Looking forward to it, I finally hope to divide the new valley, make new rice and cook white rice as jade. As soon as Grandma Bigfoot put it on the table, I swallowed and wanted to steal it. Grandma patted me on the back before my dirty paws reached the bowl. She said that if you don't respect heaven, you will be struck by lightning.
For the first meal of new rice, grandma will sacrifice to heaven. She hopes the weather will be fine next year. But heaven is always not as good as people want, and the yield of rice fields is always so low. Although my childhood was always full and hungry, I still loved the rice fields in my hometown, which was the "Herb Garden" of my childhood.
After the rainstorm, naughty water rushed out of the gap in the rice field happily, making several waterfalls hanging on every ridge, and the swift water became a unique landscape in the field. At that time, for loach, it was just a happy time. They are dancing in the flowing fields. When they were happy, they swam along the tiny water on the hillside, as if they were going to visit relatives in the fields above. The flowing water in the gap gradually becomes smaller and the slope is cut off. They linger, some sleep in the grass on the slope, some play in the mud. My brother and I used baskets and dustpans to catch them. We put the dustpan under the ridge and my brother held it. Then, I went to drive down the loach exposed above the slope ridge and drove it into the dustpan effortlessly. In this way, we easily caught a big basket of loach from that rice field. Mother looked at them and pretended to be worried: so much, don't fry, it smells bad, keep some and sell more.
When she said this, I felt that my childhood was coming to an end. Although I was only over twelve years old, I was going to graduate from junior high school after the spring and summer of that year. My mother wants me to stay in high school, obviously planning for her hopes.
Except for my mother's hope, I have no other pressure to study, just like playing. It's time for class, so we crossed the rice fields, learned to read, add, subtract, multiply and divide at school, made trouble with tools at work, held a criticism meeting and learned a few words from the speeches on the radio. Besides going to school, I wandered around the paddy field outside the house. Sometimes I mow cattle, sometimes I drive away grasshoppers, sometimes I catch dragonflies, sometimes I go to the puddles under the fields to catch fish and shrimp, and sometimes I just sit quietly on the ridge with my eyes closed, listening to the sounds of Ji Gu, frogs and crickets.
One Sunday in midsummer, I was walking and singing on the ridge with my basket on my back, and suddenly I saw a pile of white blisters on the ridge. I know, there is an eel hole under the bubble. So I slowly put my index finger into the hole. Unexpectedly, that guy bit my index finger and made me shrink my hand back at once. But that guy insisted until I pulled him out of the hole, but he was thrown into the middle of a field below, and my finger was bitten and bleeding. Reluctantly, I smeared mud on the wound and blocked the blood flow. The wound soon stopped hurting.
That kind of pain is actually happy. Pain, the real pain is heartache. I graduated from junior high school when the rice fields turned golden. I have always loved to play, as if I suddenly had self-esteem, because none of my classmates recommended me to go to high school, which made me feel very embarrassed! So, I was covered with mud from head to toe, hiding in the rice field and letting my parents look for it all afternoon.
I thought I could no longer be a student, so I really learned to do farm work. When harvesting rice, my mother and I went to the field to cut rice. Cut and cut, the head teacher came, and he brought good news about going to high school.
The next day, I didn't cut rice, but played my specialty and went to the harvested rice fields to catch eels and loaches and sell them to prepare for high school.
In the paddy field with water but not too much, the eel loach will come out of the mud to play games the night before, and when tired, he will hide at the scarecrow's feet to rest. The sun won't shine during the day, and it's cool inside. My brother and I went to lift the scarecrow and catch eels and loaches under the scarecrow.
It does not need technology, as long as it can be touched and grasped. But after the scarecrow collects it, it needs a little skill: first, it needs to know where they are hidden; Second, it needs to find a way to drive them out; Third, we need to catch it, because once it gets into the mud again, it will be difficult to catch it.
More than a month passed, and I was tanned and earned enough tuition and fees for one year.
More than a month after high school, there was news of resuming the college entrance examination. Fortunately, when I was in high school, I began a life journey of serious study and bid farewell to the rice fields in my hometown.
Although childhood is far away, the homesickness with my hometown rice fields is always lingering in my heart. As time goes on, it's getting more and more chaotic!