When the cigarette in my hand is finished, there will be a little light in front of me. The stars fall on the mountain and the graves are covered with phosphorus fire, which is more like a mirror reflecting the stars.
After the car drove into the town, it stopped at an intersection. My first car seemed to freeze air and surrounded me instantly. I took a deep breath but didn’t know where to go.
I watched the bus go far away by the roadside, and the night was quiet and serene. I thought about which direction to go, and I took advantage of this night to blend in with my dreams or keep going, and the world was endless.
Suiyuefeng
Family statement 4
Two trees
When I was a child, there were two trees in front of the courtyard. One was a willow, and I was not Lu Xun. Of course, the other tree could not be a willow, so it became an elm.
The willow grows in the elm tree on the east side of the courtyard gate. It is separated by a small dirt road and grows on the side of the road. It is impossible for two trees to look at each other across the road.
It is said that the willow is my grandmother’s variety. My elder sister-in-law has been taking good care of it all these years since she was born. When I remember, my elder sister-in-law has married the willow, and it has grown tall and stout. Surrounded by two people, I can barely hold the branches and leaves and prune it every year in front of the hospital to prop up a big shade. If my grandmother cleans the path more cleanly, many people will gather in the summer night to enjoy the cool and gossip. If my grandfather has a better temper, many children are willing to play in the tree.
It’s a pity that there aren’t those two, so the willow tree seems to grow white and straight, and it has become a frame with no rest. When night comes, its drooping branches sway softly in the wind, adding a touch of ghosts. At night, it is smart and aloof.
Many people say that the willow tree is refined and can’t be touched and injured, and some people will return blood in the willow red cloth. I don’t know whether it is to ward off evil spirits or to recognize the foster mother. They all think that the willow tree has lived for so many years and it is aura. Sometimes I think so for sure.
I don’t know when the elm was planted, but maybe no one planted it. I don’t know where it came from, but it fell into the ground and grew tenaciously. At a young age, there were no idle people shoveling it out, and there were no naughty children uprooting it, so it grew up fortunately and was gradually ignored. Human beings have the same effect.
Elm is not straight, crooked or stout, and it is not respected when a person holds it in his arms. People pass by the bottom of the tree for a while at most, and people will kick a few feet in the trunk and come back from work in the field. People will also be idle to try the sharp sickle on the trunk, and even a wild dog will raise his leg and pee on the root of the tree. A gust of wind blowing through the treetops seems to laugh at its ugliness.
The arrival of spring can bring short-lived pleasure to elms. Children desperately climb the trunk and pick elm species. We call elm money and put it directly into our mouths, chewing the green slurry like cattle and horses eat grass, and the smell of grass is sweet. The old people saw the metropolis. In the famine years, the elm money was all about saving lives and eating, and they were not willing to swallow it in large quantities. They all put a little food into the pot to cook porridge together.
But that belongs to the category of memory, and it is not a good memory, so the old people don’t want to reach out and grab another piece and taste the bitter taste of any food linked to painful memories, no matter how sweet it is.
Willow branches and leaves are bitter. I have been confused by its bright green appearance. Eating a willow leaf is equivalent to tasting a bitter taste. I spit out the chewed willow leaf in a flustered manner and vent my dissatisfaction at the trunk.
Willow trees can add a little fun if they can’t eat in spring. As soon as the catkins fly all over the sky, the world becomes poetic. It’s like bright spots in the shadows or sudden falling snow, which makes people feel uncomfortable. I watched the catkins floating away or falling nearby in front of the yard, thinking that these catkins should be enough to make a cotton-padded coat for the village head. Who has the leisure to get them together?
In addition to being rich in catkins, willow trees can also produce whistles. When the willow branches are just alive and dyed green, they are folded into a flat small branch and carefully rubbed until the bark is separated from the trunk. After all, it is fast enough to make the whistle sound sharp and heavy, but it is generally ugly.
morning
In my memory, the morning was covered with thick fog, and the white gas surrounded the village, but the smell of soybean milk pushed the door and the fog drifted into the house unhurriedly. People sent themselves away and fascinated their eyes, but they could hear the tofu vendors selling. That was the oldest and sweetest tone in the morning, pulling people who were not awake from their sleep.
