Three-inch golden lotus leaves life-to my little grandma

My grandmother has little feet.

before grandpa married her into the house, she didn't want her feet.

In those days, when Shandong girls got married, they paid attention to "looking at their faces, looking at their feet, and looking at the dowry." Grandma's face is beautiful, but the key is that her feet are small. At that time, the three-inch golden lotus was better than her face, and it was difficult for a girl with big feet to find her husband's family. Grandma's little feet were very beautiful when they got married. The feet less than 3 inches were wrapped in delicate red embroidered shoes under the winding of blue cloth, and the shoes were half an inch blue. The little feet that got off the sedan chair moved forward with small steps, and the trembling steps set off the graceful posture, which made people's expectations for the face under the red veil much lighter, but they were crying for these little feet.

married life of a woman with little feet

But these little feet brought her not only the envious eyes of others, but also countless hardships and physical pains.

Grandpa is a famous carpenter in Shiliba Village. He is even more beautiful when he marries grandma with little feet. When he is not doing carpentry, he hangs a bag of dry cigarettes to chat with people at the head of the village. At that time, agriculture was still a production team, and the farm work in the team naturally fell on my little grandmother. Grandpa never felt sorry for grandma's little feet to weed and plow. If grandma's cooking was salty or weak one day, grandpa would overturn the dining table without saying a word. The weak grandmother didn't know how to control her own destiny, let alone defend her dignity, and even had no time to dry her tears, so she rushed to cook for her grandfather again.

Grandma's daily life is like this: she gets up at dawn to make breakfast. When everyone eats breakfast, she feeds the chickens and pigs, and when she cleans up the dishes, she hastily takes a few bites of rice. Because in addition to taking part in the production team's labor for centimeters, she has to climb a mountain from the village to another mountain village every three days to change the bedding and wash clothes for menstruation, who is half paralyzed in bed and childless. It doesn't hurt to be a little tired. The key is that my great aunt is really grumpy. When she starts to get sick, she throws things at her grandmother. When her grandmother comes near her, she twists her grandmother. Grandma's body is often black and blue, and the injuries on her body and arms are never interrupted. Grandma can't tell whether it is my grandfather who lifted the table or my great aunt who twisted it. The winding mountain road has printed countless grandma's small footprints. No matter whether it is spring, summer, autumn and winter, the wind, frost, rain and snow never stop. This care is seven years, and it is not easy for grandma until her great aunt dies. However, since Great Aunt's death, Grandma often went to the mountains and looked at Great Aunt's village for a long time. Although she remained silent, her family knew that she was missing the grumpy menstruation.

Although grandma is thin and has three inches of feet, her actions have always been a mystery to me: she can easily lift the dozens of kilograms of wheat brought back by her father to bask in the sun one by one, and she can gently carry a bag of sweet potatoes on her shoulders and put them in the house, sweeping the floor, collecting dregs, cooking and washing clothes ... She will always turn like a top, and like a yellow cow, she will keep silent and have no complaints.

Little-footed woman and spinning wheel

My little-footed grandmother not only cares for the elderly and children, but also clumsily pulls the spinning wheel. The winter in the countryside is cold and depressed, which is just a day to rest for women who have been busy for half a year. Take a handful of melon seeds and move them to a bench in small groups, or copy and fold your hands in the cuffs of cotton-padded jackets and stand in the sun against the wall to talk about the shortcomings of your parents.

let them shout every day, but grandma never attends their gathering. She just sits on a stone and makes shoes on a sunny day. The most important thing is that she has to bounce cotton into cotton wool, and then make them into cotton strips with a length of 31 cm and a diameter of 2 cm. The cotton strips are piled up into hills. This is the work of Grandma Feet in winter. Cooking three meals a day, washing dishes and chopsticks, feeding chickens and pigs, and the rest of the time, grandma sat in front of the spinning wheel and began to squeak ~ squeak ~ squeak ~ squeak ~

Especially at night, when we were all asleep, grandma lit the horseshoe lamp, turned the spinning wheel with her right hand and held the cotton sliver with her left hand. The spinning wheel in my hand makes a rhythmic hum and the old cat by the fire makes a uniform purr, interweaving into a lullaby, gradually pulling the young me into the warm and sweet world of the old cat.

In the spring of next year, grandma and mother will turn the spun cotton ear sticks into a zigzag shape with wooden shafts, dye them, pulp them in groups, dry them in the sun, wind them on the spools, and finally turn them into shuttle threads in the hands of mother.

when this batch of shuttle lines is completed, grandma begins to accumulate for the next batch, and the years cycle alternately, and grandma never has a rest day. While doing this, she often talks to herself: When grandma is young, she should spin more cotton for my granddaughter and make more coarse cloth for her, so that her dowry can fill the chest when she gets married in the future.

