When I saw my second aunt during the New Year, she was already very old.
Her relatives said she had a hard life, and that she had been diligent and frugal all her life, but life was still difficult.
She couldn’t afford to spend money and was nearly hit by a car for a 10-cent mineral water bottle; she fell off the roof and was in a coma for three days for 600 yuan.
1
Under the purple-red sandstone piled up into a high mountain, a dry winter water field, only the decaying grass shaking in the wind, next to the planting of weak wheat, growing slowly.
In my hometown, New Year’s is the liveliest time of the year, a brief but noisy scene like the fireworks that children set off, bursting into the air with a bang and then more silence until the next Spring Festival.
Right now, there is not a soul to be seen anywhere, the shade of the trees is getting darker and greener, birds are chattering and flying over, stretching their beaks out and pecking everywhere. When the wind is strong, the roof tiles are blown, the birds fly into the sky with a cry.
Old Mrs. Liu has lived alone for many years, she is my second aunt, and she is still in good health in this village where only the elderly are left today. She often said to herself, “It is the best thing not to slow down the children and not to cause trouble to the next person.”
During the day, she always looks up at the roof. The sound of the roof tiles makes her very uneasy, and the sunlight coming through the corrugated cracks is very harsh.
This uneasiness comes from half a month ago.
It was a market, an old lady selling eggs said that in the village over the mountain, there were thieves who went through the house at night in a big way and didn’t find any money, so they caught two chickens. Mrs. Liu was surprised and asked how not to drag a stick to beat? The oldest sister said, the old couple are more than seventy people, which dare to do, the old bones to lose is not enough. Mrs. Liu wanted to say that you can find the police station, but then thought again, the township police station a total of only a few people, too far away, where to control over?
This “can’t care” pierced her already thin sense of security, since the death of her partner, she had to carry anything she encountered.
After hurrying home, Mrs. Liu felt the six hundred dollars hidden under the pillow, carefully counted it twice, folded it into a plastic bag, and then intended to hide in another place. She looked around the empty house, the left, the old cabinet on the mottled paint has long been unable to see the original color, I heard that the thief will first turn the pillow and then turn the closet, she can not put the money there; the other end of the house is the stove, if the sparks on the end, the money can not be put there; she opened the cupboard, want to press the plastic bag under the oil can, but the plastic bag on the shelf, the oil can tilt on the ……
Liu old lady in the house from the bottom to look up several times, the eyes finally fell on the roof, no thieves will climb the roof, and the tile seams just enough space. She wrapped the plastic bag containing money and a few layers, moved the ladder over, climbed up the ladder, the plastic bag carefully rested in the tile seam, only to breathe a long sigh of relief.
Now a blowing wind, Mrs. Liu is not sure again, the money put there is appropriate?
This money can not be lost ah.
2
This is the six hundred yuan that Mrs. Liu has been saving for several years.
Five years ago, she went to the city where her youngest son works. There are people everywhere, there are cars everywhere, tall buildings shake people’s eyes, can not recognize the road, food, drink and food, everything costs money. The son said he would not return to farming, the daughter-in-law was working in the supermarket, after the birth of a child, she did not go, three generations of the family crowded in a rented room, rely on the son as a security guard to make ends meet.
There is only one room, a corner by the window for cooking, the rest of the space to put down two beds at night is only enough to pass by sideways. When the son went to work, and then put away the folding bed Liu old lady sleeps, the house can breathe a little.
“She will take the stick fiddling rummage, find mineral water bottles, scrap cardboard and other things, will pick up one by one, stuffed into the bag.” (Photo: CFP) “She will take a wooden stick to fiddle with the rummage, find mineral water bottles, scrap cardboard and other things, they picked up one by one, stuffed into the bag.” (Photo: CFP)
Whenever the grandson is asleep, Mrs. Liu went out with a worn woven bag, not forgetting to bring a wooden stick leaning against the door. The sun is baking the earth, the concrete road flooded with white light, old Mrs. Liu walk stop and look out for every garbage bin by the roadside, even if the stench, she will take the wooden stick to fiddle with the rummage, find mineral water bottles, cardboard and other things, they picked up one by one, stuffed into the bag.
Over time, she also found their own “doorway”. A large supermarket located at the entrance to the street, a small square with several rows of chairs, where there is often not a small harvest. People sitting on the chairs often have empty bottles, some people see her picking up bottles, will be a sip after the bottle handed to her, she smiled gratefully at those people.
Once, a little girl handed her a mineral water bottle and asked crisply, “Mom, is this old woman not serious about school, so she came to pick up garbage?” The mother was embarrassed and led the girl away in a hurry.
There were also thrilling moments. One day, on the side of the road, she was plucking away layers of garbage. A pickup truck passed by and threw an empty bottle out of the window and hit the trash can in front of her, only to hear a bang, the bottle bounced back and rolled down. She hurriedly trotted over and squatted down to hold the bottle. With the sound of sharp brakes, she saw a black car screech to a halt, just a bottle’s distance from her.
Seeing her stand up, people around her breathed a sigh of relief. A young man with yellow hair rolled down the window and growled at her, “Crazy bitch, don’t want to die?” A few passers-by were blaming the young man, and someone pulled her back and asked, “Is everything all right? Don’t lose your life over a mineral water bottle.”
