Patch years prose
It was an era of lack of materials, and a small ticket from one side controlled the flow of goods and affected the lives of the people.
Everyone's clothes are subject to cloth tickets. In fact, even if there were cloth tickets at that time, it was not necessary to have new clothes to wear, because at that time most people followed the dress code of "new three years, old three years, and sewing again and again".
I have traveled at home for three years, and decided that my clothes can only be mended for three years. Its state can be imagined, and sometimes it is even difficult to find their true colors. Fortunately, my grandmother is cautious, flying needles take the lead, and whenever it is broken, it will be repaired neatly and properly. The hard work of the two mothers, old and new, is always clean, and the button leader takes it properly.
Fortunately, there was no obvious disparity between the rich and the poor in those days. You can still go out in patchwork clothes, no one will make fun of you behind your back, and you will not be discriminated against. In winter, patched clothes are still warm.
At that time, people understood "making the best use of everything" to the extreme. It was not only clothes that received patches, but almost all daily necessities, which also gave birth to many craftsmen who made a living by patching. Everything, hula hoops, mending shoes, mending pots and pans, grinding scissors, dyeing cloth, repairing bicycles and even shoveling bowls. It is the dexterity and diligence of craftsmen that people can continue the use value of goods at a very low price in that special era. What's more commendable is that the patch has also cultivated frugality for generations.
Looking back on the people and things related to the patch now, it is still memorable and warm.
There are many craftsmen engaged in patching in my village.
My uncle is an expert in hooping barrels, and barrels will inevitably rot, stink and leak after years. Uncle carries the burden and repairs barrels for others from village to village. For local decay, he can make local replacement according to the situation. This is really not enough. He can extract rotten circuit boards and update them. These jobs can be done without the support of technical drawings, and he can do it perfectly just by feeling. Barrels are often corroded at the bottom first. If the bottom is rotten, uncles can also cut the bottom as a whole. In this way, the original high bucket has become a short bucket, and it can also hold water. Looking at the labor scene of children carrying short buckets and pumping water with adults, there will be a smart and lovely beauty.
When my uncle was young, he chose a basket for the troupe and accumulated a lot of operas. He never shouted loudly when soliciting barrel repair business, but hummed a tune, and people naturally understood his whereabouts by singing. Uncle always sings opera fragments while repairing barrels. Humorous jokes attract men, women and children to watch and make everyone laugh from time to time. After listening to the scene, the mother-in-law will temporarily forget her daughter-in-law's unfilial behavior, and the child will take it back to imitate the performance.
Because of his seriousness and humor, my uncle won a good reputation in Shiliba Village, and he has endless work all year round.
Uncle only does one thing in his life. On the day of his death, many people came to see him off, some of them came to pay back the arrears of wages, and the couple would burn some paper money conveniently, saying it was for his uncle's travel expenses and let him spend more money on the way.
There is an uncle in the leaky bucket. What if the pot leaks?
The pot leaks, so no one will throw it away easily. Look for the old man in the backstreet, whether it's a wok or aluminum pot.
The old man has also made pots and pans all his life. After years of hard work, he has become a drummer. He is not angry when people call him an old man with gongs and drums. Old people have a unique skill in mending pots, and it is inevitable that there will be sand holes when using old cast iron pots. Don't worry. Send him there, and he will poke the hole with steel first. Start a furnace, put a small piece of brass into a small sand spoon and put it into the furnace. As the bellows is pulled in moderation, the flame stretches and contracts, and the brass quickly melts into molten copper. He will carefully clamp out a small sand spoon with iron tongs, pour the copper water floating in the Lan Huo on a small tray, move it under the leak, aim it at Chacon and send it up. The leaking hole will immediately release shiny copper beads, and then quickly aim at the copper beads with a small wooden stick wrapped with a wet cloth, and then cool for a while, and you're done.
If aluminum pot leaks, the old man won't do it. He will knock and close this small leak with a small piece of aluminum. If the bottom of the pot is aging in a large area, it can be replaced if it cannot be sealed. He will cut off the old part of the bottom of the pot, roll out the anti-hook groove at the incision, buckle it with the groove of the new bottom blank, walk several times with a fine hammer and knock it down to ensure no water leakage. He also threatened to smash his signboard if it was leaked within three years.
