As far as I can remember, red sorghum in my hometown does not only mean that sorghum rice is red, but also the straw of sorghum is red.
Red sorghum is sweet, which is not only good for insects, but also attracts birds such as sparrows and crows to eat. Because the harvest is small, it is rarely planted.
Houcun was the only example in that era when there was not enough food. The villagers would rather receive less or no rations and plant a piece of red sorghum. The picture is not sorghum rice, but the straw of red sorghum.
The straw of red sorghum can be combined with the straw of ordinary sorghum to weave a flower mat, which is bright and festive in yellow and red, and is deeply loved by people.
In my hometown of Fiona Fang, within eight or nine miles of Fiona Fang, it seems that the craft of weaving flower mats is the patent of Houcun. This judgment can be confirmed in the surrounding markets, where the flower mats are all from Houcun.
Almost every family in Houcun will weave flower mats.
Flower mat is a kind of decorative mat, which is not laid on the bed surface to sleep, but nailed to the wall near the bed; It is neither dirty nor beautiful. The cold winter exudes a warmth, and the summer reveals a coolness.
The specifications of flower mats are all long strips, three or four meters long, which can nail the two walls of the bed head and the side of the bed; There is a difference of about two meters, so we can only nail the bed to support a wall.
The four sides of the flower mat are red squares, which should represent the meaning of the window. This pattern not only breaks the dull feeling of the length of the mat, but also contains light and beauty. Mats try to weave various patterns, mostly in pairs to weave vases, meaning peace in the four seasons; There are also skilled people who weave the homophonic sounds of bats, deer and fish in Fu, Lu and Yu. How rich is what people want at any time.
The straw of red sorghum is very sweet, like sugarcane. When the sorghum grows to a height of more than one person and starts jointing, people in Houcun take turns to look after the red sorghum. It is difficult for us mowing children to get into the fields. The more we can't get into the field, the more we lure greedy insects in our mouths. Ji Zi walked around the red sorghum with dung on his arm. After he succeeded, he "clicked" a tree from the field, pulled it up and ran, and several partners chewed a mouthful of sweet and sour juice.
Sorghum jointing speed is amazing. When I was a child, I heard an adult tell such a joke that a cow went to the sorghum field to steal sorghum leaves at night, and the cow rope was wrapped around the sorghum stalk. It happened that it rained at night, and sorghum jumped more than one person overnight, and the cow was hanged. Fools all know that this joke is false, but sorghum soon grew to the height of heading after it started jointing. After growing to this height, people in Houcun stripped all the sorghum leaves in the lower part in time.
At first, I thought they did it just to take care of our greedy children. Later, I learned that peeled sorghum ears can get more nutrition, and sorghum stalks will be redder and brighter under the sunlight.
After the sorghum rice is grouted, people carefully bend the straw again, stand on tiptoe and peel off the leaves on it.
Sorghum ears are like drunken red-faced men, shivering and wobbling; Sorghum stalks are like a girl in red holding a willow tree. Under the breeze, they sometimes gather and sometimes disperse. What a beautiful flame scene.
Both red sorghum and yellow sorghum are precious to farmers. Sorghum rice is a ration; Ears scraped from sorghum rice are tied together to make brushes, which are tools for washing pots; The long pavilion stem under the ear can be made into a pot cover by drilling with an awl and threading it with a rope; Sorghum stalks are used to weave seats.
It takes a lot of effort to do a good job in the early stage of sorghum straw mats. Break the sorghum stalk evenly from one end with a sharp sickle. Crush the broken stalks with stones in the wheat field, then soak them in water, take them out to dry, and then scrape off the inner pulp of the stalks with a sickle. The remaining straw is the material for making mats, also called mats.
You can't learn to steal the skill of knitting a flower mat with your eyes fixed on it Even if you have some skills in making up seats, you can usually only make up two or three seats, and that's just a skill of "picking and pressing". To weave colors and words, the key lies in the collocation of latitude and longitude lines. Just like a painter painting, you should plan ahead in your mind, lay out the whole, and have a good idea. In addition to technical factors, coupled with the scarcity of red sorghum, there are naturally fewer people who can weave flower mats.
In that era when the individual economy was still "hiding half a face behind the guitar from us", people in Houcun passed it on to me and I passed it on to him; You drive me, I drive him; Help each other and develop together, quietly forming a "one village, one product" regional economy, creating a precedent for the later development model of township enterprises.
When I was a child, I saw people in Houcun weaving flower mats. Yellow and red sorghum stalks are flying up and down in their hands, just like dancing in color training, a dazzling dynamic beauty.
The weavers hold the crowbar knife tightly in one hand, but this does not affect knitting. Every time they weave a grid, they use a crowbar knife to tie the bamboo slips tightly, making the grid more dense and the woven mat symmetrical and beautiful. The crowbar rotates back and forth in the editor's hand, running freely, appearing and disappearing, like a prop in the magician's hand.
Woven summer sleeping mats pay more attention to the softness of bamboo strips. The weavers put a large enamel tea urn beside them. Every time they finished knitting, they stood up, stretched themselves, took a long drink of water and splashed back and forth in their mouths. The cheeks on both sides are undulating, and the eyes look bulging and big. At this time, the editor pinched his waist and bent down, turning a mouthful of water into a cloud and sprinkling it on the red and yellow strips to be woven. I feel a blur on the edge, like a mist hanging over my eyes.
Moist falls on the face, the sun shines on the face, and the heart lake is also opened by ripples. I pondered the essentials of knitting with my heart and had an epiphany. I even discovered the skill of weaving baskets with wicker.
The willows that were born a few years ago, in the pits and rivers in the countryside, are full of catkins falling. They were cut, dried, soaked, spread out next to the place where people in Houcun set up their seats, and sweetly called big brother or uncle according to their seniority. Some people stood up happily. According to my materials, I drew the size of a basket base on the ground, lined it up, and started from the middle, according to the simplest method of choosing two and pressing two, which gave me a good start, so I learned to do it.
I knitted the first crooked basket, and suddenly I felt that I had grown up, as if I had begun to weave my own life.
Mat weaving has a long history in China. The ancients spread mats on the ground as seats. Sitting on the floor or taking the floor as a seat is called "sitting on the floor", which is the origin of sitting on the floor. Ancient pottery has mat patterns, and it is impossible to verify whether it is printed with mat patterns woven by ancestors of Houcun people, but it is certain that the skills of weaving flower mats by Houcun people must have followed the methods of weaving mats by ancestors.
Mat has a history of thousands of years in China, from "cutting green silk as a reed mat to bury parents-in-law" in ancient Qin Xianglian to "banquet" and the inheritance of delicious food. Now, "seated", "absent" and "absent" all come from the floor mat. In modern society, mats have played an important role in laying kang, scaffolding, stacking and storing grain. Nowadays, the function of mat has been replaced by new materials. In the near future, the art of mat editing will surely disappear in the long river of history.
Painting: Zhang Qiudi PICC Suzhou Company