Earth Village Prose

I often dream of going back to my hometown where I have been away for many years. My poor but happy childhood was always closely related to the soil.

In those years, I didn’t have a good impression of soil. The muddy path was like a rope that tied my weak footsteps, making the road even more difficult to walk. The muddy mud always jumps onto my body with a smile on its face, staining my already tattered clothes and pants. What is particularly intolerable is that dirt seems to be a symbol of backward rural areas. People covered in dirt are always looked down upon no matter where they go. Even farmers are discriminatoryly called "old-fashioned", "country bumpkin", "mud-legged", etc. I have a distant relative who lives in the county. Every time I visit with the grains, vegetables and dust all over my body, I always get a bunch of strange looks. They ask me to dust them off and change into slippers. , which makes me feel inferior to others. As time goes by, I no longer want to have such relatives.

Children in rural areas really hope that it will be sunny 365 days a year, so that they will not suffer from mud and water. I was often scolded by adults because I didn't care about the hunger and thirst of the crops and cursed the rainy weather.

The primary school I attended was in very poor conditions. There was a catchphrase circulating at that time: "Mud table, clay platform, sit a clay child on it." Although the infrastructure is very simple, with clay as the "natural building material" urgently needed for building schools, our tables, chairs, benches, and school building maintenance Wait, it's all solved.

If it rains in the summer, I can wear a plastic raincoat, walk barefoot on the dirt road, and go to the village primary school three miles away to study. However, when it snows in winter, going to school becomes a headache. At that time, there was a lack of rubber rain boots at home, and there were no snow shoes that are abundant in modern shopping malls. I could only wear straw "maws" to go to school. The "Mawozi" itself weighed two to three kilograms, and it became even heavier after being covered with mud. When I wore it to school, my feet were often worn out. In the snow, even if I am shivering from the cold, I hope the weather can be colder, so that the ground will be frozen and I can walk on the hard icy road without the pain of trudging through the mud. .

However, no matter how much I hate soil, it is always like family, never leaving me, and staying with me every day. For example, my village is made of dirt. The fellow villagers live in adobe houses, walk on dirt roads, eat grains produced in the fields, and wear cotton grown on the land... It is impossible to imagine how we could survive without soil.

During spring plowing, summer planting, and autumn harvest, the hard-working animals, carrying heavy pear rakes, rumbled past the dirt road in front of the village amidst the singing and cursing of the adults. In a few days, the oxcart wheels equipped with iron hoops will roll out two deep tracks on the dirt road, and the originally hard mud will turn into dust like flour. My friends and I ran over and used it to build various high-rise buildings. At the same time, we also piled our ideals into those "grand" castles.

At that time, I didn’t know what electric toys were, so mud became a free material for our homemade toys. I dug a piece of mud from the pond. I can carve out pigs, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks and geese. I can make it into pots, pans, spoons and basins. I can shape different characters. I can also make a whistle and blow it out after drying. song. The little mud brought me a lot of joy, from which I learned a lot of skills and increased my wisdom.

After winter, soil will have a wider range of uses. The cabbages in the vegetable garden need to be buried in soil to keep them warm and frost-proof; thousands of kilograms of potatoes need to be dug in a large earth cellar to be stored as the family's basic winter rations.

In those days, there were no chemical fertilizers in the countryside, and the barren land mainly relied on soil fertilizers to fertilize the fields. After the ponds dried up in winter, the production team leader would organize a large number of laborers with shovels to dig ditches of mud—the best fertilizer at the time. My fashion can't carry heavy work and I can't earn work points for my family, but I can make a simple lunch for my hard-working parents.

The soil of my hometown has seen all the vicissitudes of life and witnessed many joys and sorrows, separations and separations. Every moment, it lovingly watches the villagers coming and going in front of them, working at sunrise and resting at sunset; it lovingly watches the girls getting married from the mud houses, and welcomes the newlyweds to settle in this village; It prays silently for every life that passes away, and paves the way for every young foot...

Now, I have been living in a corner of the city, and I have not been with the soil of my hometown for a long time.

I wonder if after all these years, the soil of my hometown still remembers the boy who went out to study and smelled of soil? It's just that since he walked out of this muddy land, he has come back less and less, and I don't know if he can come back often to be close to you in the future. Would you blame him?

The soil of my hometown waits for the village year after year, pays attention to the village, feeds the village, and warms the village. It is the real owner of the village. Human life is short, but soil is eternal.

The soil is so broad-minded, and everything in the world is born from the soil; it is also so tolerant, and the place where all life returns is still this warm and thick soil.

During the Spring Festival this year, I returned to my hometown to stay for a few days. It was raining and snowy, so I found some rubber shoes and put them on, and walked almost every path, field and ditch around the village. My roots are here, and no matter where I go to the end of the world, this will always be my spiritual home.

In fact, I am a piece of wandering soil in my hometown.