Lyric Prose of Old Houses: Old Houses Hidden in the Depth of Years

Open the rusty iron lock, open the closed door in memory, and stand in the familiar and silent yard. The sense of desolation is

Lyric Prose of Old Houses: Old Houses Hidden in the Depth of Years

Open the rusty iron lock, open the closed door in memory, and stand in the familiar and silent yard. The sense of desolation is spreading wildly in my heart: looking around, weeds encroach on every inch of land that has not been sealed by cement in the yard, between the steps and even on the high wall, standing proudly in the cold wind, and the grass tips tremble slightly after a gust of wind, as if announcing its inviolability to the owner of my yard.

Where is my haunted house? Where is the old house in my memory? Where is the Huatang that my father worked hard to build for half his life?

Several times I went back to my hometown in my dream, but I disappeared with a smile. I have breathed the air that this family has breathed here, and I have stepped on countless footprints of this family in the yard. Every corner is in my memory, fresh as ever. Those years, like the eternal Sanskrit, rattled above my head and haunted my ears. Like a fire, a piece of light is sweeping, spreading and burning my painful heart.

In a trance, those who can't grasp the past seem to have just spent a short day and been buried for a long Millennium.

The house in this courtyard has undergone several changes, bearing the hard work of parents all their lives, bearing all the joys and sorrows of our growing up and bearing the deep friendship of our happy family.

What are the earliest old houses in memory? Tile eaves? It's already the perfect house in the village. But from grandma nagging me about dad's scene countless times? Crusades? On the cover, when my mother just married my father, he should be a poor boy with only a small thatched cottage. My mother, who has just been a bride for three days, is struggling to light wet firewood in a thatched cottage, which is filled with smoke. In the smoky fire, my mother coughed and burst into tears, and her grandmother who came to pick her up just appeared at the door. Grandma searched all over the house and found only a broken bed, two old bowls, a small iron pot and even chopsticks made of straw sticks. She was too sad to speak: was her daughter coaxed into marrying such a family because the family composition was bad? Poor peasants? ! There are still four days before the Spring Festival. You see this doesn't even have new year's goods? Home? Grandma decisively broke the old custom that the married daughter could not spend the New Year at her parents' home, directed her parents, packed simple packages and went to her home for the New Year. My father, who lacks maternal love since childhood, enjoys a steaming family reunion at his grandmother's house every New Year. My warm mother never told us how shy and hard we were. Maybe at that time, young parents were full of hope, even if they racked their brains for a bowl of soup every day, they didn't feel bitter.

I don't know how my parents began to struggle for the most basic life from that empty thatched cottage. As long as I can remember, our family has been moving from east to west in the transition of housing changes, and moving like migratory birds in this small courtyard? Wandering? .

At the age of eleven, my father came out alone with his young fourth uncle. In order to survive, he knows everything and is a skillful craftsman in the village. At that time, masons were all rural? Senior engineer? Father is the supervisor of a senior engineer. This laurel, I guess, must have been honed by my father building houses again and again. My father has the ambition to give us a lofty and comfortable home, from a thatched cottage without a tile roof when he got married, to the tile roof on the first two floors and the last three floors, and then to the first big tile roof in the village (only one building can be used to show its style, and the big tile roof is different from the small blue tile that was despised by everyone at that time but is now a rare variety), and has been tossed to the first four-storey spacious bungalow in the village. Most of our parents' energy, except for raising us, is devoted to building new houses wave after wave.

In that era of food and clothing, the house was the greatest luxury and the only label to measure whether a family was rich or not. After every difficult room-changing trip, my father was as proud as a peacock, radiant, admired and admired.

At dusk and dawn after the farm work, my father went to the nearby mountain, or blasted it with explosives, pried it open with a crowbar, or swung it with a sledgehammer, and blew the boulder out of the mountain, smashed it into the required size and style, moved it to the car one by one, and pulled it back from the winding and rugged mountain road. My sister and I are going up the mountain to help move stones during the winter vacation. After a trip, our hands were broken and our feet were soft, our cotton-padded jackets were sweating, and the mountain wind blew, and the steaming sweat was as cold as ice, attached to our bodies, and we were too cold to chill. In the white fog exhaled by my father, I screamed at the sky and swung a sledgehammer. The giant stone fell apart, flying sand and flying stones, and the stone was finally splashed all over the floor.

After the stones were transported down the mountain, those with sharp edges and good appearance were sold to the construction team in the county, and the rest were the solid foundation of my father's new house or the leveled raw materials in the yard. The yard was full of stones and parents' sweat, and my father's long architectural journey began again. Because we have to build a new house in situ to lay the foundation, the main house will be demolished, so we have to live in a cramped kitchen, which is wronged in a temporary shed next to it. Continuous rainy days, from the shed where the limelight is strong to the kitchen, everywhere is sticky and wet, shivering and hiding in the bed, and the bedding is as cold as iron. Our sisters' expectation of living in a spacious and bright house that doesn't leak rain is as high as mushrooms after rain in every rainy season.

