The land in Nanwan is flat and open to the sky. It is a thick book for me to read at any time. Nouns such as wheat, wheat soil, sunflower, clod, field mud, earth house, etc. all come from this. I have only cultivated a small piece of land in South Bay, but it does not affect my understanding of the entire South Bay. Growing up, I was fortunate to have all the nouns derived from the South Bay context implanted into my life through my parents’ repeated readings and my habitual following.
Wheat soil
Pull out the wheat and bring out the soil.
Some soil was blown away by the wind and went up the mountain into the ditch. It has no legs but can roam freely on the plateau. It has no wings but can fly freely in the village. This is surface dust. Some soil adheres to the earth and feeds the wheat. After the wheat matures, it still sticks to the roots of the wheat and often returns to form wheat soil.
I met floating soil on the wheat seedlings in March. All the wheat seedlings were gray and rusty. We looked at each other and smiled in the gray March. The dusty wheat seedlings and I were a group of people on the earth who collected the same things. The sunshine has grown into children of their own appearance.
When the wheat is growing, wheat soil is deposited. When the wheat matures, the man who kneels in the ground to pull the wheat will beat the roots of the wheat with his bare hands. The wheat soil will fly everywhere, and the man will crawl over and over again on his knees in the wheat field. The soil was inhaled and exhaled by the people who pulled the wheat. Everyone would suffer from a cough disease at the same time. The wheat soil induced my grandfather's bronchitis. The grandfather who was kneeling in the ground to pull the wheat curled up his thin body due to coughing. In a ball.
Wheat soil is the years hidden in my grandfather’s wrinkles, and it is also the time deposited in my ear canals. My grandfather's face was an unchanging brown color. Every morning, I saw him washing his face with half a bowl of water. The water turned muddy, but there was no water to wash his face white. The wheat soil had been soaked into the texture of his skin. Can't wash it off. From time to time, my mother would hold me in her arms and pick out my ears. I was afraid that I would become deaf if I kept my ears picked out, so I resisted instinctively, but I couldn't help but enjoy the relief and pleasure brought by having my ears picked out. Every time my mother picked out her ears, she would mutter something about it, wondering why she had to obey. It turned out that her ears were clogged with wheat soil. The mother's use of exaggerated rhetoric is really clever. Whenever I did something wrong, I would pester my mother to pick my ears, and my mother would readily forgive me for my mistake.
I am familiar with wheat soil. If wheat soil is mixed with other soil, I still can’t tell the difference. Maitu is familiar with every inch of my skin. Every place I touched with my hand was bitten by it. The wheat soil has no mouth, but it bites people. It's not like a large animal that bites you in pieces, but like a silverfish. After pulling wheat for a day, I felt itchy all over my body, and my two hands seemed to be not enough. After scratching, the itching was gone, but the pain was so sharp, as if the skin was on fire. The wheat soil didn't bite my grandfather, I didn't understand. Asked my grandfather, he said that his skin was thick and the wheat soil could not bite him.
The wheat soil is so fine that it falls on my body and forms dirt when exposed to sweat. My clothes cover my skin and also transfer the dirt from my body. There is no condition for bathing, so I only change clothes when they are dirty. The muddy water from washing clothes was splashed on a pile of soil in the yard. The weeds and missing wheat seedlings on the soil grew extremely lush.
After noon, I didn’t want to pull out any more wheat. I spread a bunch of wheat under my body and lay on my back. My sleepiness was like a bug that could burrow into my brain. I closed my eyes. It was bright red, a bright red, like silk earthworms wriggling in knots. They spread out and gathered together, and the whole person was paralyzed on the wheat. The soft feeling was enough to make people's souls leave the body, like fine dust. It was flying majestically for a while outside.
There are waves of wheat on the land where wheat soil is deposited. Wheat soil is originally a part of wheat. While I feed my body with wheat, I am also consumed by the wheat one after another. In the end, we will give all the things we no longer need to the land. Maizi and I have An indistinguishable appearance.
The fragrance of the land
The wheat sown at the beginning of spring has begun to sprout. My wheat field shows a colorful scene, with strands of green and strands of white. The wheat in the field uses its own color to restore the state of my labor on a certain day in early spring.
The night before the wheat was sown, I drank too much because I was upset. I tossed and turned all night and felt groggy when I woke up in the morning. My father gave me a shovel and asked me to spread manure in the field. I realized that I was not in the right state to spread manure. it took.
The land is my face. It cannot speak, but it will grow wheat for people to see. All the time people spend on the ground is reflected in the wheat seedlings.
The wheat in the field grew like this, which deeply touched the shame in my heart. When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, I was very sensitive and strong, and I cared a lot about my face. But at this time, ringworm appeared one after another on my face, one white and one black, and my face was painted. It affected my image and I suddenly felt sad. I developed a bit of inferiority complex. In ignorance, I start to care about the eyes and expressions of every girl around me, and then I can't help but fall in love with a certain girl, and have a secret crush on myself, so I pay extra attention to my own face.
I can’t remember what happened that angered the teacher, and I was dragged to the podium. Three or four boys stood together facing the whole class. It was not a big deal that made people look up, but I didn’t. If I dare to raise my head, I don't care about the eyes of the whole class. I am only afraid that my image will disappoint the girl I have a crush on. Not only did I have scars on my face, but I also did something wrong, which really made me lose face. I have forgotten most of what the teacher scolded me. I only remember what he said: You have to take care of your face. Not looking up is not taking care of face, but it means that you have no face to take care of.
The land is tolerant, it will only remind you at critical moments, and then never mention it again after the wheat is jointed.
