08:59, 10/22/2023
I returned home on a drizzly day. In the morning, while enjoying a nap, I was awakened by the smell of smoke. Even though I hadn’t seen it, I could already picture the smoke coming from the old kitchen where my mother was busy cooking breakfast for the family.
I stepped out onto the main house steps and looked down into the old kitchen, where wisps of white smoke were curling up in the rain. The wisps of smoke caught in the rain, and I smiled as I remembered what I had said to my family as a child.
Outside, the rain was still drizzling, each drop falling gently. Perhaps this was the last rain of autumn. Autumn rain always made people feel like they were melting away in every moment, everything was slowly and peacefully blending together, lingering. The rain was not torrential, not torrential, so it also created "conditions" for smoke to rise in the rain. I remember when my kitchen was covered with thatched roofs, when it rained, the thatched roofs stuck together and got wet. Even though my father had covered the kitchen tightly, somehow the smoke could still seep through each strand of thatch and straw and climb up. Then when the kitchen was covered with yin-yang tiles, red brick industrial tiles, smoke also seeped through every gap and rose up.
The color of the smoke is milky white, if standing from afar, it looks like clouds. The whole countryside, faintly showing the color of roof tiles, the color of young green trees, the "smoke clouds" just float like in a dream. When I was little, I asked my mother where the smoke would fly when it got caught in the rain? She gently stroked my head and smiled, they would fly until their legs got tired and then stop. The smoke in the mind of a ten-year-old child like me at that time was like a creature that knew love, knew anger and even had... legs as my mother said. I found the smoke extremely cute.
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| Illustration: Tra My |
The smoke from the rain rose from the kitchen. The place where I spent my childhood, sometimes sitting with my mother, sometimes sitting alone, cooking rice, soup, boiling water or cooking bran for the pigs. In the days before gas stoves or electric stoves, wood stoves were mainly used. Firewood could be guava roots, longan roots, dried jackfruit roots or corn stalks, straw. Next to the pot stand, my father used bricks to build two separate, neat squares. One of the squares was for firewood, the other for rice husks. Depending on what I was cooking, I would use firewood or add rice husks to make the stove more vibrant. Every time I cooked pig bran, I would put the wood in first, wait for it to catch fire, then pile rice husks around it. The rice husks caught fire very quickly but also created a lot of smoke.
The smell of rice husk smoke is one of the many types of smoke that makes me excited and think a lot. In the smell of rice husk smoke, I get a little bit of the aroma of new rice if it is a batch of newly milled rice. The burnt smell of broken rice grains and perhaps the smell of my parents' hard work and sweat to make the fragrant sticky rice.
I grew up through many seasons of smoke and rain. Sometimes I ask myself: are the smoke strands caught in the rain or have I entangled myself in nostalgia? Because there are times when I find myself strange, returning to my hometown during the rainy season and encountering smoke, I am absent-minded, absent-minded, standing alone, very still, then gently inhaling the smell of smoke in the rain until it fills my chest. I dream, longing to be as free as the smoke floating in the vast sky of my hometown...
Ngoc Linh
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