When I was a child, there was an eel stall in front of my house, specializing in fried eel and eel noodles.

The stall opened at dusk, the time when I returned home from school, and I could see the smoke of the eel frying from afar, and my sense of smell seemed to arrive at the same time as my sight, and the scent wafted violently into my nose, hooking me to the front of the stall, and then I would go around the alley with my head down to go back to my home.

Why keep your head down?

Because fried eel is expensive and we simply cannot afford it.

Not to mention fried eel, we can't even afford to eat eel noodles, we have many siblings in our family, and I'm afraid a bowl of noodles for one person is a week's worth of food.

Mom often begged the eel seller to leave us the bones of the eels she killed. She was convinced that eel bones were full of calcium and all kinds of vitamins, which would be very helpful for us growing children.

Every night, my mom would bring back a big bag of bones from the eel stand and throw them into a big pot to boil without washing them.

Why didn't she wash them?

Because, mom said, eel bones with blood, that is the most nourishing, wash how pity!

Simmering for two to three hours, the eel bones almost finished in the pot, the soup turned coffee-colored, floating on the surface of the oil, at this time, mom will sprinkle a handful of chopped green onions, turn off the fire.

By the time the eel bone soup was finished, the night was already late.

Mom called us to the stove, and each of us got a bowl of soup with a crust of bread she'd asked for at another bakery, which she baked in a pot to warm it up and turn it into fragrant cookies.

We chewed on the crusts with the sweet and flavorful fishbone soup and felt y happy with our lives.

Whenever the eel sellers came to set up their stalls, we were sure to have eel bone soup, and strangely enough, I never got tired of it and always thought it was the ultimate delicacy on earth.

Mom was worried that we would get tired of eating it, and sometimes she would add some bamboo shoots to the soup, or put down some eggs; sometimes she would braise it with tofu, or brine it with radish....... Certainly, the ingredients used were ordinary, but it was covered with delicious magic.

The most magical, is considered to be fried eel bone.

The eel bone was originally crooked and twisted, down the frying pan when suddenly straightened out, one by one like French fries, when the pot sprinkled with some pepper salt, fragrant, crispy, crunchy, really delicious.

I ate eel bones for years, until I went abroad to study. Occasionally back to the countryside, drink to the mother's hand-boiled soup, always feel delicious as in the past, the heart is more covered with moving, mom put the deep love and love boiled into that ordinary soup, so that we are strong and healthy, in the general malnutrition in the countryside children, we are always rosy, full of spirit.

Perhaps as a child could not eat eel, after growing up, as long as to the museum to eat, see the eel sold, will always order two to eat, eat while nostalgia for that period of hard times.

As long as there is love, it is priceless.

Mother has long since passed away, in the snowy night in a foreign country, I thought that I could no longer drink the stewed eel bone soup, no longer can, one bite at a time, to experience my mother's deep love.

Thinking about it, my tears fell one by one, like the snowflakes outside the window.