Familiar backs, familiar movements, isn’t this me and my mother 40 years ago?

Walking on the ridge of my hometown, I saw this woman who was pulling the fields and weeds, and I felt emotional.

The seedlings grow and flourish, and the weeds in the fields grow wildly. In order to prevent weeds from sharing the nutrients of the seedlings and affecting the harvest, weeds must be removed regularly. The tool for weeding in the paddy field is your own hands. Bend down and use your hands to pull the weeds in the paddy field. We call it pulling the field grass.

What seems simple is not easy to do. Bending down and arching your back is very tiring. From the moment you get down to the field, you are always pulling the grass, pulling the grass for a long time, so tired that your back hurts. In the hot summer, the heat wave is rolling, and I buried my body in the seedling bushes. The whole person is like being steamed and roasted in a steamer. Once, my family had more than ten acres of paddy fields, and my mother and I did the work of pulling the fields and grasses. The problem was that it was not enough to pull once or twice, and we had to pull it many times. If we didn’t pull it, it would affect the growth of the seedlings, which in turn affected the harvest.

In my memory, the most comfortable time is to pull a handful of field grass, stand up, roll it into a pile, and then throw it to the field ridge, because this is done by standing up straight, and this part is the best time for me to be lazy: the grass in my hand Pull slowly, stretch the arm that throws grass, and fall slowly. My mother knew what I was thinking, but she didn’t say anything.

Familiar scenes, familiar backs, familiar movements, and familiar postures, isn’t this the self and mother who were 40 years ago? The good news is that this woman who plucks fields and grass is not working for a living, but can’t be idle by herself.

Life is no longer hard, labor is no longer drudgery, it is a song, it is a poem.

Text/Picture @Green Lotus Tiantian