Summer Busy
Author: Tian Liping/Changqing No. 8 Middle School
1990 summer vacation, at that time, I was about the same age as my child, who looked in his teens, and he was in his fifth and sixth grades. However, the two generations lived a life in heaven and earth.
At that time, the top priority in summer vacation was not rest, play or study, but busy summer. Summer is the most important season for farmers throughout the year. In our hometown, summer is called double grab , that is, harvesting rice and planting seedlings. The rice will only mature in mid-July, and farm work such as rice harvesting and rice transplanting must be completed before August 1st. If the rice harvest is late, it will misplant the new seedlings and affect the harvest of the next season of rice. In order not to miss the harvest, every family has to show eleven points of enthusiasm and race against time in those short ten days.
The food and income of rural people basically relies on rice. The country, team and family attach great importance to it. A few days ago, people grind sickles, prepared agricultural tools, bought fertilizers, and prepared dry food. The village was filled with a hurry, lively and messy before the war. In the next ten days, each household will have to harvest about five or six acres of rice in the next ten days, so the whole family, young and old, and animals, must be on standby. In short, anyone who can breathe and move must do their part to harvest rice and transplant rice.
Before I cut the rice, my parents also asked someone to polish the sickle in advance to make it extremely sharp. Each adult and child in the family must empty the water in the rice fields in advance. My two thirteen or fourteen-year-old sisters have become the main force in my family's harvesting rice, just like my parents. I am in my teens and I am the logistics supporter at home, responsible for the meals of everyone, washing clothes, sweeping the floor, feeding pigs, cleaning the house, and also responsible for taking care of my young brother. Because summer is very hot, every day, the adults bring their children to the fields early and take advantage of the coolness of the morning to finish the rice in the fields.
Sometimes when I finish all the work at home, I will take a sickle to the field to help my parents. You can see your parents working between the golden rice waves from afar. Your parents are quick to keep their sisters behind from afar. In the rice fields next to them, parents and children are bent down to work, and the whole field is filled with a picture of farmers chasing each other and chasing each other to harvest rice.
The taste of cutting rice is really bad. Not only do you have to bend your back and face the scorching sun, you have to be sore and painful when you are tired, but you also have to endure the heat waves emitted from the rice in front of you. From time to time, there are balls of small insects buzzing out from the dancing rice seedlings at hand, and you can bite you while you are not paying attention. When I bent down to work, I always sweated like rain. Every time I cut, I would stop, stand up and wipe the sweat off my face, and take the opportunity to rest my waist. But parents rarely stop to rest.
The rice has been cut, and the harvested rice is neatly laid in the field, as if yellow velvet blankets are laid in the field. The scorching sun at noon has dried the dew on the rice, and the rice will be bundled in the afternoon. The bundle of rice was also a group of people. Dad carried the two metal tips on the two ends, and Mom carried a bundle of thick straw ropes. My sisters and I went down to the field, first gathered the flat rice into a pile, and then carried it to the straw rope laid by my mother. In this way, we kept collecting it. You hugged me, and my mother held the piled rice next to the straw rope. When the rice almost reached her waist, my mother picked up the straw rope from the ground, held both ends in her hands, and pressed the rice hard with her legs. She kept twisting the two ends of the straw rope together, wrapping it hard, and tied it up with one pick up the rice. When the rice is almost tied up, my father will pick the bundled rice on our threshing farm. Carrying rice is the hardest and most tiring job. Our family is only father, the male labor force, can carry such a heavy burden. Carrying rice for a long time has also caused my father to suffer from illness.
After the rice is harvested, we have to be busy planting seedlings again.My father first put water in the field. When the soil and rice stubble in the field are slightly soaked, he will plow the ox. The ox drags the plough, and my father supports the plough behind the ox. He goes back and forth many times, and finally plows the field full of rice stubble into a watery and soft mud field. When my father plowed the field, we were not idle. My mother and my sister pulled the seedlings in the seedlings. After my father leveled the field, we could plant the seedlings.
When planting rice seedlings, we bent down in the paddy fields and stood in a row. The cement bar passed through our calves. We held a large handful of seedlings in our left hand and kept grabbing a few seedlings from our left hand with our right hand, and then quickly planted them into the mud field. This is how the seedlings are planted one by one by one by one by one. Every time my parents started with us, my sisters would plant the seedlings that my parents planted, one by one. Planting rice is more bitter than cutting rice. Not only do you have to bend your waist and hold the scorching sun, but you sometimes get the calves and feet soaked in the mud, but you also have to be suddenly attacked by bees and lees in the paddy fields. If you accidentally touch them, you will be stung and hurt.
Another part of the work in summer is on the threshing farm, and every household has to pile up the recovered rice bales on the threshing farm. I saw haystacks piled up around the wide and flat rice field, some of which were uncrushed rice bales, and some of which were crushed straws. When grinding rice, what I fear most is that it encounters changing weather (white rain or thunderstorms). Once the grains are wet by the rain, the rice will be no longer delicious and worthless. As long as the weather suddenly changes, no matter what you are doing, you will run to the threshing ground when taking a nap, put down the chopsticks when eating, throw down the branches when playing, or even get up from your sleep in the middle of the night, you will run to the threshing ground as soon as possible. Every family is like fighting. They quickly gathered the millets spread on the field into piles, covered them with plastic cloth, and covered the rice bundles around the field with nylon cloth. Your family helps your family, and they move along the way. Before the rain finally broke out, there were yurt-like grain piles on the threshing field, densely packed. The villagers formed a fixed feeling in such a scene.
In fact, the hardest and most tiring thing in the whole double grab was the cattle at home. At that time, we all shared a ox with three or four farmers. The plowing field was the ox, crushing the rice, and allowing the grains to escape the rice poles. It was also the ox to pull the big rock rollers and slowly crushing it back and forth. Often, after plowing the field of this family, we had to crush the rice from his family, and then our field, plowing the field during the day and crushing the grain at night, basically in a busy and tired state all day long.
Time has come to 2022 in a flash. How many years have passed? I don’t want to calculate it carefully. It’s just a number. No matter how many years have passed, those things will not be lost in the long river of memory, because they have been deeply engraved in my bones. Now I occasionally go back to my hometown, but I can no longer see the scene of every household rushing to collect it. The young and strong laborers in the village went out to work. When they walked in the fields, they saw that fields were deserted. With the progress of modernization, the previous farming methods have gradually disappeared, and now children can no longer experience our lives at that time.
Author of this article: Tian Liping
Tian Liping, currently a fourth-grade Chinese teacher at Changqing No. 8 Middle School. He graduated from Chinese Department of Hubei Normal University in 2002.
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