Chapter 340: The Aura of the Pine Tree

(20) The aura of the pine tree

At seven o'clock in the morning in winter, the sky in the mountains was not yet dawn.

My father went to bury my afterbirth. Along the mountain road, my father hurried up the mountain. According to the rules left by my ancestors, my afterbirth was to be buried under the tallest tree on the mountain.

The east showed a hint of the whiteness of the fish's belly, and by this time my father had climbed to the inaccessible mountainside, and there was no way to find it. The father was in a great hurry because he had to bury the afterbirth before the sun came out. At this moment, a bird flew in, and its crisp call seemed to say hello to its father.

Then the birds flew past my father, as if spring had come to the world. The father thought to himself: Now is a new society, and the child is a girl, so don't use that word, change it to "spring", it seems that this year's spring came very early.

The father climbed a hill and there were higher peaks around him, but it was a hill surrounded by water, and in the most open north there was a beautiful village sitting by the river, and the shining water of the river surrounded the village in an S shape, and that was where the child was born.

The tree on the hill is not very tall, and the tallest is not the hardest green tree, but a pine tree. Although the material of the pine tree is not dense enough, it is evergreen all year round, and the needles are particularly drought tolerant, so it is suitable for growing on the top of mountains without springs.

Thinking so, the father decided to bury the eldest daughter's afterbirth under the tallest pine tree on the mountain.

The father dug a large pit under the tree where he could bury the fetal garment, and when he looked up, all the branches around him were full of small birds, and the birds flying in the sky blocked the eastern light with their wings.

The moment the sun leaped over the top of the mountain, the birds in the trees disappeared. When going down the mountain, the sharp north wind still scraped on the face like an ice blade in the sun, and the land was a winter scene, without a trace of spring at all.

The 200 children at the school were excited to see the teacher's baby, and the wind that came in between the doors and closes of the earthen wall house prevented the mother's arms from moving.

The doctor in the township bleeds his mother's arm, and although the arm will soon be able to move, my mother has always had lingering fears about this kind of medical technique—

Postscript –

Maybe it's fate, there are pine trees everywhere I live. When my collection of essays, Belle Franc, came out, I didn't know what the cover design meant. Until one time, I sent it to a teacher at a publishing house, and he said: This cover is good! The texture of this pine tree is just like your character, quiet and serene.

Khan, I didn't know that the brown markings on the cover were pine, and the cover design printed on the book was Feng Ke, and I don't know if it was another pen name of my classmate Sun Yingli, who commissioned the book to make it. When we were classmates, he went from being a poet to a bookseller. He said that a poet must be raised by superior material conditions, and hoped that he could get rich as soon as possible, so that he would have time to continue to cultivate the aura of a poet who had exported chapters.

("White Diary" 3: Hei Mi Zhima's childhood, 2009.8. A Lan in Beijing.) ）