Childhood and Four Seasons in Tuanbowa

Speaking of Tuanbowa, I'm afraid not many people except the locals know where it is. But I spent my childhood there, and the four seasons in Tuanbowa are a hotbed for storing my happy childhood.

It belongs to a small town in Jinghai, Tianjin, but it is not my hometown, where I was born, nor my home.

My father is an employee of Dagang Oilfield and my mother is a family member. Due to the special reasons of our single-employee family and the organizational difficulties at that time, the unified organization was arranged in this small place.

In memory, this tiny place is subdivided into a factory, a second factory, a third factory, a fourth factory and a base, and so on. Each name belongs to a different family domain, such as drilling and geophysical exploration. Surrounded by the names of rivers and villages that I grew up with, such as Liu Du Alkaline River and Changliu Village, which I was familiar with when I was a child.

When I was about 4 years old, when I just remembered, my mother took my sister and me, packed up the belongings we brought from my hometown in Hebei, bid farewell to the two big poplars in the yard, and got on the old green Jiefang truck that my father borrowed from the unit to move. What impressed me the most was the round nose on the front of the car and the wooden baffle painted with green paint on the bucket, and my mother brought a bottle of water from her hometown with an iron pan for fear that my sister and I would not be acclimatized to the new place. These things constitute my first memory of my new life. After a bumpy journey, my family came to live in Tuanbowa No.3 branch and started the happiest time in my childhood and even childhood memory.

Tuanbowa is simply a paradise for my childhood. Blue sky and white clouds represent our happy mood. Occasionally, the rain and snow accompanied by the corresponding solar terms add a child's interest in the occasional boredom. Spring is pale blue, summer is dark green, autumn is golden yellow, and winter is white. So that the pleasing scenes described in the primary school Chinese text can be matched with the four seasons in Tuanbowa, and I am handy every time I recite the text describing the scenery.

There are always different things for us to play in spring, summer, autumn and winter, such as fishing in the water, catching cicadas in the trees, baking sweet potatoes in the wild, playing with mud by the river, skating in snowball fights, making crisp little flutes with green skin rubbed by willow branches, and so on. These things don't seem to be in the eyes of children, making us happy and carefree.

The spring scenery in Tuanbowa is earlier than other places. As soon as winter is over, willow branches can't wait to spit out buds, warm wind blows the saline-alkali land green, and sharp reeds rise piece by piece. Although I am going to school, I will also have new expectations, that is, my own vegetable garden. In spring, in our family, my father basically goes out to work, and my mother stays at home and does some manual work on the farm. In addition, they started to run their own vegetable garden. The vegetable gardens are basically not far from home. My home is in the outermost row of the family area, and the vegetable garden can be built according to the house. My mother sowed the seeds of tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic, green onions and other daily vegetables, leaving a small space and planting some flowers commonly known as barley ripe. I have never understood why this flower is called this name, probably because it blooms when barley is ripe. For me, the attraction of the vegetable garden is that it can be watered. Because the length was not enough, I connected two black rubber pipes of my father who sheared socialist wool in my unit to an iron pipe, and then watered the well-divided areas in the garden. I can play while watering, flush the ant nest with water, or plug the pipe tightly, so that the water will become like a water gun, rush out of a big vortex and see my own. This is my simplest happiness.

When full of green was in the vegetable garden, summer came, and the long summer vacation was the wildest season for children. Summer always makes people hot and dry. The chirping of cicadas and the buzzing of bees make us uneasy. Occasionally, a hot wind blows and the lush trees dance, which seems to tease our nerves constantly. Usually, we go swimming in the river, catch loaches, jump dragonflies and bake grasshoppers. Needless to say, the most interesting thing is that there is a big water storage tank not far from the bungalow area where we live. After the summer vacation, we often have water fights around here with toy water guns that adults have bought repeatedly. If you don't have a water gun, you can buy a tight hose, find a ballpoint pen to grind a pinhole, then insert it at one end of the pipe, tie a knot at the other end, and match it with an iron clip, which is a simple water gun. There is a small river ditch under the cauldron, which is not even a ditch, but the water is clear. Four or five of our friends come here every day to dig ditches and play the game of building dams. Every time the mud stopped, it was washed away in a short time, and so on, until it was covered with mud, it still failed, but it left us with a clear giggle.

