We should have seen the bamboo in the fall and winter, but do not know that it will actually wither, turn yellow, and die; later regeneration, and is a new bamboo.
Before that, it will bloom once - only once in a lifetime, after the opening is not far from death.
When I was a child, every family in the village had their own bamboo forests, scattered everywhere: my family's bamboo forest behind the old Yang house, and my grandfather's bamboo forest next to each other, separated by a path; most of the other family's before and after each house. The first thing I'd like to do is to get the chance to see what I'm talking about, and then I'd like to see what I'm talking about.
A few of us older kids used to scurry around in a few of the bamboo dams, hooking our backs to look for bamboo worms. Bamboo shoots insects often lying on the bamboo roots, or shoots, front legs on the left and right holding two "saw sickle" to show off. When we catch it, we have to make it yield, first of all, we will remove its "weapons", and then use a piece of rope to put one end around its small legs, pinching the other end of the rope will be thrown up. At this point, the shoots insects may think we let it go, will open the wings to fly - its hard wings under the ambush of transparent soft wings, turning up like a small fan, pull close, there is a breeze around.
Also, its flesh is edible when cooked over a fire. (In retrospect, I did a lot of bad things when I was a kid.)
One year, the bamboos by the weir on the team suddenly bloomed, and my family's bamboo forest, and my grandfather's family's bamboo forest, also bloomed. I remember the bamboo flowers were a bit like wheat flowers, floating on the bamboo branches, a fine white - not like flowers at all. Now searching for pictures of bamboo flowers, I realized that the memory is actually biased, white is right, but it is surprisingly long stripes!
At that time, I heard the adults in the village say, "Bamboo flowers" is a bad phenomenon, may mean the arrival of the disaster year. But that year, in fact, calm and quiet, in addition to the bamboo itself after flowering most of the leaves withered, bamboo trunk withered, bamboo mass death, and other things do not happen abnormally.
It must be said, is the bamboo shoots in the forest less insects, less fun. What else can a child focus on?
For a long time, my impression and understanding of the bamboo blossoms stayed.
Yes, the flowering of the bamboo means that the bamboo will soon die, it is the cycle of life of the bamboo itself, is a normal natural phenomenon, and there is no ominous omen.
Then later, I heard the strip friend mentioned a song, this song is called "Panda Mimi", is a public service song to save the national treasure pandas in the 80s.
It turned out that before the bamboo bloomed in our year, in 1974 and 1983, the Qionglai mountain system in Sichuan had a large area of arrow bamboo bloomed, the bamboo bloomed and then died, resulting in a number of giant pandas starved faint and starved to death. According to news reports, the dead pandas were dissected and either had empty bellies or only dried bamboo.
At the time of not knowing anything, at the moment of suddenly seeing the bamboo blossom, I would only be amazed at the rare sight of the bamboo blossom, full of joy, but I do not know that its life is about to come to an end, and after that, there are other lives that die and weaken as a result.