The orchard is sunny.

Our home is in a small village in the southern countryside. In my earliest memory, our home is a bit like an orchard.

There is an old longan tree and two tall plum trees in front of the house. There is a pond under the longan tree. There are two guava trees, a loquat tree and a wampee tree on the flat ground beside the pond. There are big stones by the pond, and next to the big stone board for washing clothes and vegetables, there is a cluster of green peony planted by my aunt, which shines in the water when it blooms. Next to the peony flowers are several guava trees originating in China. One * * * three trees, two of which have branches reaching out to the water, and the branches spread out, covering a small side of the pond. There is still a small clearing in the west of the house, and some grapes are planted. Vines climb on the shelf, and there is a green pavilion in summer. The fruits of these trees are fond memories of my childhood, which I will never forget.

With those fruit trees, my family is full of fruits from spring to autumn every year.

There are loquats in March and April. When the fruit changes from green to Huang Shi, pick it, wash it, peel it and bite it into your mouth. Sweet and sour juice will spread on the tip of the tongue. Grandma will pick some loquats with leaves and eat fruit with the children, saying that those leaves can be boiled and drunk.

Li Zigang was a little yellow in May, so my sisters and I grabbed a corner and pulled a big piece of cloth under the tree. Adults beat plums with bamboo poles and knocked them off one by one. Put the collected plums in a crock, sprinkle with salt and marinate for a period of time, and then use them to send porridge. Pickling large cans of plums is a matter for adults. The child can't wait that long. They picked up plums, licked them, bit some salt, and bit a little bit of salt. Even though they frowned with acid, they ate them with relish. Sometimes I am really greedy, so I wash the used ink bottle, break the plums, put them in, sprinkle with salt, cover the bottle, and shake them up, down, left and right. Don't underestimate this bottle of homemade snacks, which is a good thing to attract friends. After class, children will surround it and wait for its little owner to share the small fruit in the bottle. What do you use to take out the fruit? It is a thorny twig folded by a thorn on the roadside. The twig was carefully trimmed with a knife and cut smoothly. Put one end of the small thorn in an ink bottle, plunge it into the small fruit and take it out. Send it to your mouth to cure the greedy bug that comes out of your tongue.

Guava has been on the market since about June. The children at home are all rock climbers. Even a little girl like me is as flexible as a monkey in a tree. She can freely pick the biggest, ripest and most fragrant fruit and eat it while picking. The fragrance of the fruit covered with branches not only attracted the birds, but also attracted the children of the five teams opposite. Those children, I don't know how many times a day. They were just about to approach the target from the pond over there, but they were frightened by the footsteps of the owner here or the creaking sound of opening the door, and immediately turned and ran. However, after all, delicious fruit still has great temptation. When the surroundings are quiet, they will turn back, sneak into the water, swim under the tree and quickly gather to eat.

My brothers and sisters will shout at a distance to scare those children, but my grandmother says you all have a good meal and let them choose some. She often asks her grandchildren to pick some for their neighbors, relatives and friends, or say hello to villagers passing by: Come and eat fruit!

There are longan and yellow skin in July and August. Not too much yellow skin, but more longan. A big tree hangs thickly and looks golden. That longan is like a soup dumpling, very sweet. The tree is too high for the children to climb. My brother must carry a ladder and put it on the suitcase. He had to climb from the ladder to the branch, and then the rope he put on his arm was taken back. One end is squeezed on the branch and the other end hangs down, so that I can tie it to the basket. He pulled the basket up the tree, filled it three or two times, and then hung it down, enough to pick several baskets at a time.

Picked longan, very sweet, the fruit eater asked: Why not sell such a good fruit?

My dad said: people still want to buy some fruits for their children, so leave some fruits at home for themselves!

My grandmother said: I'm full, so I'll sell it if I don't want to eat.

A tree as big as longan can't be eaten, and there is a fruiting longan tree in the field on the mountain! Dry buns on the mountain have thick flesh and sweet taste. In some years, longan was recycled too much and had to be sold.

