The warmth and coldness of the world is wasted.

Winter is coming, a season that people both love and hate.

Because I have been afraid of cold since childhood, I don’t like winter. However, winter can make people calm down and slowly reflect on the past.

When I was a child, it always snowed heavily in the winter, the howling north wind blew through the roofs and treetops, the ponds around the village were covered with thick ice, and the water tanks in the house There is also a thin layer of ice inside.

The little girl who was born after the frost was supposed to be as resistant to frost and cold as the chrysanthemum. In fact, he was born weak and sickly. When the weather gets cold, his hands and feet become cold and he has nowhere to hide. Whenever winter comes, I put on thick cotton clothes, trousers and shoes early, like a fat, stupid little pig.

My ancestors were farmers, and they were so poor that they couldn’t even afford coal. When I remember, the main house in my house was no longer there, and there were only two small west rooms. There was a cooking room with a cooking pot and a kang head attached to it, where grandpa and grandma lived. Because of the residual heat from cooking and burning firewood, the mattress under the kang was warm at night.

The kang in the other small west room where our sisters and parents lived was not so warm. Before going to bed at night, burn a few handfuls of firewood on the kang hole to prevent the bed from being cold when you lie down. When I was very young, my feet were always very cold. My mother was not good at spinning and sewing, so I asked my father to hold them with his hands to warm my feet. At that time, my father was young and loved to be lively. He wrapped my feet in cotton and secretly ran out to sing model operas with the people in the village.

Sometimes I lived with my mother at my grandma’s house. My grandma liked to hold me in her arms with her big-breasted cotton-padded jacket, and wrap my cold little feet in the waistband of her big cotton trousers. That was what I felt when I was young. This is the warmest place in the world.

My grandma’s house also had a clay kang connected to a large stove. There is a portrait of the Stove Lord in front of the stove. Every year on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, please take it down and replace it with a new one. The walls around the fire pit were blackened by fireworks, and the birds and fish I drew on them with my fingernails remained on them for many years.

When I was in elementary school, my life improved a little and I started buying coal for heating. At that time, transportation was still very underdeveloped. My father, uncles and uncles went together to buy coal in distant places. They called it "pushing charcoal". Each person pushed a rubber cart, all the way south from Gaoqing, through Zhangdian Huantai, and all the way to the coal mines in Nanding, Zichuan. When they left, the cart was empty. When they came back, they pushed the coal and it sank. , which is about 70 to 80 kilometers away. If you can’t make it back that day, you have to spend the night on the road.

There isn't much coal pushed back on a cart from such a distance, and it won't last long, so gold is very expensive, so the stove is only lit when it's extremely cold. The earliest earthen stoves we used were made of bricks, and the flue went from the kang hole, and then came out from the chimney at the corner of the kang. The coal burned in the furnace is not lumped coal, but the pulverized coal must be mixed with clay and water, stirred repeatedly with a hoe, mashed into a paste and piled next to the furnace, and shoveled into the coal. The shovel in the stove is called zhazi (three sounds) in our Gaoqing dialect. Lighting a stove is also a technical job. You must first put in soft wood to light the fire, then put in some hard wood, then paste in the slag, and slowly dry it before it can burn. If it is not lit correctly, a whole room of smoke will come out, choking people to tears.

When you don’t need a fire at night, you can cover the mouth of the stove and poke a small hole with a fire pillar to keep it at a minimum firepower without extinguishing it. When you get up in the morning and use the fire to boil water for cooking, you make the small holes on the top a little bigger and scrape out the soot underneath to let the air circulate, so that the fire will burn brighter. The most terrifying thing is the smell. The pungent smell makes people choke and feel worse than a room full of smoke. Fortunately, the doors and windows of the house at that time were not very well sealed, otherwise, it would be easy to get gas poisoning.

In winter, the stove is the warmest and most comfortable place. Men sit around the stove drinking tea and chatting, while old ladies, eldest girls, and young wives gather together to sit on the stove and do needlework. Knitting sweaters, wrapping shoe soles, making insoles, winding wool, and twisting twine. Although the hands are very busy, it is the most leisure time for rural people throughout the year.

There was a stove in the classroom of our primary school because coal was so rare that it was not easy to light it until it was very cold. We were wearing thick cotton jackets, trousers and shoes, but our hands and feet were still numb from the cold. When I went to the toilet, my fingers were frozen and I couldn't untie my belt, so I had to run to the teacher for help.

In those cold winters, our children were so cold that they had runny noses all day long. Very few children had handkerchiefs, so they usually wiped the mucus from their noses with their coat sleeves.

The sleeves of such a fine cotton-padded jacket will become smooth and hard after being worn for only a few days, like armor. It is said that a match can be struck on it.

I am afraid of the cold. In those winters, it was common to have frozen hands and feet. The backs of my hands and heels were swollen like steamed buns, and sometimes there were cracks in the wind, even on my face. Frostbite. The photos taken by photographers of children in impoverished mountainous areas with their faces red and swollen from the cold are exactly the same as ours when we were children.

Every year after frostbite in the heels and toes, they will feel itchy and painful as soon as they warm up. I have also tried many folk remedies, such as applying live sparrow brains, burning green onion peels, steamed hawthorn for external application, and soaking red pepper and Sichuan peppercorns. I have tried all kinds of folk remedies, but Frostbite will still happen next year.

Winter is much better when there is no school. There are also coal sellers in the county. In the summer, we would drive our animals and pull the carts to queue up to buy back a cart of coal. At this time, the earthen stove for burning the kang was no longer used, nor was it used to burn coal powder and clay slag. Instead, the iron stove was used to burn coal lumps. The fire was strong, there was less soot, and it was cleaner than the earthen stove.

When I left the village and entered the city, I didn't expect it to be so warm in the city. That winter, I was a joke in people's eyes when I was wearing a thick cotton-padded jacket and a thick woolen coat and carrying two thick quilts and two mattresses with me.

The heating and air conditioning in the city are really good. They make everything indoors warm in winter, just like spring. They are also clean, there is no smoke, and they don’t burn coal. They only burn money. It gives people the illusion that winter is getting warmer.

After staying in such a warm winter for a long time, I will become even more intolerant of the cold when I return to the winter in the village.

The cycle of cold and heat in the human world lasts for decades. There are many turning points in life that happen in winter, and many of the memories that winter left me are really not very good. But it’s all over.

I always like to review on winter nights. The things I have experienced over the years, the roads I have traveled, and the people I have warmed. Then tell yourself that although this world is cold, it is worth your time.