Essays on childhood cicada prose
No way, those memories related to cicadas, such as water flowing through petals, sang softly all the way to my heart. In those unforgettable childhood days, when the days entered beginning of spring step by step, walked through the rain curtain and crossed the shock, all our children craned their necks and counted the vernal equinox, Tomb-Sweeping Day and Grain Rain with their fingers until the solar terms reached the depths of spring. I can finally see the shadow of summer. We began to prick up our ears all day, longing for the first cicada song of the year to fall in our ears, and then followed the sound to chase the guy who couldn't bear loneliness and loved to buy and sing. That summer, the first child who caught cicada had the capital to show off.
This is our group of rural children's complex about cicadas 20 years ago. Until now, when I walk into those days related to cicadas with words again, I can deeply feel our group of children's obsession and piety towards cicadas. Cicada is really the best toy for our rural children in summer.
I have always liked a poem: "I tried to catch cicadas, but I suddenly closed my mouth." In the concise text, a cicada catching child jumps out of sight. In summer, when the cicada was crawling on the branches, a child came to the cicada with a thief's eyes and a pair of little toes and danced the ballet of the local rural children. The child's nest hand slowly approached the cicada, and at the moment of approaching the cicada, his hands quickly covered it, as quiet as a virgin and as moving as a rabbit. Or catch cicadas at will, or cicadas fly high from the gap between trees and hands. Presumably, the shepherd boy in Yuan Mei's poem should be caught by hand like this.
At that time, in order to catch more cicadas, although we children didn't know the philosophy of sharpening our knives first to do good things, we also captured some vague information in practice and invented a cicada catching tool that was self-taught. Find a slender bamboo pole and an iron wire about 20 cm long, bend the iron wire into an oval shape, insert both ends into the hole at the top of the bamboo pole, and then wrap a layer of spider web around the iron wire to form an oval spider web surface. This process is really competitive. The so-called first strike is strong. In order to get some cobwebs, we children don't know how much sleep we sacrificed, how many spiders' dreams we stirred, and how many spiders were deprived of their labor. In the morning, the sun is still sleeping on the mountains in the east. We have been looking for cobwebs everywhere in front of and behind the house with semi-finished cicada catching tools.
With tools, catching cicadas has become an easy task. Once we found the target, we immediately took the pole and threw ourselves into the "battle". A pair of small hands hold one end of the bamboo pole and push the other end to the cicada with ulterior motives, and then push it until it is sure to catch the cicada. Then, they pressed down hard, and when the cicada had no time to react, the spider web had firmly stuck the cicada's wings.
There are also lucky cicadas, not because of our kind release, but because of the inevitable result of the game itself. In this game, the more cicadas the better. We put the cicada we caught in an open container and cover it with a lid. Under the command of "the little devil is the master", we opened the lid one after another, and the cicadas rushed to freedom. We cheered and created a magnificent flight scene for ourselves.
Those cicadas in childhood, like the wind that leaves a blank space, melt into the depths of life with those lost summers, and occasionally pass by my heart, like a clear spring that brings a touch of cool pleasure to an ordinary day.