Mother got up and went to the kitchen to pick up the stove, coughing intermittently, dumping two ashes, and holding firewood at the courtyard door. When it was corn stalks, soybean seedlings would rattle, and when the first ladle of water entered the pot, the first match struck the firewood, and the fast-paced smoke climbed all the way down the flue, and finally found a morning mist mixed from the chimney.
But careful identification can still tell whether the chimney smoke is cyan, yellow and black, which depends on burning firewood, but the morning fog will remain the same. Milky white and soy milk are slowly dripping, which is neither unruly nor noble. It is approachable to trap the village and wait for the wind to drive it out to a lake behind the mountain. It will quietly hide for a day like a ghost, and then wait for an opportunity to sneak into the village when the night comes.
Fog is afraid of the wind. Fog can’t be seen for many days in the season when the wind dominates. They hide and dare not come. They can look at the willows with messy branches in the wind. Every willow branch is like a kiss xiu dancing in the wind, but it is more like a crazy long-haired woman whose hair is messy in the wind, but she has to cry and laugh. Sorrow is extremely simple and ordinary people can’t understand it.
Compared with the elm willow, it is much more clumsy. Its stubby branches will swing stiffly in the wind, and the mind of the same first dance limbs will not be coordinated. It will sway in the wind and look at the graceful figure of the willow. I guess it will be envy at a certain moment.
I was too restless when I was willow. I put the long branches in front of the elm at random and beat them on the elm, but they were too fragile. When I touched the rough branches of the elm, they broke, so I would see some broken branches and some razor-sharp willow leaves beside the elm in many mornings. They once easily cut my cheek. I guess the elm must have suffered the same injury, but it didn’t say.
The white fog will usually disperse when the tofu vendor comes to the door. My mother carries a porcelain bowl with a cracked edge and broken teeth, which is filled with soybeans. The vendor exchanges two pieces of tofu and chats a few words about the vendor’s southern accent. I can’t tell where it is. People say it’s Anhui, but others say it’s Jiangsu. For the vast world outside, I have heard the old people say that it’s called Lishan Haili, and it sounds like a desolate and isolated place to us outside.
A few sparrows screamed at the window, and the sun shone into the house. The new pot of tofu exuded a mellow aroma, and more and more kitchen smoke rose like wolf smoke, so the village came to life.
madwoman
At the head of the village lived a crazy woman who always wore a thick cotton-padded jacket and ran around a few years ago. No matter whether it was spring or summer, I don’t know from which day she took off her thick cotton-padded jacket and showed her nakedness to the villagers. Unfortunately, she was naked and unattractive, and she didn’t take a shower for many years, so she was eaten and drunk by her husband in the house. Lazarus was in the house, and no one else had entered the house except her family. Everyone knew that the woman was still naked in the house.
Speaking of that woman, she is crazy, because she gave birth to a child when she was young, and her spirit is not common when she was three years old.
The crazy woman gave birth to another child after not being mentally active, and now she is in her twenties. She is dark and ugly, and her brain is not very bright. When people talk about him, it is difficult to talk about her. His dead brother said that the child was white, clean and clever, and praised him with praise, as if to deliberately set off how ugly the living child was. It is difficult to make me curious to know what the dead child was like. I was born not smart, and thinking about the words smart will tumble. Besides, where can a person who died at the age of three be smart again?
I have heard another saying from my mother that a crazy woman is beaten crazy by her husband. Her husband is so eccentric that even chopsticks should be kept alone without family. After every meal, she hangs her chopsticks rope on the wall.
The crazy woman’s husband is ugly, too, and that one is as ugly as alive. It’s unfortunate that two ugly people live together. I really pity her, but when I saw the crazy woman later, I let it go because it was simple and she was ugly, too.