Editor’s note: The breath of nature is pure and long, like a painting, flowers, trees, sunlight, sea, and even the sounds made by different seasons and different people can make people feel different The breath of nature tells a different story.
People call the various sounds of nature “sounds of nature” . What should the various smells floating in the field be called? “Flavoured”? “Heavenly Chef”? It’s not right to think about it, it’s only related to gluttony and utilitarianism.
The heat is raging, and I have been on the farm. When a gust of breeze brought the fragrance of peach leaves, grass, and the smell of dust and water, this idea suddenly appeared.
I don’t know if my sensitivity to country smells started with Meadow.
In those days, the scorching heat was the harvest season. Since I was eleven years old, I have been planting rice and cutting rice, so much so that when I was an adult, I carried the burden. It goes without saying that you are tired, but the water in the seedling fields is scalding hot, and the needles on the fields pierce your feet, which is enough for you. That is a helpless thing, to earn work points and get food. Among them, the most pleasant thing was lying on the meadow and eating cigarettes. In my hometown, short breaks between work are called “eating cigarettes”.
Most of the fields in the team are on the edge of the meadow. The meadows are a bit like wetlands. During the rainy season, there are puddles everywhere, and frogs are singing against each other. But in the midsummer of dry water, it is full of weeds, and there is a small lake in the middle. There is a crazy grain tree on a slightly higher slope. The sheep are scattered on the grassy slope, and the cows cool off in the small lake. In the middle of noon, people were sweating profusely and working their hands on the loess with their backs to the sky. The frog was reminding, and the whistle for eating cigarettes sounded. The adults were busy mowing the grass and gathering firewood, and the half-old children of us always rushed to the bottom of the grain tree to seize the most shady place. Some old people lie down in the grass with a straw hat on their face and doze off. The girls are whispering or fighting grass. We either sit with a grass stalk in our hands, or we lean on our arms and look at the sky in the distance, thinking: How can we bear such fatigue year after year in the future?
Whatever! As long as it’s cool now. I was happy when I was a child, but I didn’t have a long memory. The heart is always towards the future.
Sitting under the shade of a grain tree, the wind blows from a distance, across the ten-mile flat barren, the shade of the tree is so magical, no matter how hot it is, the wind filtered through it is cool. The wind may be too hot to bear, so take a break in the shade. They came in waves, and the sweat on the clothes showed salt flowers. The wind was a bit salty, it must have come from the sea. If you sip it carefully, you can tell: it is the fragrance of the rice roots that have just opened the sickle; it is the frankincense of the hot indica rice; it is the sludge of the newly pulled rice seedlings mixed with the smell of water. The cows in the small lake snorted, and there was a smell of rumination; it was a strong smell of sheep. On the pond slope, a saucy sheep was raising its head to capture the smell of the opposite sex.
I really don’t know how my sense of smell was so sensitive at that time. Which one is cooking what: it is braised river mussels, it is noodles with crab, it is clear; even the vegetables and melons in Brother Aang’s field can be smelled when they are ripe. Hunger spawns a developed olfactory system. So I couldn’t help but steal a few to eat. It will be a long time until the sun goes down and the work is over! In those days, there was always a heavy rain in the afternoon, and the thunder rumbled after the lightning, so there was a special smell in the atmosphere, like a freshly peeled preserved egg. After watching “One Hundred Thousand Whys”, I realized that it was the smell of ozone. Thunder, abundant ozone, that year’s late rice must be a bumper harvest. In the crushing thunder of the lightning whip, we saw a pyramid-like heap of grain before our eyes. Over time, I thought that ozone was sweet.
The captain’s whistle blew, and we’re off to the fields again. Tian Fan was still scorching hot, and the needles still pricked his feet. Looking back at the meadow, I don’t know who has forgotten the straw hat there, rippling in the wind between the branches. There was a faint gratitude in my heart, thinking of coming back tomorrow, the day after tomorrow.
Many years later, when I chat about the happy times, what I think of is not “Dancing the Willow House Xinyue, Singing the Peach Blossom Fan Bottom Wind”, but the meadowzi and the grains Tree. Now, when I pass there again, the meadow is long gone, together with the crazy grain tree. The small lake was also filled. The summer wind is still the same, but it can no longer smell the rich taste of the year. Is that wind also evolving, or is my sense of smell numb? At this moment, I suddenly thought of the song “Answer Blows in the Wind”, and the ever-growing meadows came to life in front of me. (Tang Shuomei)