Anchoring home

My house was nestled in the middle of an areca garden, with a low tiled roof that seemed to bow before the mountain. The walls were made of mud mixed with straw, and in the rainy season, water seeped through them, and in the dry season, they cracked. But that was the first place I knew what the warm smell of family was, where there were poor meals but still full of family affection.

My mother was a gentle and patient person. Every morning she went to the garden when it was still dark, busily watering each row of vegetables, shaking off each worm-eaten cabbage leaf. At noon she slept little, often sat fanning me to study, muttering and counting the coins my mother had earned from selling vegetables early in the morning. How could I forget the ferry trips across the river every day when my mother worked hard to sell to raise my siblings and me to be educated people.

I didn’t have many toys when I was a child. The things I played with every day were sand from the riverbank, the kites my father made from cement paper, and the sound of a bamboo flute blown out of tune in a headwind.

I don’t remember when I started to feel sad. Maybe it was one winter afternoon, when the flock of ducks my father raised was swept away by the flood, my father sat silently the whole time without saying a word. Later, every time I returned to my hometown, stood along the riverbank, and recalled the image of my father at that time, when he sat by the dim oil lamp to cut young mulberry leaves to feed the silkworms at night, my heart ached, unable to hold back my tears.

In my dream, I saw myself flying very high, looking down at a small village as small as a hand, the river sparkling like a scarf spread across my memories. But when I woke up, I was just a child sitting with my knees drawn up, looking through the crack in the door, listening to the wind whistling through the bamboo like a threat.

The older I get, the more I understand that the dream of flying cannot save me from this earth. Only memories, whether painful or gentle, are the only things left to remind me that I once went there, lived, laughed, and cried with my village.

Every human life is a river and every river has a source. I have carried this feeling throughout many years of wandering, especially it always lingers in my later works like a curse: My source is my father, a village school teacher, few words, but full of depth. It is my mother, a poor woman with white hair when I was not yet a person. It is the sound of cicadas in early summer, the smell of muddy well water after the rain, the shade of bamboo leaning on the white pages of my childhood school notebooks, it is the Vu Gia river with erosion on one side and deposition on the other, mountains on three sides, green on all four sides...

Each person has a different way of “returning to the roots” through the memories and nostalgia of their childhood that they once lived and carried with them throughout their lives. Many years later, when I lived in the city, passing by tall buildings, seeing myself reflected on unfamiliar glass surfaces, I still sometimes heard the sound of oars gently swishing in the early morning. Only then did I realize that I had never left this place: “That village left with me/ without me knowing/ Only that in the middle of the poem I wrote/ the shadow of the river and the mountains kept flickering/ I used to live in the village/ Now the village lives in me”...

Source: https://baoquangnam.vn/neo-lai-que-nha-3157185.html