Indeed, at that time, a mouthful of aluminum pot often changed its bottom more than once, and it was not uncommon for aluminum pot to bear the old bottom with the new bottom.
The old man who is noisy with gongs and drums works quickly and is silent, but every sentence is like that little hammer. The old man lived to be eighty years old. On the day of his death, he was still sitting in front of the stage, holding a small hammer in his hand and saying nothing. People thought he was thinking about how to repair the broken jar in front of him. When his grandson saw it, he pushed it forward and the old man leaned over and knocked on the stage. Until that day, the signboard of "Seiko Buding" hanging at the door was never smashed.
At that time, country bicycles were luxury goods, which were only available to individual families or overseas Chinese, while human mud trucks were more common. Like people, cars are bound to break down. There is only one garage in the town, which is state-owned. Repairing cars naturally includes tire repair business, so the word "tire repair" is written on the door panel of the store in bright red paint.
There is an idiot, a posthumous child and a poor peasant's child in our village. He is honest and honest, and my widowed mother finally brought him up and got married. But after five years of marriage, the daughter-in-law is still pregnant, and the old mother is in a hurry. In the sixth year, my daughter-in-law finally got pregnant and loved sour food. The old mother was so happy that she couldn't clap her hands. Neighbors are also happy for his family. The kind-hearted aunt next door pointed out to him: "It is not easy to have one, and you have to mend your tires no matter how poor you are." Two stare blankly feel reasonable, take money to the town to prescribe tire repair medicine. As a result, he shouted "tire repair" and asked the garage, bending the owner's back.
Erleng's purchase of tire-patching medicine from the garage spread like wildfire, and became the laughing stock of the village for a time.
Let the laughing stock spread, but Erlang doesn't mind. The next spring, his daughter-in-law really gave birth to a child, a pair of fat twins. The news spread that many people really came to the garage to ask for tire repair medicine. The shopkeeper was annoyed, both funny and helpless, so he had to add a sentence on the signboard, "We don't prescribe medicine, please go to the health center to prescribe tire-patching medicine for women."
Although two cold, fertile sons are unambiguous and clever, both of them have been admitted to famous universities. At that time, there was almost no financial burden for reading. The Erleng family trained a pair of outstanding college students and became a village of ten miles and eight villages. It's a story, and the garage also got a lot of light because of the legendary prescription for tire repair medicine.
Er Leng's son has a bright future and became an engineer. After making a lot of money, they decided to rebuild their old houses, but they were resolutely opposed by Erlang. Erlang firmly believes that the old house has good feng shui and can't be moved. He takes good care of the old house. When the wall ash falls, he will immediately line it with white lime. If the tiles are tilted, they will flatten out in time. In this way, a century-old house is still livable and antique today.
At that time, there was still color to accept the patch.
At the eastern end of our village, there is an independent courtyard with five rooms, which is ancient and mysterious, and often smells of thick grass. When you get closer, you will find that this is an old dyehouse.
After a long time, everything in the old dyehouse has been dyed black. The bricks, stoves and cloth racks on the ground and the land under three feet are all dark. The cloth racks are arranged vertically and horizontally, and the thick wooden racks in the latitudinal direction and the small bamboo poles in the longitudinal direction have long been black. It is even harder for people who dye cloth to escape. Their dark skin color is directly proportional to their working age. Therefore, the old dyers laughed at themselves and said, "I have been in this business for a long time, and I have a child with my wife."
Indeed, the old dyers are all black and blue, and their eyes and teeth are unusually white, which makes people dizzy. If you meet them on the village road at night, it's strange that cowards don't break out in a cold sweat. This scene also made me fully understand the meaning of the idiom "those who are near ink are black" when I was young.
At that time, patched clothes could not be made of primary colors. For visual unity and coordination, people who care about them will send them to the dye house to dye them in one color. Fertilizer bags and self-woven coarse cloth also need to be colored before making clothes.