Grandma picked leaves from clusters of longan fruits, rearranged them and tied them into bundles with thread, only to see that the fruits were missing branches.

I'm helping. Grandma said: Can you count when you go to school?

I said: Yes.

Grandma said: when you get to the assembly, you are responsible for selling fruits and you are responsible for counting money and collecting money. Is it okay?

I said: Yes.

Grandma always said that she didn't go to school. I have been helping her count since I went to school.

At the party, grandma spread a piece of film on the floor and put out a string of longan. Don't shout, people in the market will come around to bargain and let the shopkeeper weigh it. Sometimes I am in a hurry, and my grandmother says, take your time! Mr Wang Can doesn't seem to teach as much math as his wife!

Grandma said the number of wives, that is, the number of people she has never studied business. Although I am in grade five, I should not run as fast as her old man. It seems that she just wants her little granddaughter to exercise, and after receiving the money, she will say to me: You have to calculate whether it is right or not! She won't let you go until I tell you the calculation result.

In fact, in primary school, I not only sold longan with my grandmother, but even when my mother raised chickens for sale, my grandmother asked me to help her count and collect money.

In the scorching sun, the grape trellis at home was covered. Grandma and I enjoy the cool under the shed. Grandma rummaged through the leaves of the grapes, picked some transparent grapes and said they were ripe. Both grandparents and grandchildren eat together, sweet. I also look for ripe and crystal-clear grapes through the leaves of grapes, and sometimes I find big and long caterpillars. Throw it to the chicken, sometimes the chicken doesn't eat bugs. I'll get some sisal leaves, stab the worm and watch it roll. Catching insects for grapes is my daily task.

The grapes are too ripe to eat, and grandma will take some when the children are at school and take them to the school brigade.

Adults will buy some, mainly for some rich students. A few bunches of grapes for a dime, she doesn't care how much it costs, and she will go home when the fruit is sold out. After a long time, the students all know that there is a grape in my house that will bear fruit. Everyone likes going home with her after school. For my family's grapes, my friends still talked about it as adults: I thought that there was only that grape in the village! After school, I always want to find an opportunity to go around and know where the grapes are far away.

Children seem to have a magical instinct, even though no one says they can find the food they want. Many fruit trees at home saved me from a lot of greed and hunger in my childhood.

Although there are many fruit trees at home, my father still likes to grow fruit trees. Someone returned some mangoes. He took the chewed mango and said, can this be planted? Then he would bury the core in a flowerpot, wondering if the seeds survived.

There is a small river near our village called Nalan River. It is said that there is an orchard and a big pear tree on the river bank. After collecting the fruits in the pear garden, my sister took me there once, looking for any fallen fruits one by one. As a result, no pears were found that day, so the two sisters had to go home disappointed. My father may know about it, but he remembers that we will eat a lot of pears later: there are sand pears, green pears, crisp pears and sweet pears. In the season when pears are ripe, there is a dish on our table, which is pear pieces mixed with sugar.

Grow up slowly, then leave home and go to school in the city. When I came back from vacation, I could help my grandmother tie longan, but I still ate more and sold less, and sent out a lot of fruit.

My father prefers to study fruit trees. I don't know where to find many high-quality fruit varieties, including sweet peaches, pears, grapefruit, and many longan and litchi, all of which are planted in the mountains. He also planted a banana. He said to me: You can support yourself by his orchard in the future, and you can come back to eat fruit in the future. What he said was full of hope and sunshine, but I felt a little sad after listening to it.

One day, my father said to me with a fruit, eat it. This kind of fruit is called passion fruit. I ate too little fruit. I don't remember the taste, but I remember the nice name. Many years later, I saw a lot of passion fruit in my life, and many people around me told me the delicious passion fruit. I tried a few. It was too sour. I wonder why this kind of fruit is favored by so many people. I searched for passion fruit on Baidu and accidentally found that passion fruit also has a name called passion fruit, which is extremely rich in nutrition. Just because of this at first, I went to buy a lot of passion fruit. A big reason is that I miss my father and the feeling that my father told me to eat passion fruit.

