A House of Women: Grandma's Life

On the way to my grandmother's house, we talked about two grandmas at the same time: one is gentle and the other is hot; the gentle grandma often feels melancholy , and the hot grandma likes to watch TV alone.

I accompany my gentle grandmother, and occasionally I think of the stubborn grandmother far away from my hometown. If you have to come first, then yours, mine, this hot grandmother is my grandmother.

I haven't told the story of this grandmother yet, and my earlier memories are of both a desire and a fear of going to her house as a child.

It was a single-family building built on a slope. It had three floors on the ground, and two floors when the ground sank. My grandmother lived on the lower floor, with a patio and two rooms. Further down, there were livestock, and neatly piled firewood was piled up. It was pitch black everywhere, and only the sound of cows and pigs could be heard. Open the door and go out, it is a vegetable garden, planted with eggplant, pepper, cucumber, beans, and there seems to be a pepper tree that is taller than my grandmother.

Further down is the pond where my cousin took me to row a bamboo raft when I was a child. It was eroded by water hyacinth and only a few shallow ponds remained. This is an invasive plant. When we were young, we played with bamboo rafts in the pond, and even went to pick its flowers, hoping that the more it bloomed, the better. It would fill the entire pond. I didn’t expect it to be a nightmare, and the water hyacinth quickly came true. Reproduction destroys the ecology around the pond.

When I was a child, I liked to go down to the second floor, play in the vegetable garden, and play by the pond. When I grew up, I felt that the vegetable garden became desolate. The destruction of the pond by water hyacinth was a major reason, which affected the water supply to the vegetable garden, but it was also possible that my grandmother was getting older and did not have the strength to take care of the vegetable garden and take care of the livestock. So the negative layer became a place that I was faintly afraid of. It was pitch black, like a huge monster was hiding.

But it's not because of this environment that I'm afraid to go to my grandmother's house, but I'm afraid of a specific thing, and I'm afraid to sleep with my grandmother.

For some reason, it seems that as soon as I go to my grandmother's house, I have to share a bed with my grandmother. I know my grandmother is a good grandmother, but I always have nightmares, dreaming that the grandmother lying beside me turned into a monster, and when I tried to escape and wanted to wake up, I couldn't wake up. My grandmother and I are not that close either, but I seem to know that speaking out about this fear and showing resistance will make the elderly sad. The fact that she can accept me sleeping next to her means she wants to be close to me.

So I never told anyone, including my mom, and suffered all alone with those fears that started creeping in when I lay down looking at the ceiling. I later learned that this condition is called "ghost pressing". It actually has a more scientific and modern term, called "sleep paralysis". But I still feel that the mysterious name "ghost press bed" is more in line with the situation at the time, and the elderly grandmother has become a projection of my fear of the unknown.

A Chuan told me that when he was a child, his mother-in-law would tell him that children cannot sleep with the elderly, and the elderly who are dying will absorb the lifespan of children. I just remembered those "weird things" that happened when I was sleeping with my grandmother. Although there was no basis, they were inexplicably implicated and became unexplainable coincidences.

Later, I saw a thriller called "Don't Get Sick at Grandma's House", which tells about a series of weird things that happened when the protagonist lived in grandma's house. The grandma on the cover turned into a horrible ghost, showing an evil smile, which reminded me of my childhood experience again. I feel that I am not alone, there should be many children in the world, who used to be as afraid of my grandmother and grandmother as I was. .

Compared with others, we have very little experience with the elderly, once a year, only once in many years, and then an old man called a grandmother or grandma appears in front of the child, and children will be curious: how did she grow up like this, She existed before me, even before my parents, an ancient monster - so unfounded fears began to grow, and there were always episodes in the process of getting along that proved that Boundless imagination. Just like I may have had a sleep disorder a long time ago, but because I was nervous when getting along with my grandmother, it happened more frequently, so I connected the two in my heart, casting a shadow over my grandmother’s image and becoming a Fear incarnate.

This fear is the first time a child thinks about life, threats and death. Before that, he was carefree, surrounded by fresh and lively peers. The adults always seemed to be the same. The appearance of his parents had been like that since he was born. They rarely see the elderly, or because they have nothing to do with them, they don't pay much attention. Until they meet a strange elderly relative, something that has been neglected suddenly lies in front of them, no longer dodging, so they are forced to think about all the problems related to it. But because he is still young and a blur, it just hovers in his heart, and there is no exit. When he happens to encounter a mysterious thing, he can only develop in a mysterious direction.

After the mystification, I always felt that I was dealing with a monster or a god, quietly pretending not to know, and treating her as my grandmother on earth. So I didn't get to know my grandmother until I was an adult.

But unbelievably, my grandmother's name was really "Yuxian". She has two names. When I listen to them telling stories, I will say, what is the family name, what is the family name, and which name is taken. But because of the lack of details, these two names can only simply piece together the life of my grandmother.

The date of her birth is vague, and she doesn't know the exact year, and even her birthday seems to be just a perfunctory choice of someone who is close to her. People say that she is a descendant of a Kuomintang officer, but there is no way to verify it. She only knows that when her family was shot, she was taken away by servants and sold to a family. The children of that family, the children take care of the children, and then do a lot of housework, do laundry, cook, gather firewood and cut hogweed.

Later, she went to her grandfather's house to be a child bride, but she was actually a child taking care of the child. Grandpa didn't do his homework at home, didn't want to go to school, and hid in the pile of firewood near his home to play. Grandma went to him and pulled his ears home. This is a story we sat in front of the kitchen stove to make a fire, and my grandmother smiled and told me a story, so there are such details.

She raised her grandfather, married him, became her wife, and gave birth to four children, an uncle, a aunt, a second aunt, and the youngest daughter, my mother.

The great aunt I never met died of illness at a young age, and her only son was abducted by traffickers because of her husband’s negligence. Compared to her own miserable childhood, my grandmother was probably the most painful. So she seldom talked about her eldest daughter, and about the child who lived abroad. Only a photo in the album that was taken in the old house proved the existence of this child. Occasionally, when the children accidentally mentioned it, they suddenly fell silent, and then heard the grandmother cursing in the corner, turning her back to wipe her tears.

Our custom is to be vegetarian on the first day of the new year. Grandma will get up and cook bait silk, add pea tips for salty ones, or add a little chili by yourself, and boil the sweet ones with brown sugar water. The bowl that my grandmother ate by herself was salty and sweet with chili peppers, and my aunt laughed at her next to her. How could anyone eat like this, how could it be delicious. She sat down next to me, smiled embarrassedly, and said that she was used to eating like this before, and thought it was delicious. She should have said that when she was a child, when she was not full, she was hungry like this. Until now, it is difficult to adapt to the feeling of fullness. Over time, it has become a strange and incomprehensible taste.

My grandmother, she has suffered a lot in her life. She has suffered from labor and childbirth, which cannot be resolved, and the huge mental damage she has suffered cannot be sorted out from the beginning. I could only sit in front of the stove alone, staring at the moment when the flames ignited, remembering some things that happened in the past, some of them told, but most of them swallowed and chewed alone, like chewing on a hard and cold bone. In this life, I don't know where to start.

Her teeth had long since fallen out, like the cumulative result of all the torture over the years. But before I spread the known stories, I still thought she was hot, she started refusing to do some housework, she would watch TV by herself, and no one would try to compete with her. She cursed her son, her husband to death, and her daughter's husband. Her bones are still hard, and she will live as long as I secretly imagined when I was a child.

(1) mother's name

(2) The season of picking bacteria

(3) When she is alone