That year

□Guo Shubin

Speaking of mixing mud and making clay, people born in the 60s and 70s will probably laugh.

Maybe you don’t care, but children in modern cities can go to the handmade clay bars that charge by the hour and play around all day long!

Don’t believe it? You try it too.

In the year when I was admitted to Liutongzhuang Lien Middle School, after finally scraping together three brick houses in the north, my father said that the family no longer had any spare money to build a side room, so he decided to merge with Mu Mu. I built two western rooms to serve as my study room.

In the era when red and blue bricks were still luxury goods, for ordinary families like ours, it would be good to have wheat straw mud that can be used casually, let alone reinforced concrete.

When I came home from school that day, I saw my sister wearing high-waisted rubber shoes stepping around in the mud sprinkled with a layer of wheat straw. It was very interesting, and I couldn't help but want to try it.

But when I stepped into the mud with my feet and tried my best to pull them out, I couldn't help but think of "After it rains, the beautiful female doctors in the city wear thin strap sandals and go to the countryside." "My heel was stuck off by clay before I even entered the village." I was so embarrassed that my face turned red with shame.

The clay in my hometown that is "sticky when wet, hard when dry, and cannot be moved without being wet or dry" is indeed well-deserved, especially the evenly mixed wheat straw mud, which is even more bullying - no matter if I take three The toothed hook went down, or I used a three-pronged shovel to gouge it in, but it didn't come out anyway.

Later, I simply stepped on it with bare feet and shoveled it with my bare hands. My father squatted upside down and neatly stacked the wheat straw mud handed over by my sister or me on the brick base covered with a thin layer of reed pipes.

My father said that you should not be too frizzy in anything you do. Swallows pay attention to step by step when building their nests in mud. Farmers grow crops according to the seasons, and they must master the "temperature" of wheat straw and mud walls - even if they look at the bottom layer quickly. Once it's dry, there's no rush. It will deform when someone squats on it, and sometimes it will shake or even collapse.

More than half a month passed in the blink of an eye. When my interest in stepping on wheat straw mud and rolling mud balls gradually became boring, and even felt that it had become a burden, my father said, "The window is too high. Let’s use adobe instead.”?

Speaking of making bricks, I got interested again. Because long before I played in the mud, I had seen my father and the others dance like "three shovels, one mold, twenty-four pestles"...

I vaguely remember that that day I went to deliver dry food and food to my father and the others. Water, I can hear the rhythm of "dong dong dong... dong dong dong..." from a distance, which is very interesting.

When I got closer, my father was carrying a piece of freshly laid adobe to stack. Haiping was standing in the knee-deep pit, using a baffle to scrape the soil off the backing board, and molding the jujube wood into a mold. He placed it on the backing board again, then inserted the baffle, threw a handful of plant ash into the blank mold, and then picked up a shovel and filled it with three shovels of soil. ?

At this time, my father just returned.

I saw him twisting his waist, jumping onto the blank mold, jumping up and stomping a few times, and then kicked off the excess soil on the sides. Then he lifted the stone pestle with both hands and pounded it backwards towards the center three times. down, then move forward left and right and tap lightly nine times, then raise the pestle head and step back and tap it hard nine times, then tap the mold three times lightly, and finally put the stone pestle firmly aside, spread your legs and jump off He kicked the brick mold backwards with his right heel, and at the same time lifted up the mold with his waist, and lifted the brick with both hands...

My father said, don't underestimate the "one minute" A handful of ashes, three shovels of soil, and twenty-four pestles." It is not only a physical job, but also a technical job. If the two people do not cooperate tacitly, it will not be completed at all.

Summer is full of awns and summer is hot. In the blink of an eye, it is the time to grow awns and harvest wheat again.

Suddenly I thought of the four major tasks of "harvesting wheat, beating grain, digging rivers, and building embankments" that have gradually faded away; the "warm in winter and cool in summer" adobe house where Hengrui and Ruizhen lived Westinghouse; The most determined gaze in my solitary journey, the pride of my life, my unparalleled hero...

This is for me to remember.