After more than ten years of separation, I dreamed of my old house one night. The appearance of the house hasn't changed at all. It was this dream that aroused my feelings for the house.
The house is very ordinary, located at the foot of a remote mountain village. A hole in the earth hole is the most splendid place in the whole yard, and next to it is a hole in the unformed earth hole. Father cut down a tree from the mountain, and seven or eight thick trunks became rare treasures. It took my father a long time to clumsily split the trunk pulled back by the ox cart into long strips, and then divided four trunks with the same length and thickness into two groups, and fixed them horizontally from top to bottom, thus a simple fence door was born. A wire hook became the only safety sign in this hole. The person who enters the hole opens the wire hook at will, and the person who comes out hangs the wire hook conveniently. It is the cave that is not worth seeing, and it stores the harvest that parents exchanged with sweat. Every autumn, the caves are full, and after the start of each semester, the caves seem lonely. When you walk into an empty room, gloomy chill sweeps people's faces. Father sighed and said, "When will this broken house be full of food?" Mother murmured, "When the house is full, the future of the child will be gone." At that time, I didn't know what my mother meant, and regarded their conversation as the most common and common conversation.
A decent house looks no different from a cave in northern Shaanxi. My father didn't make the window himself. He paid a lot of money to invite the famous carpenter in the village to jingle for a while before installing it. When the lights are turned on at night, our home is the most unique. The window is not big, and it looks like a red lantern hanging on a cliff from a distance. The setting inside the house is very special, at least it is the only other design in our village. There are two sets of kang in the room. Pushing open the door, there is a small heatable adobe sleeping platform on the right and a water tank and a cabinet on the left. Opposite the cabinet are two stoves with their own characteristics. One is for heating the front kang, and the other is for heating the back kang, which is built by the kiln palm. Back kang is also called palm kang, and the width of the whole room is the width of back kang. People in northern Shaanxi also refer to the front and back kang as palm kang and door kang respectively, and the door kang, as its name implies, is closer to the door. The most striking thing is that there is an earthen platform as wide as the cave on the palm of the kiln. Anyone who has lived in a cave in northern Shaanxi knows that the earthen platform is called a kiln platform. Every autumn, my mother takes loess from outside and covers the kiln table with a thin layer. I gently touched the soft yellow loess beside my ears, and my mother's habit for many years told me to cherish some delicious food there. At the end of autumn, the sweet potatoes and pumpkins recovered by my mother from the farmland are stored as treasures, and then a list is covered outside, which looks neat. In the next year, these treasures will more or less fill a family's food and clothing.
There is a river under the house. After freezing in winter, groups of hairy children skate and play with bonfires, which makes them very happy. In summer, the laughter of girls and boys washing clothes resounded through the whole village. Because the house is in the middle of the village, trivial things happen to people in Qianzhuang, and things happen to people in hou zhuang. We know everything there. There are four or five villages that go straight to Houzhuang, some of which are no longer under the jurisdiction of the same town under our village, but we are familiar with it as soon as we meet, and we know the number of young children and the situation at home like the back of our hand. People from three or four villages will pass by our village, pass by my house and go to the bank. After several villages, Zhong Er Chuan is the seat of the government and the village under its jurisdiction. On the sixth day of the first month of each month, on the 16th and 26th of November of the lunar calendar, when passers-by who enter and leave the village stop, they often talk about people living in the direction of the mountain where the house is located, especially those in that house. After a long time, the house became the only place in the village that represented poverty. However, my family raised me slowly. ...
Once I grazed cattle by the river. Pedestrians come and go, looking at me and talking. One of the men in his fifties asked curiously, "Whose child is it?" What's your name? "I timidly said my father's name, and the other party immediately pulled down his face and said," Ang! You are ... "I know how to be shy and hide with a cow." Later, someone said that your family lived there, and I just smiled. The house belongs to my family, and I have never had the courage to say it. For some persistent inquiries, I always casually raise my hand in the air and say, "Let's live there. "In fact, I don't know where I live because of my gestures. Later, I changed my name to that house, maybe I was a little ashamed to save our house. After a long time, when I have feelings for the house again, I always feel that it is kind and comfortable. So, no matter who asks, that room is always long and that room is always short. Just like the people in Qianbei Village said, don't look at that hole, there are talents!
It is also the day when the house will get rid of poverty. After my two brothers were admitted to technical secondary schools one after another, the position of the house in the eyes of the villagers immediately changed between hell and heaven. The house is no longer a representative of poverty, but has become the proudest hole in the earth, and has become a talk after dinner. On the beach under the house, or on the grass beach not far from the house, people gathered together invariably talked about how good the geomantic omen of the house was, how blessed the couple were, and how disappointing their children were.
That decent earth hole, a small cave, has become my lifelong concern. Every time I go home, I always look at the house for a long time. Some people say that the house collapsed in the wind and rain, and there is nothing to miss, but I can't help feeling extremely unbalanced, like admiring an elder and paying tribute to a revolutionary martyr. Maybe other people didn't visit the house in person, and the house never brought them joy and warmth.
Actually, that house doesn't belong to me, including my family. My family and I are just guests in that room, guests who have lived for a long time. The whole family moved to the cave. When I was a child, my parents regarded the cave as a warm harbor, and they were busy for a while before cleaning up the abandoned houses of the same villagers. According to my mother, this abandoned house was rented after many twists and turns. The landlord saw our sincerity and exempted the rent. On the one hand, it doesn't hurt our face to live in a house. On the other hand, abandoned houses are occupied by people, and it is inevitable that they will gradually deteriorate in a few years. It is also true that the owner of the house is a kind family. He has a new house to live in. Whether the house to be abandoned is idle or idle can only be damaged in idleness and will not become beautiful in idleness. Their grandfather fled from other provinces to this village. He dug a few acres of wasteland by himself and lived on the weather. After his death, his grandfather left no legacy. The two brothers worked hard, married their daughter-in-law, and gradually lived a good life. Since the new house was built, it has become our home.
I went back to my hometown in the summer of 2006 and specially looked at the house. The house stood there alone, as if waiting for every owner to take care of it. The yard is much smaller than before, and there are many weeds. Some unknown weeds are taller than others, and they can't get through them. It turns out that the width of the rack car turning back and forth only leaves a straight road. The path in the yard is covered with weeds. I tried to move forward, and the width of the road was no different from that of the narrow path. The willow in the middle of the yard rotted away, leaving no roots. The hole in the house was damaged by pieces of mud, and a good house was much less. On the other hand, the earth hole next to it was reused and a sparse wall was simply erected. Several willow trunks with different thicknesses and extremely rough hair made a simple door and became a circle of sheep.
Looking at the jagged yard and thinking of my family's days in that house, I almost shed tears. The barking of sheep in the pen interrupted my thinking. A flock of lambs scampered for their mother, and the mother cried for her own flesh and blood. I have to go away and let them meet as soon as possible to make way for worry-free. I looked at the hongxia on the horizon, but I couldn't say a word of gratitude in the room.