Mother's Irrigation
Several cloud lanterns rose in the night and hung on the opposite mountain range. The cloud lamp shines yellow, like the sun that refuses to fade away, accumulating in the clouds, waiting for the next day to bloom again.
I stood on the balcony on the second floor, watching my mother under the cloud lamp dyed golden. She was wearing the cheapest floral top and pants in the mountain market. The top is long sleeved, and the pants are long pants. Apart from her face, she tightly wraps herself and walks back and forth in the wild grass hundreds of meters away. The wild grass has been encroached upon by the tall wild thatch, and my mother shuttles through it like a colorful animal foraging in the darkness. Throughout the summer, the clouds in the mountains were blown somewhere. Before September, there were several rains in the city, but the mountains remained sunny and bright. At first, people prayed for some rain. Until August, the temperature in the mountains suddenly rose again, with the rising sun hanging high every day, and the temperature was several degrees higher than in the city. I returned to the mountains for vacation and only then did I realize that what my mother said on the phone was that the vegetables couldn't be dried this year, which was not her usual exaggerated statement. For the past three months, my mother has had a rigorous daily plan and has been continuously watering her vegetable garden. At 5 o'clock in the morning, it was dawn. She woke up and watered the nearby vegetable fields for the first time. She watered the distant vegetable fields first, and finally watered the flowers and plants in the yard. After finishing the work, the sunlight happened to flow like golden water from the opposite cliff halfway up the mountain. Around 4:30 pm, the sun set in the west, and my mother repeated the same process. After pouring water, the night is often deep closed. There are also nights when there is not enough time, and the mother will tie a flashlight on her head like a miner, persistently completing the watering of the last tender leaf. Green beans, peanuts, peppers, loofah, green beans, ginger, radish seedlings... These seasonal vegetables are dying in different ways in every household's vegetable fields. No rain is a very dangerous thing for completely autonomous mountain life. The continuous exposure to sunlight and insufficient rainfall have made the daily delicacies we enjoy precarious. I just realized that maintaining primitive labor and supply, even in the rain rich southern mountains, those natural evergreen seasons belong to the will of the mountains and waters themselves, and often do not belong to us. My mother, father, and my ancestors have always had a deeper understanding of this land than we do. Fertile land requires regular trimming and plowing, as well as supplementing with natural fertilizers. What we lack more in our land is the soil itself. Every year around the Dragon Boat Festival, the rainfall that erupts in the mountains will cause a new round of erosion on the land, ultimately depositing all the soil in the bottom layer of the downstream reservoir. The wilderness outside our courtyard was originally a dozen acres of fertile land. The embankments surrounding the fertile fields have collapsed and are still hidden in the towering and majestic thatch like that of a warrior. I don't know when it started, but my mother planted three peach trees in these thin soil mixed with pebbles in the old fertile fields. She piled up a small amount of soil together, forming a new vegetable field of about 40 square meters. On the right side of the clump of balm, she independently carved out a small piece specifically for growing chili peppers. She said Bamao is good. Bamao can shade the small and delicate chili peppers from the sun. Two vegetable fields and one courtyard, the mother takes 3 hours to complete each watering. Once in the morning and once in the evening, adding up to 6 hours. Residents in the mountains follow heaven and earth. My mother has a love for land that completely surpasses my father's. Land can bring her strength more than anything else. The repetitive labor, the corn, peanuts, green beans, and luffa that she protected like babies, came from genuine care and understanding to truly grow. Of course, t