Text/Chen Jiazhong Picture/Network
The haystacks in memory are huge and huge, like clusters of golden mushroom clouds, rising gracefully in the world of Shunhe Village. At the end of lunch time, the neighbor's chimney is like a game. Plumes of fat kitchen smoke come out like a dense mass, devouring haystacks. The fragrance of cooking smoke and haystacks can really capture your taste buds and make people from other places fall in love with this small village at once.
In Shunhe village, my father is the master of stacking wheat stacks. His haystack of wheat is the strongest and looks good. The annual wheat harvest season is one of the busiest seasons in Shunhe Village. When people harvest wheat from the field and transport it to the wheat field for threshing, then they have to deal with a lot of wheat straw piled up in the wheat field. The newly beaten wheat straw feels soft as silk. They piled up in the wheat field with iron forks at will, and the midday sun was dazzling, reflecting on the crowded and lazy wheat straw.
At that time, my brothers and sisters and I were responsible for transporting the wheat straw home in the wheat field by flatbed, while my father was always used to putting a white towel on his shoulder in the dark and holding an iron fork to stack the wheat straw in an orderly way. According to my father's old experience, it is most important to lay a solid foundation. He often uses a shovel to level the place where he intends to pile wheat straw, then tamps it with a wooden hammer and spreads a thick layer of sand. Then hold the wheat straw in your hand, spread it evenly, and then compact it with your feet. When the haystack reaches the height of nearly one person, not one person can work, but two people need to work together. A man under the haystack filled the straw with an iron fork and sent it to the man on the haystack. Then the man above took the iron fork, took it and piled it up in turn. In order to keep out the rain, he always mixed the wheat husk and soil with water after the wheat straw pile was "built", put it on the wheat straw pile, and smoothed the mixture of wheat husk and soil one by one with a mud trowel.
I remember that in the early 1970 s and 1980 s, wheat straw was always one of the main fuels for people to boil water and cook in Shunhe Village. However, due to the long-term accumulation of wheat straw outdoors in the wind and the sun, it is really unnecessary to use it as fuel for the pot. The housewife next door has a headache when cooking, and often adds a handful of wheat straw to the hearth of the cooker. However, as soon as the straw touched Mars, it gave off a slight tingling sensation, suddenly sparking and turning into gray ashes. In order to keep the temperature of the furnace cavity constant, housewives need to keep adding handfuls of wheat straw. Housewives often cook a meal, often sweating, and there are pieces of wheat straw and ashes on their bodies and hair, not to mention being flustered. To this end, housewives will let the pillars of the family cut off branches and dry them in the yard as fuel in the furnace of the pot. Dry branches are the most urgent fire, which can effectively save energy.
I still remember the haystacks piled in front of and behind every house in the village, which became a happy paradise when we were young. We played hide-and-seek in the haystack, and some friends, like a mountain leopard, plunged their heads into the haystack until their whole bodies got in. No matter your long-awaited call, I hide in the depths of the haystack and form a whole. In late autumn, I played hide-and-seek and got into the depths of wheat straw. Although the autumn wind outside is rustling and chilly, it is quite warm for people to go in. I remember falling asleep as soon as I entered. Several friends shouted my birth name at the top of their lungs and asked me to come out. I don't even know. When I woke up, I heard my mother calling my birth name one after another and told me to go home for dinner. This just broke free from the wheat straw and arched it like a giant hedgehog.
There are two sons and neighbors in the sixth group of Shunhe Village who got into the haystack to play hide and seek. A child couldn't find a partner to get into the haystack, so he lit a match and threw it on the haystack. The burning match fell on the haystack and immediately ignited the whole haystack. The raging fire burned one haystack after another, and the two brothers were buried in the sea of fire ... Later, our friends in the village stopped playing with haystacks.
(French impressionist master Monet's oil painting Haystack)
About the author:
Chen Jiazhong (1969-) is a native of Suqian City, Jiangsu Province. Famous reportage, biographer and poet. He used to be the editor-in-chief of today's Keyuan magazine. He is currently the chairman of Beijing Qiangguomeng Culture Media Co., Ltd. and a member of China Biography Society, China Reportage Society, China Prose Society and China Character Copyright Association.
He has published six reportages and biographies, such as Cheer for Life, Meridian Man-Professor Zhu Zongxiang's Scientific Life, They Moved China, Dream of a Powerful Country-Several Fragments of Cheng Lianchang's Life, Introduction to Famous Works and Appreciation of Fine Poems. The masterpiece of prose "Fear of Life" was included in higher vocational Chinese (Volume II).
A little PG One merged.