That day, the road home she seemed to walk on cotton, can not take a step, a step carefully.
Sometimes she would get lost, each crossroads looked similar, the same tall buildings, the same people coming and going, overhead, the same corner of the gray-blue sky, she pulled out a crumpled piece of paper with the specific name of the street written by her son.
That summer, she sold $212.40, the price of one thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine bottles and some cardboard. The night before she came back, she put the money under her pillow, but on the train back, she found it tucked back into the cloth bag she had brought with her. Her daughter-in-law must have put it there, she thought.
3
The previous year, after the Spring Festival, Mrs. Liu went to her eldest son’s place for a while. The oldest son is in a suburban 4s store to repair cars, the store lacked a cooking, Mrs. Liu followed.
Not far from the store, a fenced-off vacant land is full of grass, it looks like no one cares, Mrs. Liu felt that the land is soft and fertile, too bad to be empty. Outside of cooking time, she went to the farmers market to buy a hoe and vegetable seeds, opened a piece of land, planted peppers.
The chili pepper seedlings grew taller every day, and when she stir-fried, she picked a few chili peppers and chopped them up to make seasoning, and the workers ate them with sweat and said they were really good!
Mrs. Liu was so happy to hear that she widened the vegetable field and planted several kinds of vegetables, rape, bok choy, pea seedlings and so on. Every day at dusk, she cleaned up everything in the kitchen and went to the vegetable patch. The seedlings grew lush day by day, and the tender branches and leaves stretched in the sunlight, and Mrs. Liu gradually made this place her home.
When she couldn’t finish her vegetables, she carried them to the market to sell them, and they were all sold out every time. People in the city do not grow vegetables, but still know the goods, see that she sold fresh and clean vegetables. Once, she just went to the market to put down her back pocket, a vegetable vendor came over to buy all the vegetables, and did not haggle, only weighed the catties to calculate the total amount of money. Mrs. Liu saw that he also had peppers and beans on his stall, and could not help but ask: “Buy so many vegetables for what?” The vendor said, “Eat it yourself.” Mrs. Liu was confused, “You are also selling it yourself.” The vendor patiently replied, “Those are all wholesale from the greenhouse.”
But this happiness is so short-lived, one morning, old Mrs. Liu heard the roar of machinery, several excavators are going around the fence. She ran all the way over and stopped the excavators with a gasp, “This is my vegetable! Why are you crushing it?”
“You don’t want to die, you old woman! You go to the owner, he bought this place!” The driver of the excavator had a loud voice, and the sound of the machine rushed through the field in an overbearing manner. Those tender green vegetable seedlings were crushed and squeezed, the green juice blended into the soil, and the eggplant seedlings that were flowering, too late to grow eggplants, had fallen into the soil with their roots.
Fell off the roof for 600 yuan: I don’t want to drag my children down
The eldest son and several workers came over, they picked her up and helped her back. “The land was not ours, it was lent to us, so now it’s a return to them.” The son said.
Old Mrs. Liu decided to go back home to farm the land, she put the two thousand five hundred dollars she had saved in a paper bag and handed it to the eldest daughter-in-law: “You want to buy a house here, I can’t afford to support it, this is the money for the work and the money for selling vegetables.” The first daughter-in-law took the money, but said nothing.
The son sent Mrs. Liu to the car and secretly gave her four hundred yuan. The son is afraid of his daughter-in-law, the money is also secretly saved, he earnestly looked at Mrs. Liu, “Mom, you do not resist, go back to a person to take good care of themselves, headaches and brain fever, to find a doctor also need to use money.”
4
The old woman who returned home did not spend money, she grew vegetables, took them to give away, and sometimes went to the market, sold the vegetables for a little household goods.
The four fields are silent, the village’s original two hundred people have almost gone, to work in the city, to buy a house in town, the rest are unable to walk. Some older than her old people also can not work, they sit quietly under the eaves, watching the sunset full of the sky, watching the sun set in the west, watching the day fall slowly and long into the night ……
Mrs. Liu sometimes watches TV, there is a public service announcement, and she is about the same age on the old lady answered one phone call after another, and finally at the dinner table sighing: you are busy, busy, all busy ……
That voice echoed in the house for a long time, as if it was talking to her, and the dust in the corner fell like grains of sand.
She thought about the six hundred yuan, afraid of being blown away by the wind. After thinking about it, she thought of a rat hole under the bed that her grandson had destroyed during New Year’s Eve, where it was safer than the roof. So she built a ladder and climbed up to the roof step by step. The plastic bag was still there, she reached out her hand, but she couldn’t reach it, so she slowly and trudgingly climbed up another ladder.
This time reached, but the feet stepped on the empty ……
When Mrs. Liu woke up, three days had passed. The village elders said she was lucky to have a big life, and the noise of her fall alerted the neighbors who were going out to pick up their son, and they followed the sound to save her.
The old woman who woke up didn’t know that she had been diagnosed with an intracranial hematoma in the past three days and had spent more than 10,000 yuan on medical treatment.
This fall, have fallen dozens of six hundred dollars.
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