Memories of the countryside

Memories of Ham My (Ham Thuan Nam) where I was born and raised on rainy days of late autumn make my heart flutter with many memories. Searching for the past in the afternoon of memories in the eighties of the last century. Ham My appears to me so familiar.

I close my eyes and think back to my youthful days full of dreams. It has been more than 30 years since I left my homeland. Every visit to my hometown brings back many fond memories, making my soul flutter, mixed with reality and illusion. I am lost in my own nostalgia, filled with countless feelings of longing, longing, and forgetting; mixed joy and sadness with each moment of time.

Catching field crabs. Illustration photo.

On rainy afternoons in the old autumn, I remember walking on the edge of the rice field, using my bare feet to splash water in the small ditch, letting the mud on my feet flow away with the cool water. At this time, the rice fields on both sides of the rice fields were covered with milk, blocking the path. Called a path, but in fact, the edges of the fields that were used so much became trails. That was the path for farmers to visit their fields, to catch crabs from their burrows that crawled out and bit the rice; that was the path that farmers could use to visit their fields, if they saw any holes that were flowing from one field to another, they could stop them in time and build them up to keep the water for the rice when it was about to form ears. Nowadays, such paths no longer exist, the people have built concrete pillars to plant dragon fruit, and such paths have also been concreted to make it easier to harvest dragon fruit on hand-pushed carts with wheels, which are more convenient. But every time I return to my hometown, I remember the memorable paths with fragrant rice stalks on both sides. There were some unfortunate crabs that crawled out of the cave mouth and were put in a bucket and brought home to be minced for the flock of wild ducks at home waiting for food to lay eggs every early morning. Talking about the flock of ducks in the natural cage made my heart flutter, remembering something very far away, but very close. At that time, I remember around the first half of the ninth lunar month, my mother went to the market and bought about 15 to 20 ducklings, used a bamboo curtain about a meter high, about 10 meters long, then rolled it up behind the porch, and locked the newly bought ducklings in there. My mother said, if you feed the ducks with leftovers, they will grow quickly. But if the children diligently caught crabs and snails to feed them more, the ducks would grow quickly, lay eggs for them to eat, and then eat meat during Tet. My younger brother and I imagined that every morning we would have a few eggs to boil, mix with fish sauce and dip with boiled spinach, and then we would run out of rice. So every afternoon after school or herding cows, my brothers and I would follow the banks of the ditches and rice fields to catch crabs out of their holes to eat. The big ones would be grilled and eaten for fun, while the rest would be broken into small pieces and chopped for the ducks to eat. Occasionally, there would be a lame or slow-growing duck, which my mother would butcher, boil, and cook into green bean porridge for the whole family to eat; the aroma of that evening meal still makes my heart flutter to this day.

For me, there is another unforgettable memory when in the afternoon, we carried a bundle of fishing rods, used worms as bait and stuck them on the riverbank where the water stagnated next to the dry bamboo roots; although we were bitten by mosquitoes a little, but in the last days of autumn when the rain stopped and the water receded, there were golden snakehead fish caught. The fish were brought home, many were shared with the neighbors, the rest were grilled and mixed with basil, sipped with a few glasses of rice wine or stewed with ginger leaves to serve as food for the whole family during the time of poverty, there was nothing better. At that time, Ham My commune where I lived did not have many shops, during the subsidy period, occasionally enjoying dishes from the fields and home gardens like that was a dream. I went through my childhood in a rural area with innocent, bright smiles, with labor appropriate to my age and with the belief that I would have a bright future if I tried my best in studying, knew how to overcome circumstances to rise up.

Today, I have lived away from my homeland for more than half of my life, but every time I return to visit my hometown, I always feel extremely close; taking the opportunity to quickly breathe in the fresh, cool countryside breeze in the windy sky, with a bit of chill when the rain has just stopped. In my memory, Ham My commune still has so many things to remember, to love, to be proud of, a hometown where the people were "heroes in the resistance war to liberate the nation", when peace was restored, they worked hard in production to build their homeland to become more and more beautiful. Writing about missing their homeland, Chau Doan has verses that make people far away from home always recall: Oh homeland, even though it is far away, I still remember/ Remember the hard days of innocence/ Mother bent her back carrying a shoulder pole in the mist/ To catch the dawn at the market.

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