The happy time of summer passed quickly. When we started to write our summer homework anxiously, autumn came to us with the start of school. In my impression, autumn is lifeless, and there is a scene of brown and yellow ruin everywhere. The leaves on the ground are getting thicker every day, the autumn wind is blowing, and dandelions are flying all over the sky. There are no bugs to catch, and we don't need to take care of the vegetable garden. Only reeds swaying in the wind are still tempting us. When we are bored, we will grab a handful of reeds and weave some shapes we don't know at will. Although everything is lifeless, it does not affect our entertainment. Especially after the Mid-Autumn Festival, when the crops in a large field have been harvested by the red harvester, we will put down the pieces of paper and glass balls in our hands, run and wrestle in the field, bring sweet potatoes and potatoes from home, have a picnic with the remaining corn stalks in the field, and have small accidents of burning eyebrows and hair, but they don't care. Every time I go for a picnic, I always stay up late and go home. It is inevitable that I will be reprimanded by my parents. Some parents beat me badly, but children often forget the pain when the scar heals. A few days later, as soon as everyone met, they hurried away.

One day in late autumn, at the southernmost tip of the family area, it was originally a large saline-alkali land covered with reeds and wild vegetables. As a result, one day when we were chasing the wild in the open space, we only heard an excavator rumbling away. In a short time, the place where we played all day turned into a huge deep depression, and then people kept adding water and turned it into a fish pond. This made us angry and depressed for a long time. When we entered the winter of 65438+February, after the first snow, the pool froze, and we cheered, and new happiness came. Speaking of skating, we children all have simple ice skates made by ourselves or at home. Mine was made by my father. First, a wooden chassis was made, with two solid wood brackets and a bench nailed to it. Then put steel bars on the bottom of the wooden support, and add two hard steel bars as hand supports, and a pair of ice carts will be completed. Of course, older children go straight over the wall to the unoccupied room, tear down the wooden windows and make the floor. If there is no steel bar, they can directly use thick iron wire instead and row on the ice. That speed looks as good as my exquisite version. There is another guy among the partners who play together. His father is proficient in welding technology, so he welded an all-steel version of the guy, which makes us envious, just like high-end professional equipment in the atmosphere. So everyone rushed to please him in exchange for ten minutes of fresh experience. Before and after the Chinese New Year in winter, skating will be changed to setting off firecrackers, and hanging guns will be removed and put away. Brave people will light the primer in their hands and throw it out. It will burst with a bang in mid-air, which is really exciting, but I seldom try it because I am timid.

Of course, our four seasons are still mixed with school life, so let's talk about my primary school life. In the first three grades, we all went to school at home and walked together. At that time, there was no school violence and no child abduction, so adults didn't care. Even if they didn't come back after school, they couldn't find it. They must have gone somewhere. In the fourth grade, due to too few students, the school was cancelled, and children from several factories nearby moved to Tuanbowa Base Primary School. Because they are a little far from home, they take a unified bus from all subordinate units every day, and a retired teacher will be arranged on the bus to be responsible for our safety. In my opinion, I'm afraid that should be the prototype of the school bus now. As soon as we sit in the car, everyone likes to talk and fight in the car, and even have verbal disagreements. A fight between children, of course. Often, before I could start work, I was sharply reprimanded by the teacher, and then the surrounding immediately became silent. After a while, the usual noise resumed, and then it was reprimanded and repeated, like a cat catching a mouse, which was very interesting. Occasionally, due to special reasons, there will be a day when there is no shuttle bus. It was our happiest time at school. Because you don't have to go home at noon, you can ask for money from home, eat a bowl of Lamian Noodles near the school after school at noon, and even pay one or two yuan more if you can at home, and go to the school game hall to play several rounds of street fighter. As for how to get to school, everyone will ride to school together that day. The scene is spectacular, especially when we find that the little guy riding the 28-car can't reach the pedal and has to pad it all up, which makes us laugh.

And every time I hear the cadence of two thin old men who came to our family area from Changliu Village to collect junk, I will run out to see it. I mainly like to observe their tattered Barr trolleys, which are rusty and have no brake handles and legs. When I need to stop, I take out a thick stick from the basket and bid farewell to the tripod area of the car, so that the car is firmly supported on the ground. I still think that scene is funny.

It is these happy and easy-to-satisfy days that have accompanied us through the changes of seasons and years. Everything has ups and downs, but our innocence has always existed.

Later, in the sixth grade of primary school, we moved out of Tuanbowa as a whole and went to my father's unit to live in a new building. Now we live in Dongying. But since then, I don't know whether I grew up or Tuan Bowa really has its unique charm of the four seasons. I can't find the feeling of being a child anymore, and I can't even find a suitable place to play glass balls. For me, since then, I have had the unique troubles of teenagers and hazy thinking about life.

That's right: times are changing, so are we.

Fortunately, I have a perfect childhood memory. My growth is accompanied by the alternation of four seasons. In my impression, every season has its rich colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, and each color is intertwined, forming a rainbow in my childhood memory. Even after more than 20 years, those colors and things are still clearly engraved in my mind for me to recall to fill the spiritual emptiness I had to face in my thirties.

I think, in the near future, I must take my children back, even if things have changed.