The old dyehouse is the only one I can see. The spacious courtyard is the workshop. There is a big pot in the big brick stove, and there are several big dye vats beside the stove. Dye vat has been filled with dyes, thick green and black, clearly reflecting the blue sky and white clouds. The dye in the pot is taken from the local flower green, and the juice squeezed by the flower green is boiled. The dye in the pot often boils, and the light blue steam rises, and the whole yard will be filled with pungent smell. The clothes and fabrics to be dyed only need to be boiled in the pot for one hour, fished out and soaked in the dye vat for a while, then hung on the shelf to dry and rinsed clean. After several processes are completed, the color will be unified, and it will not fade when worn as a foot wipe.
The old dye house in the village can only dye one color, and there is no pattern at all. Therefore, the people in Shiliba Village have only one color, navy blue. Everyone's clothes are a simple scenery, and a simple beauty gives people a peaceful state of mind.
Today's industrialized printing and dyeing will certainly present a variety of colors and rich patterns, which will bring us pleasure in colors and patterns, but it will inevitably confuse people's minds.
Compared with the repair of clothes, barrels, pots and even tires, the repair of ceramic utensils is much more difficult.
At that time, ceramic utensils had not been replaced by plastic products. Every household can't live without pots and pans. As big as water tanks, pickles tanks and rice tanks, as small as casseroles and heating stoves, even urinals are ceramic.
Ceramic leaks are difficult to repair, but thrifty people still cherish them. If the water tank is cracked and can't be filled with water, put on an iron ring and replace it with dry goods such as millet, which will last for decades.
A distant cousin of mine is also a treasure. Perhaps driven by poverty, his pity for things has alienated into meanness and greed. He always likes to dig at his weight. He laughs when the scale is high. If it is flat, he has to reach out and grab it.
Once, his old water tank leaked, and the husband and wife discussed adding a new one to the porcelain cave. When he entered the warehouse, he looked at the glaze color from a distance, listened to the echo, picked it up repeatedly, and after a long time, he finally decided to take a bite. When paying, the shopkeeper repeatedly stressed that choosing the right place to go out is not allowed to go back on our word. Cousin nodded and paid the money, and the husband and wife carried the new water tank back. My cousin hummed a ditty all the way, which made my daughter-in-law feel abnormal and asked him what he was proud of. He sold the lawsuit without a positive answer, saying that he would understand when he went home. When he got home, he opened the lid of the water tank and let his wife look in. He saw a glazed pot quietly placed at the bottom of the jar. He proudly said, "It's no use!" Seeing this, the daughter-in-law bent down and reached for the useless pot, but she couldn't move it. After careful exploration, the couple found that the careless potter put their clay blanks together and burned them into one. The choice between the pot and the pot is before my cousin. Depressed cousin decided to protect the jar and abandon it. Just when he knocked on the pot with a hammer, he had to give up because he was worried that the jar would be hurt by the pot. In this way, there has always been a useless pot at the bottom of the jar. This is all right, except that the pot occupying the bottom of the cylinder has an unlucky name called "urinal"
Uncle, the old man of gongs and drums and the old dyer are all dead, and Erleng and his cousin are also in their twilight years. With the passing of patch years, patch business has entered history one after another.
When I recalled these dusty past events to an old man in a western developed country, he not only didn't think my childhood was shabby. He even thinks that the attitude of "harmony between man and nature" advocated by the ancients in China contains as few things as possible, which is the wind of thrift. He also asked, "For five thousand years in China, hundreds of billions of people lived on this land. Have you ever seen them leave a mountain of garbage for future generations? "
The old man came to China from the west to engage in education. He insists on spending one day every weekend picking up rubbish discarded by tourists in suburban attractions. His behavior also influenced his students, and some of them joined him to clean up the earth's home together. He encouraged me to put ordinary memories of those years into words.
In today's extremely rich material, people enjoy endless convenience, but no one cares about the loss of thrift. The consumption concept of abandoning before getting old has prompted the garbage mountains around the city to increase at an alarming rate and leap into the blue sky. Faced with all this, the old man asked anxiously: "The wrong way of life of human beings is tearing and expanding the oxybromide hole in the sky, and one day the vicious sunshine will burn the earth." Which master should be sent to patch? "
I am speechless about this.