Anchoring home

My house was nestled in the middle of an areca garden, its low tiled roof bowing down to the mountain. The walls were made of mud mixed with straw, and in the rainy season the water seeped in, 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 to the limit. Every morning she went out 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 and buy things to support my siblings and me to be educated.

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

I don’t remember when I started to feel sad. It might have been one winter afternoon when the flock of ducks my father raised was swept away by the flood, and he sat silently the whole time without saying a word. Later, every time I returned to my hometown and stood along the riverbank, recalling the image of my father at that time, when he sat by the dim oil lamp cutting 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 the village as small as my 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 trees 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 state of mind 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, the Vu Gia river with one side eroding and one side depositing, mountains on three sides, green on all four sides...

Each person has a different way of “returning to their roots” through their own childhood memories and nostalgia that they have 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