How long can a person live, depends on how many past years he can remember?
I recently returned to my hometown and spent seven days going over everything in the house. This is the house where I have lived for more than 20 years and my parents-in-law have lived for 56 years. The father-in-law is a professional soldier, so the house is allocated by the government. It has more than 100 square meters and is divided into three floors. According to the family, there are three spaces: "upstairs", "downstairs" and "below". "Upstairs" has three rooms, a study room, a reception room, and a secretary's room. There are four spaces downstairs, where the father-in-law sleeps, the mother-in-law sleeps, the living room and dining room, and of course the princess room where I sleep. "Below" are the two adjutant's rooms, an orderly's lounge, and a kitchen.
At the beginning of last year, the military informed us that we had to move out in April this year and would give us an apartment. Although it is a bit embarrassing to change a bungalow of more than 100 pings to an apartment of less than 40 pings, but after all, "the situation is not transferred by subjective consciousness", and the move must be moved. The question is, how to move it? For more than 50 years of accumulated objects that fill three floors, it is not enough to make more lockers to put them in an apartment. For a full year and a half, at family gatherings, going out for shopping, and celebrating birthday parties, the topic of discussion among family members has revolved around: "How to move?" Q-style "Let the military be in charge, they asked us to move!" There are all. When I hear any argument, I vote in favor of it, because I know from the bottom of my heart that "it won't be me moving anyway." I discussed with my sister early on, I would pay for the move, and I would pay for the new furniture, but I couldn't do it. I know that is an impossible task.
In this way, one year and five months have passed, and I have been going back and forth in the old house dozens of times. Except for the mother-in-law who often mentioned that she is going to move, there is no movement at home. Even my father-in-law's reading glasses are still stained with dust. Lie quietly in place. God bless the father-in-law, it has been six years since he passed away.
Finally one day, or to be more specific, a few days before the "moving dead line", when I went home with my colleague Ru Ting, she whispered: "I think if I don't do it again, I may really not be able to move. "
At the beginning, I made it clear that I didn't have to do it."
"But if the house remains intact, what will happen when the deadline is reached?" This is not what Ru Ting asked, but I was asking myself. I finally understood that in a few days, this house would no longer be ours.
So, at nine o'clock the next morning, I wore a work uniform and summoned a group of Women's Troops such as Ru Ting, Xiaoxian, Yili, Dalizhen, and Yizhen, and started my forced relocation! I said to myself, it's just a matter of losing something.
I pointed to the things in the house one by one and asked my mother-in-law, "Do you still want this?" Her answer was always: "This? Of course, this is... (the memory begins...)" After two hours, I found that There wasn't a single thing she didn't want, everything was at stake, like the plate with the missing corner, "It's the plate you ate cereal when you were a kid, don't you remember?" or the flyer, "It's the father-in-law. An old friend held an art exhibition..." The trash can, "I bought it from you when Zhongxing Department Store first opened..." Yes, what kind of cold-blooded person is willing to throw away the plate of cereal I ate when I was a child?
I grew up with my grandparents because my parents decided early on to go their separate ways. Since I can remember, I have lived in the memory of the old man. Memories are not only their expressions, but also their attitudes to life. Because the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are separated, their growth environment has been stripped away. They can't see their relatives or their hometown. Apart from memory, how can they fight against this isolation?
The idea is moving, but when my mind resurfaces, my heart hardens. I decided not to ask her. The first principle, I thought to myself, if I can still buy it in the future, I will throw it away. The second principle is that what is useless in life is also thrown away. I called Jasmine's library, which collects second-hand books, and said I had some old books to donate to them. The answer is that if you want them to collect it, you need more than a hundred copies. I said, there should be more than 3,000 copies. They came to take a look, and it turned out that eight workers were used and two trucks were moved.
In addition to books, there are all kinds of furniture. Those furniture are things I only see when I'm filming scenes set in the 1920s and 1930s. I called a friend who made props for the show and asked him to collect it. He came in empty-handed, came in and watched for less than five minutes, and said he was going back to drive the truck. I don't know how many cars he moved, and I was busy throwing other things, but I kept hearing his voice in my ears, "Oh my God! There's more!"