Passion fruit can be eaten in many ways. If it is ripe enough, it is sweet enough to be eaten directly in the mouth. Some are sour and sweet. You can sprinkle some salt into the pulp and stir it, and it will be delicious in your mouth. Another way to eat is to make a hole in the passion fruit, put some honey in it and dig it with a spoon. Sour and sweet, eating one makes people think about the next one. I often miss the man who talks about the orchard while eating passion fruit, and his face is full of sunshine: if he is still there, there will be passion fruit or passion fruit in his orchard.

When my father is around, I seldom go to his orchard. Even on busy days outside, I leave home in a hurry. He picked all ripe fruits, including pears, loquats, longan, lychee, peaches and grapefruit, each with its own flavor. Every time I go home, he will stop what he is doing, sit together and chat with me, and let me take all the fruits when he comes back. When my son was one year old, he suddenly fainted in his banana field. No one thought that in such a short moment, heaven and man were separated forever, but the orchard he planted stayed.

I have been afraid to go to banana fields or orchards because I am afraid of touching the scenery. Bananas are full, and no one picks them hanging on the tree. It was mother who cut them down, picked them up and sent them to school. The loquat in the orchard was ripe, and no one picked it. My mother picked it and gave it back to me. Her thin shoulders, carrying a heavy bag, people in their sixties are walking very fast, which reminds me of all kinds of situations when she picks fruits, the sadness that no one picks them when they are ripe, and tears want to flow. I said: I want to eat fruit in the future, and I will pick it myself when I go back. Don't pick it like this. After all, the fruit is too heavy.

After a long time, I went to the orchard. When I went to pick the fruit, my cousin had built a pig farm where my father left the orchard. In order to build a pigsty, some pear trees, litchi trees and longan trees were cut down from the fruit forest, leaving loquat, grapefruit, wampee and a sappan tree. Sumu does not bear fruit. This is a medicinal plant. It is said that my father found it from my grandmother's house and planted it. Every year before the Dragon Boat Festival, my mother will cut off some branches of Sumu, cut them into pieces and take them to the collection for sale as medicinal materials. After my father left, no one knew how to care for those fruit trees, and no one fertilized them. The longer the fruit, the smaller it became. The shape of the green pear was distorted and astringent because of moth-eaten, and finally it could only be cut off.

My cousin left later, leaving a pigsty and half an orchard, and a sad dream.

The sun still shines on the orchard, but it can't stop the gradual decline of the orchard. However, no one is in charge of the orchard, and a lot of grapefruit will still be produced every autumn. The Mid-Autumn Festival should be the season for eating grapefruit, but those grapefruit will not mature until after the Double Ninth Festival. When we finished the Mid-Autumn Festival, the grapefruit gradually matured and fell to the ground when it was ripe. Mother is old and can't reach the fruit hanging high on the tree, but she will still pick up the fallen fruit. Some grapefruit are eaten, and some are placed in the yard, golden, facing the road at the gate of the yard.

Later, my brother built more pig houses in his father's orchard. In order to do a good job of epidemic prevention in pig farms, it is best not to walk into that garden gate. I usually just look at the dense trees in the orchard from afar. In those shadows, not only pigs are screaming, but also poultry are running around looking for food. My brother said it was his farmhouse. Over the years, he has become younger and more energetic, enjoying the fresh air in the countryside. In my father's orchard, his song came from time to time: If we don't grow up, can you still hold me high? ...

Today, there is still silence around my hometown, and many fruit trees have disappeared, but the ancient longan tree outside the door still stands there. She is old, but she still bears some fruit every year, so that when the branches are pressed down, one hand can be pulled out. It turns out that when we were young, we thought trees grew very tall because we were too short at that time.

Time has changed our life scenes. People who are eager to grow up when they are young often miss their childhood when they grow up. Every time we go back to the countryside where we once longed to escape and look at the birds flying high in the blue sky, we will deeply miss those happy scenes in the orchard.