. Feeding the pigs is half of the children's business. Those who come out of the company are like me. With such a big thing, when it comes to pulling out pigweed, I'm afraid there are not many people who don't know it. Adults are busy in the fields, and small things naturally fall on their children. In June and July, when school is over in the afternoon and it's still early to get dark, there are three or five children each with their left hand. A bag of fertilizer, a small shovel in the right hand, and in the nearby fields and channels, there were seedlings, cabbage, and dandelions, all delicacies for pigs. Everyone squatted down, one by one, and put them into the bag one by one. If you hurry up, you can get a porcelain bag in thirty or forty minutes. You can take it home and pour it out, chop it into pieces on a chopping board, pour it into a special large pot, add water and a little bran oil residue, and cook it until it boils. Okay, it’s said to be pig food, but in fact, chickens and dogs also eat it.

After graduating from college, I went to work in other places. Although I was still in the Xinjiang Corps, I never left my hometown. Time flies, and it has been a full fourteen years. During this period, I have been back several times intermittently. Each time I have been in a hurry, like a dragonfly, and I have not even had time to get a taste of my hometown. However, the feeling of returning to my hometown has become stranger and stranger every time. In addition to getting more and more familiar. The more vivid faces there are, the most striking thing is the old and new villages divided by a road. On one side are neatly planned and majestic brick houses, and on the other side are sparse and dilapidated earth houses. The old Zhuangzi, where not many people live anymore, looks particularly special. The place is unexpected and vicissitudes of life, and there are not many old employees left in the company. Most of them are new employees who have immigrated with accents from various provinces. Among them, the majority are from Henan, and we don't know each other.

After all these years, what lingers in my mind is still the familiar land of my hometown. I have dreamed of the old elm tree at the entrance of the village countless times, and the reeds swaying in the wind can be seen everywhere on the roadside... even though I have long since I settled down in a small town and lived in a spacious and bright building. I didn’t know who was sitting across from me for many years. I lived the life of a nine-to-five office worker. I no longer had to light the stove in winter, which made my nostrils black all day long. There are summer vegetables and the neon lights flash after nightfall, but it is far from the joy of leaving my hometown as I imagined when I was a child. How many nights have I tossed and turned and asked myself, isn’t this the life I strive for? Why do I feel more and more painless and painless? Can't find the exit.

Time flies by, and before I know it, when I reach middle age, in a city with tall buildings, I often seem to be walking on the edge, looking at the strange and bizarre world around me, feeling cold, but having to endure it. The scalp blends in with it, because there is no way out, and the hometown is like a stuck in the throat, clear and permanent memory. It may be a bit sad, but at least it is lucky. Imagine that for our next generation, when they grow up, will the word hometown still be in their memory? I have no idea.