I think grandma didn't feel bitter or tired when she did these things, because she had hope in her heart.

Little-footed women and delicious food

In the wheat harvest season, grandma is even busier. During the day, she has to boil water and cook for the whole family, and when everyone has a rest at noon, she is carrying her own basket made of corn stalks to pick up the ears of wheat under the scorching sun. At that time, after harvesting, every family carefully picked up the missed ears again. When grandma went back, she couldn't see a few ears of wheat at all. Grandma was often busy for a noon, carrying an empty basket with coarse clothes and trembling, and grandpa saw another scolding. Grandma didn't excuse but didn't change the habit of picking up ears of wheat every day.

In autumn, she will hop on her feet and carry a basket to pick up corn, sweet potatoes, soybeans and peanuts. Every year, she dries the food she has picked up, peels it off with a wooden hammer, cooks the soup with wheat, bakes the corn and sweet potatoes for us, and cooks the soybeans and peanuts with salt to make a kind of snacks for grandpa.

When I grew up, I made similar soups and vegetables, and I also ate many big meals and farmhouses in star-rated hotels, but none of the soups could match grandma's wheat kernel soup, and none of the pickles tasted as good as grandma's pickled vegetables.

In the midsummer night, grandma often goes to Yang Shulin with a lantern to touch my brother and me (we call the golden cicada a climbing fork). After the rain, there are many climbing forks in Yang Shulin. It's hard to touch so many climbing forks for grandma's little feet in the Woods. Put it in salt water for a few days, and match it with a single cake baked by her with a hazelnut (an antique tin thing for making single cakes). The fresh meat is fried brown and crisp, and the fragrant juice is wrapped around it, which is more and more bright in the sun, wrapped in a single cake, and the tangy fragrance bursts in, so delicious on earth.

grandma with little feet in the eyes of the younger generation

whenever I see grandma taking off the foot wrap and hugging her feet, I feel particularly uncomfortable. Those little feet with four broken toes are awl-shaped like the length of a small palm, and the little heels and broken fingers are covered with cocoons; The road in the mountain village is uneven. When I meet a muddy puddle or something, my whole body shakes left and right several times to fall down, which makes my heart ache.

On sunny days, grandma always sits at the door, unwraps the foot wrap layer by layer, puts on reading glasses and plucks the cocoon on her feet with a needle. If I happen to meet this scene, I will help my grandmother pluck cocoons together. Of course, only now is my grandmother willing to tell me the story of her foot-binding.

Grandma was wrapped around her feet by her mother when she was five years old. Except the big toe, four little toes pushed hard to the center of the foot and were pressed under the baseboard. Then a blue cloth with a length of ten feet and a width of two and a half inches to three and a half inches was wrapped around the four toes, through the instep and heel, and then to the instep and heel. In order to prevent grandma from secretly releasing her feet, grandma sewed the foot wrap with needle and thread.

As soon as it was wrapped, grandma cried in pain. She couldn't get down for days, and she cried when she walked and held the wall. After liberation, you can finally let go of your feet, but because of years of foot binding, your feet have long been deformed and stereotyped.

Every time I help my grandmother to remove the foot wrap, my eyes get wet: the foot wrap is opened layer by layer, with the big toe in front and as sharp as a lotus petal, and the rest of the toes are tucked into the soles of my feet one after another, and they even "blend in", with the instep bulging high and the soles of my feet almost invisible, and the unique heel is the largest, transforming into the "pillar" of the whole foot-this is the "three-inch golden lotus" repeatedly praised by feudal society. No, in my opinion, those feet are less than three inches long. Thumb also wronged, careful not to stand up straight, for fear that once I stand up straight, other sisters will follow with pain.

I never understood the inevitable connection between foot-binding and getting married when I was young. When grandma nagged me about these words, the tone was as dull as talking about an irrelevant person, and a smile floated on her face, as if telling a distant and memorable story.

However, time is cruel. Maybe God knows the hardships of this little woman's life, so she took her grandmother away painlessly at the age of 86. Since then, I haven't eaten fried forks and baked single cakes. I ran to my grandmother's old house and saw the spider web on the lonely spinning wheel. I think the spinning wheel misses its owner as much as I do!

I couldn't bear to see grandma's little feet before, but now I can't see them if I want to.

The Sophora japonica bloomed and withered in front of my hometown's old house, but I couldn't see my grandmother's trembling and emaciated body. She walked with a cane in one hand and waved me off in the other, and she refused to go back to the house until I left for a long time. I have been leaning against the wall for a long time, chanting my name ...

Gone

Memorial with a handful of loess

Missing

Heartache with dreamlike memories

From the Republic of China to the modern age

Missing the long braid

Missing the gown and jacket

But those little feet have not grown up at all

Walking with trembling

. However, leaving these little feet

can't go far away

can't reach the end of the world