Essay on Mother Cloth Shoes

Mother has been busy making shoes all winter.

She found out the old clothes at home and opened them one by one. Boil the rice soup into a thick paste, remove the old door panels abandoned in the corner and clean them up. Then take advantage of the warm sun, spread the tattered old pieces of cloth flat on the door panel, and stick them together layer by layer with the prepared rice soup. When the cloth installed on the door panel dries in the sun to form a big hard shell, it can be gently lifted up like a piece of paper, and kept as a spare material for storing soles and insoles. This is what local rural people commonly call a "shell".

Shoemaking is a particularly time-consuming and laborious job. Now, in any street, you can easily buy very cheap Beijing cloth shoes from the stalls, which are as beautiful and elegant on your feet. So it is really uneconomical to make cloth shoes by hand. I've been trying to persuade my mother not to do this again. I said we don't wear it now. But she is still busy alone and enjoys it. She said that when we are sleeping mats at home, wearing cloth shoes will not cause beriberi. She not only made it for our family, but also made a lot and gave it to relatives respectively. I'm afraid people won't accept her kindness, because like myself, too few people are willing to wear cloth shoes, not to mention the cloth shoes made by my mother are not beautiful, and some can even be called ugly.

Considering the size of the wearer's feet, mother cut the hard cloth shell into a pair of feet, then folded the cut cloth shell into a cloth pier with a thickness of about one centimeter, fixed around it, and tied a fine and neat thread on the cloth pier with a needle, and the cloth pier became a solid sole. Rural soles use much thicker hemp ropes instead of thin lines. These hemp ropes are also quite troublesome to handle.

In the countryside before us, almost every family planted ramie. After complicated processing, the skin of this plant can be turned into white and strong fiber bundles. These fiber bundles are twisted into strands with an old-fashioned spinning wheel, which is the hemp rope that can be used to support the soles. Of course, these fibers can also be processed into homespun through more complicated procedures. Before and after I was born, this kind of cloth was still very common in our local countryside. Although strong, it is stiff and has poor thermal insulation performance. When I was reading, I covered myself with linen bedding and slowly felt the warmth of winter after midnight. I have also used linen curtains, which are airtight and deadly in hot weather. This kind of cloth is essential for funerals, but it is far less soft and warm than the muslin in daily life. The advantage of using hemp rope as sole is that hemp is not only durable, but also waterproof, which is especially important for cloth shoes.

Thick soles are difficult for needles to penetrate, so accepting soles is both physical and technical. I tried it myself, but I couldn't get the thread off twice. My finger was pricked several times and it hurt badly. Mother also used several tools to make soles: thimble, needle pliers and beeswax. A thimble is like a wide-brimmed ring with neat pits on it. Mother put the thimble on the middle finger of her right hand, pinched the needle nose, slowly pushed the steel needle into the blank of the sole, and pulled it out from the other side of the sole with needle pliers. It is not only difficult for the steel needle to pass through the blank of the sole, but also difficult to pull out the rope smoothly. So always apply beeswax to make it slippery. Every stitch is so troublesome, you can imagine how long it will take to make a pair of soles. If you are interested, you can find a sewing needle to stick a book half a centimeter thick. It usually takes several weeks to get a pair of soles. Fortunately, my mother always does this intentionally or unintentionally when chatting or sunbathing. Her time is not measured by economic value.

It's much easier to make uppers. Buy corduroy cloth and wide elastic band, cut out the shoe sample, and leave symmetrical gaps on both sides of the "fish mouth" position as a "mechanism" to adjust the tightness. Use fine cloth as the lining of the upper, lock the shoe mouth and stick the lining evenly on the inside of the upper. Cut off the excess part of the sole with a wooden knife and sew the upper on the sole, and a shoe is basically successful.

When we were young, my mother always spared no time. Even on cold winter nights, she always makes warm cotton shoes for the whole family by a weak fire every year. Therefore, my mother is never idle. Every winter and summer, she keeps knitting and wearing cotton shoes. I don't know how much time she has spent. Anyway, we walked through childhood, adolescence and youth in a pair of cloth shoes. Now students don't want to treat me as a middle-aged person, and I have become a "younger old guy". In a line, time is on her face, and her skin is getting closer and closer to earth tone. Her hands are getting more and more stiff, and I can often hear the slight explosion of her joints when she reaches out. Moreover, the cloth shoes are old, even if they have not been worn for several times, they are still left in the corner, covered with dust, or used as the delivery room for rats.

My mother is old, just like a yellow calendar next to the gate of my hometown. Mother has no school education. She never told me anything profound. She always insists on doing so. Today, her hand held me up, but she may not want to get old, because she dyed all her gray hair black with the chemicals she bought. I feel as if she wants to finish all the cloth shoes I need in my life. She wants to nail all the feelings that can't be clearly expressed into the soles and sew them into the uppers, so that we can continue to walk into the mountains and rivers and never look back.

……

During the break, a student came up to me, looked at my feet, and then looked up at me and said, "Teacher, your shoes are so childlike!" " "I smiled shyly and told him that this is my son's old canvas shoes. He doesn't wear it, so I feel comfortable in class and walking. What this classmate doesn't know is that I never wore leather shoes before I joined the work, except my father's old oxhide shoes. It can be said that I grew up wearing cloth shoes made by my mother. The rest of the so-called good shoes are liberation shoes and brand-name sports shoes. I didn't wear the "double star" until I went to normal college, which made me excited for a long time. After working for more than a year, I finally put on my first pair of real "leather shoes". Since then, I have used one or two pairs of leather shoes to cope with all the weather all year round or even for many years. Now, it's my turn to pick up the canvas shoes that my son doesn't want to wear, and this is just the beginning. In fact, my father has been wearing my old clothes for many years, and I have no intention of giving up this tradition. Maybe in some people's eyes, this is stingy, but I still want to call it "hard work and plain living".

I think it is a sin to abandon an item when it still has considerable use value. Needless to say, in today's industrial society, a pair of shoes may not require much labor, but when I was a child, the cloth shoes I wore all year round were made by my mother in her spare time.