Niu Yongchao 丨 Lagua (prose)

Gourd

Text/Niu Yongchao

In my hometown, the watermelon and garlic in Zhongmu County are very popular. They are not only large in yields, but also good quality. Every summer, there are many watermelons from Zhongmu in our local market, which is of course attributed to those long -distance traffickers.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the days of peasants were still very tight, and they worked hard for a year. Poor is thinking about changes. Many young people in the village have started the business of selling watermelons in China.

From us to Zhongmu County, it takes about 90 kilometers to and from. The donkey was not long, and the cow walked too slowly, and his father bought a mule. After the trustees hit a new shelf, he joined the team of watermelon.

The key to selling watermelons is to buy, the melon you buy is good and cheap, and you can make money quickly. Our locals called the melon "Laoga", because they wanted to pull the watermelon back from Zhongmou with a car.

Those who come to Zhongmu Laigua are often accompanied by three or five people. Not only do you take care of each other on the road, you also have to help with each other when buying melon.

At that time, in addition to the provincial and national roads repaired by the government, the country was mostly on sandy roads. Many villages are not close to the official roads, and the livestock can not run away, so it has been delayed on the road for a long time.

My father said that it would take a day to go to Zhongmu La a car melon. If you set off at five in the morning, because it was an empty car, the animals ran fast after getting on the asphalt road, and you can rush to Zhongmu County at noon. For lunch, people and animals took a break for a while. When they bought the melon -loaded car at four o'clock in the afternoon, it was one or two o'clock at home.

In the morning, there are more melon cars. The fierce competition between sellers is also conducive to buyers' price. As a result, father and uncle were often on the road at 3 or four in the afternoon. At ten o'clock in the night to reach the destination, people and livestock can rest for one night. Get up the next day to buy melon, go back at noon, and you can get home at 8 or 9 at night.

When buying melon, there are usually two algorithms for the weight of watermelon: one is a weight -scale weighing, how much is it. The other is the estimated pile. The buyer and the seller first talk about the price, and then the weight of the melon pile is estimated. Once they recognize each other, count the money to load the car. The number of transactions is more, and everyone has a number of hearts. The estimated weight and actual number are basically comparable.

Seed -free watermelon is extremely sweet, but no one has this technology there. The seedless melons sold on the local market are mostly produced by Zhongmu. Naturally, the profit of selling seedless melons is also large. Sometimes my father has two kinds of seed melon and seedless melon, and sometimes only seed no melon.

In order to allow the funds to return quickly, the watermelon pulled back was sold immediately. If you go smoothly, you can pour a car melon in three days and earn 4 or fifty dollars. If you pull all the seedless melons, a car can earn seven or eighty yuan. For farmers at the time, earning more than 20 a day was indeed more cost -effective than playing small workers.

However, there must be risks to do business. Sometimes it is forced to sell it because the watermelon is not sweet, or it can't be sold for a few days because it is cool. In addition, watermelon is inevitably damaged during transportation, some collide with each other in the bumps, and some rolled on the ground.

In addition to these, La Gua people also suffered a lot. They were reluctant to go down the restaurant to eat, and they often brought some dry food to charges hunger. When you go to the place and refuse to stay in the hotel, it is common for lying in the car to sleep in the wild.

According to his father, the worst thing in watermelon was the carbon in the halfway. For long -distance transportation, the wheels are large, sometimes walking, and the tires are inexplicably omitted. Therefore, the cylinder is the equipment that the father often brings.

Every time he goes out, his father has to check the tire carefully. He sat in the yard to replenish the image of the car, and so far he fixed it in my mind: his father who was blessed in his thirties, because he was afraid of heat, he wore a pair of pants, sitting on a small bench barefoot on a small bench There are half pots of water, knife, glue, scissors, and old tires for patching in front of them ...

Mold luck will not mess with you because of your carefulness. On the way back, there was a problem with the tire on one side. At first, I just sprinkled slowly. In order not to let the uncle wait, my father wanted to go home as much as possible.

However, when walking to half the distance, the tire was still bursting. Although it was during the day, if it was not transferred to more than 1,000 pounds of watermelon on the car, there was no way to replenish the tire. With the help of the two uncle, his father first hugged watermelon to the ground, and went to the surrounding people to get half a pot of water to replenish the tire on the spot. After more than an hour tossing, the tire was finally repaired. When they continued to rush, the sky was completely dark.

If you hit rain on your way to rain, he would be convicted. Therefore, his father often brought a piece of plastic cloth when he went out. Once, there were no signs of the weather when they left home, but the place was raining suddenly. The father was unloaded to the car pole, and people lay in the carriage to sleep. I couldn't sleep on a rainy day, so I had to stop the car under the tree, and people sat under the car overnight. His father was distressed that the mule was raining and put the plastic cloth on the mule, but he shivered coldly.

I remember when my father went out to pull Guagua, the day when he was back, his grandmother couldn't sleep, or sat in the yard, or lay on the bed with her eyes. As soon as someone sighed loudly on the road, she immediately called her father's name out of the door. Sometimes she stood at the gate for a long time and waited until her father entered the house.

Every time his father entered the house, his mother had hotly kept the meal in his time. The father was not in a hurry to eat. Instead, he first picked out one or two of the cracks of watermelon and cut it to make the family eat a few pieces.

My sister loves to eat watermelon. No matter how night her father came back, she heard the sound, she got up from the bed, and went to sleep.Grandma also likes to eat melon. To this day, when she eats watermelon in the summer, she will also mention the seedless melon pulled by her father.

Today, more than thirty years have passed, and my sister and I will still recall the scene of my father La Gua.It was just that we were young and never thought of his difficulty.For the lives of our family, how much hardship he has made!

(Write on January 13, 2019)

[About the author] Niu Yongchao, female, Xinzheng, Henan, associate professor of Henan Forestry Vocational College.After more than 20 years of coaching, the education and teaching research of economic management and marketing majors occasionally dances to make a text, find warmth in the text, cultivate body nourishment in code characters, and make the heart clear and transparent in the opening and closing of the text.

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