When I was a child, I went up the mountain with my father to cut down trees. After my father sawed down a tree, I caressed the irregular circular pattern on the stump and asked my father, "Dad, what is this?" My father wiped the sweat on his forehead and touched my little head and said, "This is called the wheel of the year, the tree is a few years old, there are a few circles." I looked at the tree, and then looked at my father, and asked curiously, "Does that person have a wheel of life? How can I not see it?" My father smiled and said, "When you grow up, you can see it."
This is the first memory of my father in my childhood - the carpenter. But when I grew up, I preferred to believe that my father was an artist. A tree stands on a hill for thousands of years, and it is still just a tree, at best a shade for people and a nest for birds. Father with his dexterous hands to eliminate redundancy, the tree will become a table and chairs bed cabinet, become calm and connotation, and then have the beauty and charm of art.
The tree cut down and carried home, the father will build a shelf in the yard, the trunk will be put up, popped on the ink line, a person on the top and a person on the bottom of the two-meter-long saw you push me to pull the trunk into rafter skin, and then according to the required size of the saw, planing, eyeing, shaping, assembling, and finally scraping powder, sanding, painting. Each process father is meticulous, never cut corners, extremely serious. Not only the face of the furniture made smooth, beautiful and fine, even others do not pay attention to the corners are not allowed to have a little roughness, can not tolerate a little flaws, so he did the furniture to spend more time and energy than other carpenters. For this reason, his mother often complained that he was slow, but his father did not care, explaining: "slow work makes fine work, three days to do a cow beat the horn (a very simple agricultural tools)." Because of this rigorous and conscientious, meticulous work attitude and dedication, father's carpentry work in his hometown of ten miles and eight villages reputation and reputation.
During the winter farming season, my father bowed down every day, like a shrimp, burying his head in the yard to push, planing, chiseling, sawing. And my favorite, the cartridge he used to play line. Often when my father was not around, I followed his example and looked for a piece of discarded wood, pulled out the line soaked in ink from the cartridge, strained it and straightened it, lifted the middle part of the line with my thumb and forefinger, and gently put it down, and only heard a "pop" sound, and a straight, black line appeared on the wood, which was a very magical feeling. At that time, we did not have any toys, they went to find my father to do furniture sawed down the edge of those three pointed octagonal waste, as a building block to play.
More like to see his father with a planer to a rough board surface planing. At this time, my father always gripped the wooden handle on both sides of the planer with two hands, two forefingers, one on each side of the planer to control the direction of the force, and violently pushed forward, only to hear a "swish" sound, the planer pushed from the end of the board to the end of the planer, there will be a long, thin, wood-scented shavings from the holes above the planer, and the shavings will fly out in a curved manner. A long thin strip of wood-scented shavings would fly out of the hole in the top of the planer. Push it once, and a strip would fly out with a swish. In a short while, the floor is covered with soft shavings, fine sawdust, the house is filled with a strong fragrance of wood, in those fine wood grain on the dazzling.
Occasionally touching a tree scar, the planer will be hindered, in the tree scar there to pause for a moment, the edge of the sharp sound. At this time, my father's front legs were bowed back legs straight, upper body slightly forward, take a deep breath, the force are transported to the arms, the planer a little back, and then fierce into the "miso" sound of the past, half a section of the shavings and some hard wood shavings will fly out. My father used the momentum to push a few more planes, and then lifted the wood, squinted one eye, glanced obliquely at the straight lines of the wood, and muttered to himself: "Masons are afraid of sand, carpenters are afraid of tree scars ah!"
I put a section of shavings on my face as a blindfold, and raised my head to ask my father: "Dad, who is the teacher who taught you the craft of carpentry?" My father just smiled and said, "It was Lu Ban." I think of all the people I know in the village one by one, and did not find a carpenter surnamed Lu in the village, my father laughed out loud. Growing up, I realized that my father as a carpenter is completely self-taught, where he saw a piece of furniture, he went home to one of his own slowly pondered, repeatedly tossed, time long, and actually developed a good skill of doing carpentry work.