After the wheat harvest, plant sunflower seeds again. Unfortunately, the oil sunflowers had just been sown due to lack of moisture, but it rained heavily the next day, forming thick knots. The buds of oil sunflower are weak and tend to turn yellow when hardened. Breaking knots is a laborious task, and I am used to thinking about things wildly while working. The thick knots and weak sunflower buds remind me of a teacher who trains but never curses. There was a sudden power outage during evening self-study. A few girls were laughing sharply in the gap between the power and lights. The old gentleman heard it. When everyone lit candles and the classroom was lit up, he stood on the podium and called a girl by name. , Rousheng raised an unexpected question, why don’t girls grow beards? Everyone looked stunned. Everyone looked at each other in confusion. He suddenly said that girls are thick-skinned and cannot be penetrated by beards. I wanted to laugh, but the atmosphere was too serious and I didn't dare.
I couldn't help but laugh out loud in the bare ground. On the broken ground, light green buds spread all over the ground. It seemed that they understood my smile and scrambled to get out of the ground.
After harvesting the oil sunflowers, plowing the land deeply, and pouring winter water on the land before it freezes, the land becomes idle. It’s so good to have winter every year, even God feels sorry for me. It feels that I have been busy on a piece of land for more than half a year, but I still can’t be idle. It has frozen the ground, cut off my thoughts, and let me When the weather is cold, flipping through a book, reminiscing or looking forward to life, is a way to recuperate.
From then on, I only planted flowering crops on the land, sowing peas in the spring and sowing buckwheat in the summer. After late autumn, I transplanted some flowers and plants into flowerpots and took care of them every day, enjoying it. When I'm tired from studying but don't want to fall asleep, I just look at the glass flowers in full bloom through the clear glass window, and the subtle fragrance comes from my heart.
Earth House
In order to fulfill his wish to build an earth house, my father carried the mold and pounded the earth for the people in the village. My father spent his young years ramming earth clods. He exchanged his time for earth clods and stacked them neatly on the ground.
Take a pile of field soil, dig a hole from the top, fill it with wheat clothes, put water under the wheat clothes, soak the soil, turn it over, stir it, and mix it into mud. Mud is more malleable. If the soil cannot meet water, no one can make it stand up and hang on the wall. Soft mud and thoroughly dried soil are golden partners. It is also field soil. The beaten soil becomes a hard clod, which is the main skeleton of the earth house, while the soil soaked in water becomes soft and becomes a puddle of mud. , smear it on the wall to fill in gaps and cover up ugliness.
In the early days, there was only one earthen house. In the courtyard with a clear height of 18 feet, this small house with a width of three meters and a length of five meters faced the south wall with its back to the north wall, like a monkey squatting. In the huge yard, there is a pair of eyes, a mouth, and no nose. It is an ugly monkey. We have been in and out of the monkey's mouth for decades, and the monkey cannot leave us even if it opens or closes its mouth. The back wall of the earth house is peeled off by wind and rain every year. When the rain is abundant after autumn, we put a puddle of mud in the pit behind the house and repair the back wall with a new one. The hole behind the house has always been my father's biggest worry. In my father's heart, the hole is the sun and moon that cannot be filled. If there is heavy rain and the pit is filled with water, the old house will most likely take advantage of the situation and fall back into the pit.
On the edge of the pit behind the earthen house, a poplar tree suddenly jumped up and stood there, giving the monkey a slender tail. The earthen house has become old because of this. It only raised its tail over its head and looked even more impressive.
When I thought I grew up, I was no longer willing to live with my parents. My father saw my thoughts and built an additional room next to the old house. This room is still a civil structure, with only one door and one window. Everyone calls a house with this structure a one-eyed dragon. I feel like I have found a treasure.
I married my bride on the Tukang in my new house, and my children were also born on the Tukang in my new house. I was very energetic at that time. I dug out the red soil from the crack in the cliff, ground it into powder, sifted it carefully, mixed it with water to make mud, plastered the wall and polished it. I spent a lot of time making the dado a fiery red color, and then painted on it. The seemingly exquisite pattern is actually completed in one stroke from the beginning to the end, which is very satisfying. In that era when life was as calm as water, the turmoil of adolescence always gave me some impulse to live a different life than usual, and the poor life always constrained me. I could only use the method of spending time but not spending money. Let my residence have some new changes. The unchanged appearance of the old house makes me nostalgic and tormented. In order to erase the embarrassment of having a bare family from my heart, I searched for old newspapers everywhere and put them on all the walls. Newspapers, the cabin suddenly seemed a lot more luxurious.
After I left the old house, repairs were neglected. The rafters and purlins on the roof were rotten and could not bear the weight of the mud and tiles. The roof collapsed, leaving a bright hole, and the fallen soil , the surface of the kang collapsed, and the clods standing in the kang hole had black faces and a smoky look. They repeatedly used their dark color to show me the passing time. Seeing them, I vaguely You can still smell the firewood being ignited by your mother. Pushing open the wooden door, the wall skirts are still bright red, and the patterns are still exquisite, but they are all covered with dust. The walls still stand as straight as before, without any slack, so I respect the soil in awe, and the molded soil sticks to it. The duty of soil, unless you deliberately destroy it, is that whether you use it or not, it will stand firmly there and stand in your life.
After the earthen house became idle, young village cadres mobilized me to demolish the village courtyard. The old courtyard easily attracts idle wild animals and affects the mood of the people living in the village. Compared with the green hall and tiled cottages next door, the old manor looked poor and ugly, and they couldn't stand it, so they fulfilled their wish and demolished the manor. Bulldozers razed the courtyard walls and old houses to the ground, finally filling in the hole that had been open to the sky for decades. Every summer, crops grow green on the land where the old houses fell, integrating with the village.