Finally, the stones were replaced by piles of paper money, the red bricks for building were pulled back, the precast slabs for casting the roof were pulled back, and the cement was also pulled back. The villagers came to help celebrate, the shouts of uncles and brothers to help unload the goods, the laughter of aunts serving tea and water, and our proud and unspeakable laughter filled the whole yard. You know, at that time, there were many houses in the village that didn't even live in tile houses. We have to live in a bungalow like city people, which is much prouder than wearing new clothes for the New Year!

Three major events for rural people: building a house, marrying a wife and having children. Building a house is the first important thing. After sowing in the autumn harvest, farmers have to be idle. With the loud noise of a long string of firecrackers, my father's huge construction project began. In order to save money, there is actually no extra money. Father invited an uncle who can build a house, and cousins who can't build a house are not far behind. They scrambled to move bricks with ash, and my mother and aunts were responsible for boiling water and cooking. The whole yard was full of excitement: the figure of workers sending mud and bricks back and forth, the shouts of uncles and aunts asking for materials, the hearty laughter of uncles and aunts, the smell of food, and the steaming steam from the steamer floating out of the kitchen. We are even more excited than New Year's Eve. Carrying bricks for a while and washing vegetables for a while, for fear of not adding bricks to the new house.

Busy for nearly a month, the main project of the new house has been completed, and the remaining piecemeal work will take some time to elaborate. After the sumptuous banquet, relatives all staggered back with hiccups. Father squatted in the yard alone, lit a cigarette and was silent. Only the light of cigarette butts flickered in the darkness. Everything was quiet, so quiet that I could hear my father's heavy breathing and the sound of falling down together in the dark.

A father who is tired and out of shape should be very satisfied: the house is built very high, seven steps higher than the yard, and the towering canopy is around. Four spacious bungalows with corridors are completely designed according to the houses in the city. The room is big enough to put the fashionable dressing table that his daughters have long wanted. Every room was fitted with doors instead of curtains, and the children had their own little world from then on.

If my father was born in a rich family, he must be a romantic poet like Li Bai. I still admire this, from the detail carving after he built the house. The wall of the yard has been built, and a living cactus has been planted on it. In two years, the walls of the courtyard will be blooming with beautiful flowers. The yard was planted with roses, chrysanthemums and other flowers and plants that nobody cared about in the countryside, and two rows of vines were set up. We can take a leisurely walk under the vines. Peach trees, apricot trees, pear trees, persimmon trees, apple trees, and even osmanthus trees rarely seen in rural areas have settled in our yard. There are elegant and faint bamboos and ginkgo biloba outside the courtyard. Fruits and vegetables in season are always fragrant. There is a canal outside Guangqing Gate, and there are several mountains on the wall in autumn. It's like a flower orchard full of vitality and fragrance. Where is the yard of an illiterate farmer? It is obviously the seclusion of an expert and elegant person!

Our home is not where we live in seclusion. Every night, after busy farm work, our neighbors and even uncles from Dongxi Village will gather in our spacious hall to listen to my cheerful and well-informed father. State affairs, news trends, when the father of village cadres for many years came with his mouth open and his head was clear; Neighborhood disputes, conflicts between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, my father can shake hands in a few words. My father has been at the forefront of leading agricultural science and technology in Sang Ma. Mother is quietly sewing in the corner of the hall, and sometimes she looks up at the teapot to see if she needs more boiling water. Over the quiet village, bursts of laughter floated from our house from time to time.

In spring, when we go to Qiu Lai, we flock of milk swallows fly away one by one. Every dawn when dew soaks, we can't hear my father driving a tractor out of the yard. At noon in hot summer, when my father came back from work, I couldn't see his tired appearance; In the dusk of every treetop, I can't hear the cooing of my mother standing in front of the steps calling for food to feed the chickens; Mother's willow tips can't be seen on the moon. Dai Yue returned home with a hoe, rolled noodles and sang a little song softly.

Gradually, more and more young people go to work in cities, leaving only the old people and children in the village, and the village is empty. At first, the noise at home was low, but then the livestock became sparse. In the morning, roosters crow one after another, and at night, the east dog barking in the depths of the village is not heard. The village is quiet, parents are old, parents in the village are old, and the house is just like them, declining day by day.

Year after year, we sent our parents away in this house, and the house was empty. Although still struggling with wind, frost, rain and snow, it has lost its vitality. Gradually, the yard of the old house is full of weeds.

Old houses, like countless villages, are afraid of carrying the flags and glory of their fathers and the memories of youth and disappearing into the depths of the years.

Author: Yun Lan

WeChat official account: Hongluoshan Academy.