Memories of the countryside

Memories of Ham My (Ham Thuan Nam) where I was born and raised on rainy days of late autumn make people feel nostalgic 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, dreamy days. 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; joy and sadness mixed with each moment of time.

Catching field crabs. Illustration photo.

On rainy afternoons of the old autumn, I remember I often walked on the edge of the field, using my bare feet to splash water in the small ditch, letting the mud on my feet flow down with the cool water. At this time, the rice fields on both sides of the field were covered with milk, blocking the path. Called a path, but in fact, the edges of the fields had been used a lot and became a path. That was the path for farmers to visit their fields, to catch crabs in their burrows that crawled out to bite and destroy the rice; that was the path that farmers could take to visit their fields, if they saw any holes flowing from one field to another, they would promptly stop and fill them up to keep the water for the rice when it was about to flower. Until now, such paths no longer exist, people have built concrete pillars to plant dragon fruit on their fields, 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 that were put in a barrel 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 9th 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, the ducks would grow quickly, lay eggs for them to eat, and then eat meat at 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 burrows to look for food. The big ones would be grilled and eaten for fun, while the rest would be broken into small pieces and minced 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 that is when in the afternoon sun, we carried a bundle of fishing rods, used worms as bait and stuck them on the river bank 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 on the hook. The fish were brought home, many were shared with the neighbors, the rest were grilled and mixed with basil, sipping a few glasses of rice wine or stewed with ginger leaves to serve as food for the whole family in a 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 current 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, a little chilly 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 countryside where the people are "heroes in the resistance war for national liberation", when peace is restored, they are diligent in production to build their homeland more and more beautiful. Writing about nostalgia for 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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