When I was a child, I lived in Lixiahe area . Life was difficult and materials were scarce. There were no roads in the countryside, no electricity, no fans, and I had never heard of air conditioning. I remember there were only a few yellow cattail fans sewn with strips of cloth to prevent damage. . Summer nights with cool breeze have become our childrenâs expectation and luxury.
At that time, most of the houses had walls made of rammed adobe, covered with roofs made of wheat straw. There were no courtyards, and most of the houses were planted with metasequoia and easy poplar in front and behind the house. The clay floor in front of the house had been scorched by the blazing sun all day, and the ground was somewhat hot. Every day when the sun sets, my mother goes to the river behind the house to pick up a few buckets of water and splash it on the ground. The fragrance of the soil immediately fills her nostrils. Put the small square table and stools on the ground, scoop the cooked porridge into a large porcelain basin and bring it to the square table. Then my mother picked a few cucumbers or melons from the melon rack in the private plot at home, washed them, washed them, and peeled them. , cut into slices, add some salt, soy sauce, monosodium glutamate, and minced garlic to marinate for a while. Sometimes grandma will make a pot of wheat cakes and deliver them, and dinner is done.
When night falls and the porridge gradually cools down, the family gathers together to eat an unforgettable, warm and romantic "moonlight dinner". Porridge with cucumbers, gnawing sesame cakes, the sound of drinking porridge and the crunching of cucumbers come and go. This is probably the most familiar sound in my childhood. There were clusters of reeds growing beside the ditch behind the house. There were a lot of fireflies at that time, flickering on and off, dotted with stars, twinkling and twinkling, which was very tempting to us. I ate in a hurry and went to catch fireflies with my playmates, sisters and brothers impatiently.
Fireflies fly very slowly and very low, and we can easily catch them by just grabbing them. I put the fireflies in the glass bottle, put them in the mosquito net, and fell into a sweet dream in the light of the fireflies' flashes.
In the open space in front of the house, two large benches were placed on a wide door panel with a mat on it. In order to make us quieter and fall asleep as soon as possible, grandma used an old cattail leaf fan to help us cool down and drive away mosquitoes, while telling us fairy tales such as the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, Meng Jiangnu crying the Great Wall . I was immersed in the story and asked my grandma naively, why is the Queen Mother so annoying? The father on the side laughed loudly and said boastfully that this boy is still so young and has a sense of justice. My father pointed to the sky and told me the locations of Vega, Altair and the Milky Way. I didn't understand them, and I remembered them vaguely.
Although my father only attended private school for a few years, he has a good memory and remembers many folk stories. At that time, my father often told us stories while enjoying the cool night, which made us fascinated...
It was late at night, the dew came out, the moonlight was hazy, and the whole village was shrouded in the dark night. I am often carried into the house by adults in my sleep without knowing it... (morning, July 3)