Sometimes throughout the winter, my father was not at home, and he went to the door of the village to play furniture for others. The main family out of wood, the father out of technology, food and shelter can earn eight or nine dollars a day, January down to earn two or three hundred dollars. The first time I saw this was when I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and the second time I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and the third time I was a student there.
Later, outside the large manufacturers of furniture batch into the countryside, my father's exquisite skills and those who accompanied him for most of his life of the knife and axe tools are all on the shelf, gradually covered with the dust of the years and the vicissitudes of memory. I saw the workers use a few pieces of high-pressure boards to assemble a beautiful piece of furniture. However, in the dazzle, I couldn't smell the faint fragrance of wood emanating from the shavings under my father's planer. I often saw my father standing in front of his tool cabinet, looking at those quiet and serene axes, chisels, planes and saws. I miss the joy of every piece of wood shavings from my childhood, and what does my father miss?
My father had an innate affection for wood and trees. In his later years, his father planted walnut trees on all of his family's land. Every time I went home, I would accompany my father to his walnut forest to go around. My father always liked to carry his hands, top head of white hair, look at this tree, touch that tree, turned back to me and said: "too long, last year was only the mouth of the bowl so big, this year is thicker than a person's thigh." I quietly followed him, my father's back was hunched over. All his life he had bowed his back to do carpentry work, silently carrying this heavy family. All his life, he had faced life and stress with such humility. Stepping in my father's footsteps, my eyes gradually blurred, my father's hunched body like those who are growing walnut trees, become clear and tall.
In a lifetime of dealing with wood, my father acquired a wooden character: carrying the burden of the family on his shoulders, while all the sorrows are buried deep in his heart, such as the tree's annual cycle, year after year, but never revealed to outsiders. When one day I touched the father's wheel, the tree, but has fallen.
Mother came down from the countryside
Mother came down from the countryside. Wearing a pair of cheap, flat-soled shoes, standing on the 30th floor of the neighborhood, with a faded canvas bag in her left hand and her right hand resting on her forehead, she tilted her head back as far as she could, squinting her eyes to barely see the fragmented sky and a few rays of sunlight leaking out of the net above her head. Niang rubbed her somewhat cloudy eyes, and I saw a hint of helplessness and confusion.
Mother is a rural person, a rural person who will never be able to integrate into the city life. But in order to take care of the children for me, she had to leave the land where she had lived for more than 60 years and came to the unfamiliar Kunming.
The mother will not dance square dance, take the bus will also be motion sickness, she only dare to go to the vegetable market and grandson kindergarten that two streets, far away from the fear of getting lost back, she and the neighborhood of the retired old lady never chat a piece, she did not understand what the CPI is something, only know that the market in the cabbage are to more than a dollar a catty, that is too expensive, if in the old country in the corner of the field randomly planted two, all year round can not finish eating. So she doesn't have a friend in this city.
My wife and I are busy with work, early morning and late at night, who did not notice a rural elderly in the city of loneliness and misery. One afternoon, I was at a meeting, suddenly received a phone call from the child's kindergarten teacher, said that more than ten minutes after school, other children are picked up, leaving only my daughter no one to pick up. Put down the phone, I rushed to call my mother's phone, rang half a day before she answered, the phone is connected, I was impatiently yelled: "Mom, what are you doing, and now you do not go to pick up the child? The others have long been picked up." After saying this, I just heard the cell phone came puffing and puffing gasping sound, mother while gasping for air, while like a child who did something wrong, came up for air and said, "My watch ...... somehow ...... stopped, just now Watching TV ...... only to realize ...... that the time is over, not afraid ...... of me running to ...... another four or five minutes ...... will arrive."
My eyes blurred at once. I seem to see: an old woman with arthritis in the countryside, limping running in the streets of Kunming, mouth gasping for breath, forehead covered with beads of sweat but too late to wipe away with their hands, a face of self-blame and guilt.
