Old harvest

In the songs written about the Vietnamese harvest, the two late musicians Van Cao and Pham Duy both had very good songs. Van Cao had a song called "Mua Day" which was famous for a long time.

Van Cao's Harvest Day is a song praising the beauty, vitality, and resilience of Vietnamese farmers: "Harvest day, the countryside is happy/ The rice sings happily/ The rice doesn't worry about the enemy's return/ When the golden season comes, the countryside...". Pham Duy gives a bustling, joyful feeling, with the quick-paced joy of farmers when the harvest is good through each lyric and rhythm of the song Carrying Rice: "Carrying, carrying, carrying rice home/ Carrying rice home, carrying rice home/ Carrying rice home! Carrying rice home! Carrying rice home! Carrying rice home!".

In the old days, every time the harvest season came, the whole village was busy, worrying about harvesting, threshing, drying, and storing the rice. In general, everything for the harvest had to be ready. The village divided up the harvest, after one family finished, it was the turn of the next. From adults to children, everyone was busy. Men did the heavy work like gathering rice, bundling rice, threshing rice, threshing rice... Women were busy harvesting rice, carrying rice, drying rice... Children were busy tending buffaloes and cows, bringing rice to the fields... The rice that farmers planted and sowed at that time was seasonal rice, from sowing to ripening lasted 6 months, each year only one crop was done. A good harvest was a long time of excitement and waiting. Days of work, months of eating! A good harvest meant a season of joy, a bountiful harvest of laughter for the farmers. Harvest season has come, under the golden ripe rice fields, women and girls pick and pick with sickles, each bunch of rice full of grain is spread out on the field. The voices and laughter of each other dispel all the fatigue. The men are busy gathering and bundling rice. The children are searching for fish and crabs in the thick puddles under the stubble. In the afternoon, groups of people carry rice on their shoulders, the full, round, golden rice grains swaying to the rhythm of their steps. After being carried home, the rice is piled up, when night falls and the moon rises, the rice is spread out in the yard for the buffalo to trample. On the large brick yard, people lead the buffalo, people thresh the straw, people shake the straw, people collect the rice... Occasionally someone sings a folk song to tease each other, the joy of a good harvest seems to multiply. Just like that, the buffalo and people work tirelessly until the moon rises high in the sky. After threshing the rice, the women wait for the wind to blow the rice husks to clean the straw and broken grains. When the wind is weak, they use large bamboo fans to fan the rice instead of the wind. The clean rice is then brought out to the yard to dry, dried in the sun, and put into a basket or a barn to store. The women put the new rice into a mill or pound it until the husk peels off, revealing the pure white rice grains. The new rice is put into a copper pot to cook. When the rice is cooked, the pot of new rice gives off a fragrant aroma. The first bowls of rice of the harvest are offered to the gods, the land, and the ancestors for their blessings, then the family reunion meal comes. Perhaps this is the best meal of the year. Straw is also a precious product to farmers. Straw is used for cooking, used as food for cattle and buffalo, used to cover vegetables from being washed away or crushed by rain... Farmers dry the straw and build it into tall trees, which can be pulled out and used whenever needed. In the fields, when the harvest is over, the fields are dry, the farmers start to collect trash and burn the fields. The fields at the end of the season, white smoke curls up in the wind, carrying the acrid, pungent smell of straw. The smell that grasshoppers, locusts and small birds, every time they smell it, they fly over and circle around as if trying to catch it to smell, to pick up each wisp of smoke. And me too, that smell has followed me all my life.

Now science has advanced, new rice varieties are short-lived, and several crops can be sown in a year. Harvesting is no longer as hard as in the past. The scene of carrying rice home for buffaloes to trample, or men standing in the sun beating each bundle of rice, is rare. Farmers now have more free time. Women do not have to work in shallow or deep fields all day long. Instead of harvesting by hand, there are now harvesters. In small, narrow fields, people use grass cutters to make harvesters, which are dozens of times more productive than harvesting by hand. There are threshing machines. In large fields, people rent a whole set of machines that can harvest, thresh, winnow, and bag, and farmers just need to rent a car to bring it home to dry. People come to the field to buy straw. The price of straw is also sky-high, and the money from selling straw is more than enough to pay for the rental of machinery. In general, farmers today are much happier than in the past.

Wandering through memories of the old harvest season, suddenly I crave the fragrant smell of new rice, "nang huong" and "nang ut" displayed on the dirt mat!

Source