[Essay] An old house with earthen walls is a firework that warms people's hearts.

A few adobe old houses, high and low, flat in Gao Diping, strewn at random, like an idyll. The yellow wall of Yamato, or the white wall of Shi Zhuan, has been rinsed in the running water of time for too long.

I can't bear to give up this old yard in the season. Outside the courtyard, tall trees cling to the grass and are dyed with light yellow green.

Old house and old home, old friends don't give up. Look, there are eight fresh and three joyful red couplets. Clothes and quilts are hung on the bamboo pole outside the house, and there is a blanket, especially bright red, which responds to the spring sunshine and echoes the girl in red not far away, showing a vague popularity.

There are almost no people in the whole village, and the doors are left unlocked. It was a long alley, even a little cold, and it came to me. Come out quickly, take a breath in the courtyard dam, and you can smell the clear sunshine, the earthy smell of the adobe house, and the smoke of the kitchen, which is warm and soft.

This is the Wu Jia Courtyard in Luohe Management District, Shuiping Town, Zhuxi County in early spring. Silent spring and beautiful mountain village reveal the cold silence of space and the sadness of time.

Adobe walls or rammed earth walls. Tulou is the oldest residential building in China, bearing a long history of farming civilization. Years, people's livelihood, family, blood; Family continuity, farming heirloom, loyalty and filial piety, feud and enmity ...

Every earth-walled house once contained these heavy weights and cared for the most precious things in the world. In the history of mountainous areas in northwest Hubei, the vast majority of people, generation after generation, should have thrived in earth-walled houses.

In the past, it was very difficult to build houses with earth walls in rural areas. The host family is worried about the exhaustion of labor and property. And rammed earth to build a wall, the technology is quite particular. This is an ancient building technology. You have to have wallboard first, that is, make a rectangular box with two-inch thick boards, which can hold soil.

Then, fill it with earth. We need two strong workers, with long wooden handles and square heads, to tamp and level the land with great strength. The first layer is compacted, with several short trees placed horizontally on it, and then the wallboard is erected and compacted. In this way, a wall was built.

Dozens of meters high earth walls rise from the ground and stand up layer by layer, and each layer of earth wall should be straight. The center of gravity of the earth wall is unstable. If the foundation is not high, it will fall. The key to the stability of soil wall is whether the wallboard is erected correctly and whether the rammed soil is solid.

In addition to building walls, it is necessary to cooperate with digging and taking soil in time. Digging and picking soil are very particular. The finer the soil, the better; The soil picker walks on a wall more than a foot wide, and it will not be biased, swayed or dizzy.

Building an earthen wall house is also a heavy physical activity. The walls of the adobe house have been soaked with countless sweat. Tamping soil to build a wall requires a strong labor force, and it is not easy to dig and pick up soil. So the host family should pay enough money to treat them well. People who work, when they are in a mood, or in order to relieve fatigue, often talk and laugh while working, and even shout labor songs. ...

More than 30 years ago, mom and dad worked hard to build a three-bay adobe house before painting Pingshan, which cared for our brother and sister's childhood and adolescence. After more than 30 years, my brothers and sisters worked together to transform it into a two-story brick building. After the new building was completed, it was named "Huaping Mountain Hall".

When a new building is successful, it misses the old one. In order to commemorate the old house with earthen walls, I wrote an article "Painting a Hall in Pingshan", in which there was a sentence: "In the early 1980s, my brother and sister were young and weak, and they had no fixed abode. Parents cut the mountain before painting Pingshan, and asked craftsmen to invite workers. Exhausted family wealth and eventually became three civil tile houses; The blue light of the road has actually made the parents who are in the prime of life prematurely senile ... For more than 30 years, their parents are old and the old house has declined. Four brothers and sisters, gradually drifting away, silently puzzled. Love is my old house, and I'm worried about my parents.

With the changes of the times, people gradually use steel bars, cement and bricks to build houses. The earth-walled house, which is warm in winter and cool in summer, will eventually become a landscape that is about to disappear completely. This is also the result and performance of urbanization and rural poverty alleviation. There are only a few earth-walled houses left in the countryside, which are low-key and ancient in front of the new houses made of steel and brick. ...

Nowadays, many people who grew up and lived in rural areas above middle age have lived in adobe houses. These people have already lived in reinforced concrete houses, and the fireworks in the earth-walled houses will warm them all their lives.

Note: The pictures are selected from the works of many photographers in Zhuxi County, such as Ren Yongze and Kan Xiaohui.