In this way, the mother silently in this strange city for the children to hold on, never in front of us to call a bitter and tired. Every day after picking up the children home and having dinner, she went back to her hut early to rest, but I know that she was insomnia every night, and got up before dawn. Gradually, my mother spoke less and less, not even much throughout the day. One day at noon I ate in the unit cafeteria, go home to get a material, open the door, Mother sat quietly alone in the somewhat dim living room, I asked her how not to turn on the TV to watch, she said, watch too much eye pain, do not want to see. I said that go out for a walk, she said her feet hurt, the yard and no friend, the street is full of cars, upset.
Looking at the face of some haggard mother, head full of silk half into white hair, rough hands constantly rubbing some swollen knees, every time you want to stand up, you have to use two hands to support the knees, hands and feet together with the force, at this time, I heard the sound of bone creaking. I sat down beside my mother and took her hand, and for the first time in many years, I held her hand like this. This is a pair of what kind of hand ah: rough as a file, knuckles have been swollen deformation, the back of the hand crawling with a strip of earthworm-like veins. Looking at this pair of hands that nurtured my growth, my tears once again in the eye sockets.
In my impression, my mother's hands are the most dexterous hands under the sky: she sews a good handful of clothes, cooks a good handful of food, and can afford to hold a tiny embroidery needle, and can do the heavy farm work. When I was in junior high school, in order to pay off the debt that my family owed from the renovation of the old house, my mother took advantage of the winter to subsidize the family by making tiles during the farm's spare time. This was extremely heavy hard labor, and the key was that in the cold winter, doing this work was particularly harmful to the hands. In winter, when the light is late and the darkness is early, and the daytime is short, my mother would get up at 5:00 a.m. every morning to make tiles, and sometimes when it was too dark, she would use the family's horse lamp to light the way. Sometimes it was too dark, so she used the family's horse lamp to light the tiles. In winter, when the weather was cold, there would be a thin layer of ice in the mud pot in the morning, so she would crack the ice and continue to make the tiles. Many years later, I can still imagine in the zero-degree environment, bare hands holding up pieces of clay in the icy water to do tile the kind of bone marrow cold. Every winter, my mother's rough hands would split open and ooze blood beads out of the mouth, smeared with Vaseline, in addition to letting the hands blackened, but does not play a big role, so my mother's ten fingertips will be wrapped in layers and layers of tape. Sometimes when we accidentally touched those bleeding cuts, my mother's hands would tremble violently. The first time I saw this, it was a very important part of my life, and it was a very important part of the life of my family.
That night, I lost sleep, and I really understood the mother's attachment to the land and her father's longing. The young couple in old age, she needs is not this prosperous city and closet I bought for her brand-name clothes, but with the father in the rural bickering in the happy old age. Discussing with my wife, I decided to send her back home to the countryside. The next day, I put the idea and the mother said, I obviously feel her eyes flashed a trace of surprise, but then said worriedly: "I left the child who will bring? Hire a nanny, your father and I are not assured." I pretended to be relaxed and reassured her, "There's no need to hire a nanny, I'm working very lightly now and can take care of it myself." The tips of my mother's eyebrows stretched, and the hint of surprise returned. She said, "Then I'll go back for a while, and if you're too busy, I'll come back to help you bring it up."
Throughout the day, Niang, contrary to her usual sullenness, was happily busy cleaning up the house, taking out all the garbage and putting her clothes neatly folded into her travel bag. I went to the coach terminal to buy her a ticket home, the night I took the ticket to her at the same time, gave her two thousand dollars, let her take home with her, the ticket she took, but the money said nothing, said the family has, and so pushed back and forth four or five rounds, she took the money. The next morning, I sent her to the passenger station, the car is about to start, she put her head out of the car window, said to me: "money I pressed under the pillow, I and your father can not use much money, you are in the city expenses, save yourself a little use."
The car drove away, and the sky was drizzling, and I couldn't tell whether it was rain or tears that flowed down my face.