Time flies, time flies, but the memory is still there. I was born in a poor rural area in the 1970s and was short of materials. I don't want to say that everyone is short of food. I just wear coarse clothes that I basically knit and sew myself, and I can only wear them during the Chinese New Year. Even so, it is not easy to put on brand-new coarse clothes. Take knitting for example, it's really complicated.
At that time, there were two main weaving equipment at home, which made the neighbors envious. One is a simple spinning wheel made by my uncle who can be a carpenter, and the other is an old wooden loom bought by my father for 5 yuan. My mother got rheumatism when she was young and stayed up all year round. Nevertheless, she still works hard for the children. After autumn, my mother picked up the peaches discarded by the production team in the cotton field and put them in the sun. After the cotton peaches were dried, my mother peeled off the white cotton in the cotton peach shell and picked out the impurities in the cotton. According to the texture of cotton, it can be divided into two categories, one is cotton used for bedding in winter and the other is cotton used for weaving. Weaving is not an easy task. From ginning, elastic cotton, twisting cotton, spinning cotton thread, tying thread, dyeing thread, dropping thread, setting and weaving into pieces of coarse cloth, there are many processes.
In these tedious processes, what I can't forget most is the scene of my mother spinning: in the dim light, my mother sat in front of the spinning wheel, rocking the spinning wheel in one hand and twisting the cotton thread in the other. With the stretching of her arm, the long cotton thread wound on the spindle in an orderly way. The night is already deep. When I wake up from a hazy sleep, I occasionally see my mother touching the newly replaced cotton ear, and her face shows the joy of harvest. Day after day, in this way, the white cotton thread became a slender and symmetrical cotton thread in the mother's hand.
My favorite thing to do when I was a child was my mother's loom. I don't know how many years that antique loom has been used, but the iron hook for fixing the warp and weft has been wiped clean without any rust. The wooden shuttle for stringing is greasy and as heavy as a jet, which is cool and refreshing. Mother shuttled with one hand and pushed the board with the other, at the same time, her feet stepped on the woven board rhythmically and kept stringing warp and weft. A piece of old coarse cloth is interspersed with wooden shuttles, and the width of the cloth surface is increasing line by line. I often learn to step on the loom like my mother, and the end result is that I broke the warp or weft and ran away. It will take my mother half a day to reattach it.
When a soft old coarse cloth is taken off the loom, mother always dyes it black or sky blue. After receiving the cloth from the dyer, my mother couldn't wait to take the coarse cloth and lead us to the tailor's house to measure it. In a word, we finally put on brand-new coarse clothes during the Spring Festival.
Nowadays, with the development of science and technology, people have already bid farewell to the old coarse cloth era and replaced it with various fabrics such as polyester, polyester card, acrylic, wool and silk. My mother died many years ago, too. However, those forgotten coarse clothes are flattered again in the market with a plain, simple and quiet attitude, which may make people find the innocence and simplicity of returning to nature, and may even make people who wear coarse clothes miss the love that keeps giving up.