Appliances appear late in our home. When I was in elementary school, I used to envy my classmates' home with a washing machine, and I came back and asked my mother-in-law, why didn't we have a washing machine? Her answer was, because we have someone doing laundry at home, and the clothes are easily damaged by machine washing. Since I was a child, I didn't have the habit of watching TV at home. My father-in-law's theory was that "guests come to the house to communicate, not to watch TV." Because of this, the family is silent at night, my mother-in-law paints, my father-in-law reads and writes with a brush, and I, I forgot what I was doing, I should be in a daze. But there was a time when my house had four TVs, four VCRs, three DVDs, two microwaves, three refrigerators, and two dishwashers. Is this the torrent of the times? Or is it because I got into show business?
If someone asks you how much stuff you have in your house, how would you answer? What should your unit of measurement be? From a certain point of view, everyone has a lot of things at home, which is the accumulation of many years of life. But some things can be measured, for example, let me ask you, how much wine is in your house?
Let me open my wine cellar and take a look. The so-called "wine cellar" is actually a small storage room in the father-in-law's room. I've never seen what's inside, because I don't know when it started, there was a coat hanger at the door, which means that there's nothing in there, and if there is anything, it has nothing to do with our lives. If it wasn't for the move, everyone would have forgotten there was a door over there. When it was finally opened, dust poured out, and behind the door was a cabinet full of wine, each bottle covered with a layer of dusty soil. I grabbed a bottle and looked at it. It was empty, completely empty, but the packaging on the top of the bottle was still intact. This bottle of wine has never been opened, just evaporated. I took out the bottles one by one, and roughly calculated that there were more than 200 bottles.
Uncle Zhang, who has been helping Zhang Luo at home for many years, quietly came behind me, "There is another storage room." "I also have it in my bedside table, all of which can be used as your dowry." The mother-in-law came over and said. This sounds heartwarming, doesn't every family have heirlooms? But dowry hundreds of bottles of wine, what message does this convey? Tragic comedy has become farce. Father-in-law doesn't drink, but he thinks that other people's wine is a gift, and it should not be transferred, let alone resold. The old gentleman in his 80s has just saved 430 bottles of wine. much? In addition to wine, similar gifts include more than 600 cans of tea and more than 200 boxes of ginseng...
In this day-to-day battle, I lost books, furniture and appliances, clothes, and newspaper clippings—newspaper clippings from my father-in-law for more than 40 years, as well as newspaper clippings collected from the entertainment page for me by my family members. My primary and secondary school homework, well-known and unknown love letters, are also put into the garbage bag in the mood of leading by example and killing relatives with righteousness.
I kept cheering with the past like this, and one day my father said, "You are the first emperor of Qin, who burns books and pits Confucians." I heard a smile on my face, but my heart was sour. Seeing the things that have been thrown away, someone took a flashlight to the garbage dump at night and picked it up secretly.
Is it funny? Actually horrific. Seven days went by like this, and I stuck to my role as the butcher of cold noodles. The auspicious day to move into a new home has finally arrived. I looked at my father-in-law's tablet, holding the lottery in my hand, the surroundings were quiet, and my heart was quiet. I knelt down and kowtowed three times, and said in my heart, "I know that you are reluctant to leave, and I am reluctant to leave, but 'family' means family will follow people, my father is still there, my sister is still here, my mother-in-law is still here, they are here Where is your home." I threw the lottery and slammed my head on the ground. Suddenly, the depression and strength of these days were completely disintegrated, and I fell on the ground and cried.
Everyone has moved homes, but each home has a different weight in people's hearts. Sometimes you leave not just a place to eat and sleep, but a part of your life. When you leave that space, you leave a part of yourself there forever. To a certain extent, every time you move, your life has to start over, and the length of your life has to be recalculated. Not only are you giving up objects and neighbors around you, you are also cutting off the continuity of time.
After the old house was emptied, I had to endure the pain and stay away from the smell of my father-in-law, the smell that reminded me of how long and how far my life was. But "getting away" is not disappearing after all, I am a person, and I have memories. The smell is faded, but I will try to keep it alive and use my method to let my descendants smell the smell of the old house.
I finally took a last look at the osmanthus tree in front of the door, turned around, and closed the door. With a click, can there be a voice in this world that is so familiar and so thrilling? Walking out of the little alley, I couldn't help but turn around again, feeling that the story wasn't over yet. But no, in the red of the setting sun, the little girl with two braids, holding her father-in-law in her left hand and her mother-in-law in her right hand, was singing lightly. Looking at her smug look, you would think that children in the world don't need to grow up. The singing sounded like nothing, it wasn't real, but I knew what she was singing. There is a small river in front of my house and a hillside in the back. There are many wildflowers on the hillside, and the wildflowers are red like fire...
.jpeg)