In the early morning of summer, I walked in the country, breathing fresh air and looking at lush crops. Inadvertently, I looked down, and several rare old melons and seedlings on the roadside attracted my attention. I squatted down to watch carefully, and a picture of my childhood hometown jumped into my eyes.
My family lives in a small mountain village at the junction of Jilin and Inner Mongolia. When I was a child, there was a strange melon, which grew on hillsides and roadsides. This kind of melon has two sharp heads and a bulging middle part. The skin of the melon is densely covered with white raised spots, and the juice is sweet. Its scientific name is Didiaogua, alias Yeyangjiao, commonly known as Laoguapiao.
In 1970s and 1980s, people dug countless small pits on Dongshan Mountain (the pits can store rainwater to prevent flash floods). Seen from a distance, these pits are densely arranged on the hillside like fish scales, and people call them fish scale pits. Every summer vacation, a group of our friends excitedly ran to the hillside and fish scale pit to find wild fruits to eat. I was surprised to find that clusters of green plants were growing around the fish scale pit, and small flowers were blooming one after another. There is a hint of green in the gray, like a little star in the sky, flashing in the linear green leaves, and the spindle-shaped fruit falls in the gap between flowers, like an earring worn by a girl, shining with green beauty in the scorching sun. That fruit is an old gourd ladle in my hometown. We looked around the old gourd ladle, and our saliva could not help flowing downwards. I picked a fresh and tender old gourd ladle, gently peeled off the green husk to reveal the white pulp, and took a delicious bite. Sweet juice permeated every cell of my body and made me slightly drunk in my childhood.
Old gourd, when ripe, the peel changes from green to yellow-green, and the shell naturally cracks. Sometimes, we rogues will take it off with umbrellas and peel off the hard skin, which is full of seeds. The breeze blew, and the full seeds flew away in the small umbrella, carrying my childhood dreams! Sometimes, those wild girls hold the ripe fruit in their palms, close their eyes slightly, quietly hide their worries in the seeds, and then blow hard, and the umbrella-shaped seeds fly in the air, just like fluttering dandelions, as beautiful as dreams!
We are tired of playing and crazy enough, so we put fresh and tender old melons and scoops in our pockets and run home in the orange glow, so that our parents who have worked hard all day can share the sweetness of this wild fruit!
Laopiao, a blue wild fruit in my hometown, has milky white milk like my mother's sweet milk; That fragrant smell is like the smell of my hometown where I was born and raised. Ah, LaoPiao, you contain the sweetness of hometown soil, you are full of the warmth of mountains and rivers, and you cherish the lingering feelings of distant wanderers!