Every time I recall the fun of catching cicadas in my childhood, my heart is filled with infinite beauty and joy.
When I was a child, I lived in a small village in the south of the Yangtze River. Several mottled vigorous poplar trees. Every year in the middle of summer, through the lush green leaves, there are loud and bright cicadas, one after another, melodious and far-reaching, which makes me unconsciously walk into a cool place. Now living in a busy city, there are no trees in the buildings, and the sound of cicadas is unpleasant. I occasionally go to the park under the shade of trees to listen to the summer symphony of cicadas.
Cicadas are wild creatures. It takes four or five years for a cicada to grow from an egg to a larva. After a long period of underground self-cultivation, living, and waiting, it emerges from its cocoon and emerges into a cicada. Whenever the end of summer comes, the cicada can no longer hold back its loneliness, and climbs up the tall branches from a brand-new posture, looking at the unfamiliar world with its abrupt round eyes.
When I was a child, I developed a deep “feeling” with cicadas. Whenever the long cicada chirping of “I know, I know” sounded in summer, I couldn’t sit still any longer and looked up to find the black elf hiding on the tree trunk, and the cicadas were very clever. Slip.” Fly away like an arrow.
Later, Uncle Forgan, who was next door, taught us the method: take a handful of wheat flour and mix it with water in a bowl until it is not hard or rotten, then put it in clean water and use it Repeatedly kneading with your hands, only gluten remains after the white slurry of flour is kneaded clean. The gluten at this time is very sticky, so wrap it around the top of the long bamboo pole as an artifact for catching cicadas. In the scorching summer, the sun shines through the gaps between the leaves, the cicadas are greedy, sucking the sap from the trees desperately, and the chirping is extraordinarily loud. We set our sights on the target, and slowly stretched out the bamboo pole, aiming at the cicada’s wing and touching it at the fastest speed. The caught cicadas are put into bamboo cages, and some are tied with ropes, tied to branches, and allowed to flutter and fly, or listen to them sing.
At night, my friends and I were reluctant to leave the cicadas to rest, so we put them in the mosquito net. Early the next morning, a clear cicada chirped woke the sleeping child from the sweet dream. In the blink of an eye, a new happy day began again…
Listening to the adults, The unearthed skin of a cicada is called “Cicada Clothes”. It is yellow in color and crisp in texture. It can be used as traditional Chinese medicine. So, my friends and I went to the woods to pick up cicadas every morning, and we picked up a lot of them. I exchanged them for a lot of pocket money, and went to the bookstore to buy my favorite villain book…
When I grew up, I did farm work in the countryside. After lunch in summer , a few shirtless young men, will invariably go to the shade of the tall camphor trees at the entrance of the village, spread out straw mats, lie down and let the sound of cicadas hypnotize them, and gradually fall asleep in the cool world…
Time flies like an arrow, more than 30 years have passed in a blink of an eye, the past is long, and every time I recall the joy of catching cicadas in my childhood, my heart is filled with infinite beauty and joy. When I think of the verse of the literati and poet Luo Bin, “The cicadas sing in the west, and the guests in the southern crown think deeply”, I also have an extravagant hope: If there is a city full of beautiful buildings and jade, there will be one after another like the sound of cicadas destroying the dead, the old people under the trees dozing off, and the children sighing at the cicadas. , how beautiful! (Yan Zhiming)