[Vegetation time] Homesickness of watching. Wild pineapple

My hometown is a coastal fishing village in the west of Hainan Island. Legend has it that hundreds of years ago, when our ancestors first set foot on this sand, this sand was quietly waiting for them to set foot on the sea. There were many birds flying here, so they named it Yinggehai.

In the 1970s, I spent a free and happy childhood in Yinggehai. It was the only time in a person's life that he could roll freely on the beach, wander in the sea, listen to the wind whistling through the wild pineapple bushes and Casuarina forests by the sea, stir their branches and leaves, let the soft sand disperse, and jump into the folds of his trouser legs with the pace of running, without worrying about the burden and sadness of life, just happy.

In the past, the fishing village was simple, and the most prosperous street in the center of the village was just a sandy road formed by dozens of Nanyang-style old arcades neatly and relatively for several years. Ancient arcades are two stories high, and their sandstone walls have been infiltrated into dark yellow and black by sunlight and time. The only difference is the design and color of the relief on the top of the exterior wall facing the street, and the style of the window frame. These arcades are occasionally mixed with some low-rise bungalows, with overlapping tiles on the herringbone roof, yellow grass growing on the seeds blown by the wind, and occasionally one or two stout plants are born to take root, stand tall and bloom with simple colors.

Further to the seaside and the periphery of the village, the huts next to it are basically simple huts, with yellow mud painted on the walls, low doorframes and dim lights, bamboo plaids on the thatched tops, dried squid and cooked shrimp, and a unique salty taste of marine fish floating in the wind. Living in these places are basically small fishermen with poor family economy, and there are also foreigners who come to work in the town to make a living. They just want to sleep, have a bed and food to fill their stomachs, and they can't pay attention to the comfort of home at all. They don't even bother to fence. They just transplanted some cactus or wild pineapple seedlings from the wild and planted them along the periphery of the house. After half a year, they grew into a barbed fence and surrounded an independent yard of their own.

Cactus and wild pineapple are prickly and natural hedges. Once densely planted, let alone strangers and wild dogs, even domestic chickens and pigs who love to dig holes in the ground dare not approach the edge easily.

Wild pineapple is a perennial shrub and tree, which is different from the herb pineapple that people eat. Fruit pineapple leaves are sparse and generous, thick leaves are smooth and without edges, covered with some tiny white powder, which looks gray-green, at most about one arm, with fine thorns on both sides of the leaves, just like sawtooth, and the height of the plant is only half waist; The leaves of wild pineapple are thin, but dense and elastic, with the texture of leather. The color of young leaves is bright green, and the old leaves are green and dumb, and gradually narrow from bottom to top. Finally, a very long and narrow leaf tail is formed, and the elderly can reach more than two meters. A soft ridge with obvious folds is raised on the back of the vein, and there are hard curved thorns on both sides of the leaf and the back of the leaf ridge, which look like hooks and are extremely sharp and accidentally scratched.

At first, young wild pineapple plants were in the form of grass. With the height of the tree, the old leaves are peeled off, revealing rough branches, and finally the whole plant can grow to the height of one or two floors. The old wild pineapple has dropped all the dead leaves under it, revealing brown branches the thickness of its legs and arms, twisting and bending to hold up the leaves clustered at the top of the stem, like fireworks hanging down along a parabolic trajectory after being blasted.

The branches of wild pineapple have no thorns, and often branch and grow into a large piece. When a plant grows tall, it becomes a green screen with dense top and sparse bottom, which can block the sight of strangers peeping from a height, but the bottom can't stop the invasion of livestock. At this time, the cactus, most of which is tall, plays a role in separating the low-lying areas, and privacy and security can be taken into account.

Such a fence is not soundproof, and the sound of chickens and dogs can be heard. In the village, villagers can often be seen chatting and talking across the barbed fence, and crossing the low fence to give each other food. Through a fence, through the simple feelings and goodwill of distant relatives and neighbors! It was an era when low thorns and wild pineapple trees could show separation and boundaries, but the distance between people was very close and the heart was still very close.

In their spare time, the children in the village like to go to the windbreak belt by the sea best. Although it's a long way to go, the sun makes people smoke overhead, and it hurts to the soles of their feet. But around the wild pineapple and Casuarina jungle there, you can catch red and green slope horses and soft-shelled sand crabs, and pick sweet cactus fruits and wild pineapple fruits from thorns. If you are lucky, you will find a bird's nest full of temptation and worth the hard work. At that time, living materials were not very rich. In order to survive and support their families, adults work day and night, busy fishing in the sea, weaving nets and drying fish. The children in the village basically grew up in a state of stocking. Every day when the sun rises and fishing boats go out to sea, in the empty village, groups of children silently wait for people's trampling in the fierce sunshine along the dark alleys winding in the dark old houses, the sandy paths separated by wild pines and cacti, and the village avenue. They either go to school well or play in the windproof pine forest by the sea-leave the cradle and parents' arms and learn the direction of their future life after learning to walk independently.

The wild pineapple forest along the coast has been growing for countless years, and the uneven branches and leaves are stacked, which has a sense of vicissitudes and is a landscape standing at the forefront of the coast. There are dense aerial roots on their thick branches, which are deeply embedded in the sand embankment together with the trunk, forming a jungle with staggered roots to resist wind and fix sand. It is not only the ecological world of coastal creatures, but also a paradise for human children to play. Lei, whose body is brown and the bun is red, and whose skin is red and green, like to dig holes near wild pineapple bushes to live. Ants and various spiders and beetles have also established their own strongholds here, and the children regard it as their comfort zone. Every time I come to this wild pineapple jungle, the older children will be responsible for finding holes in the sand and catching the horses hidden inside. Children will pick up pine needles and dead branches and burn them. After baking, you will eat it one foot at a time. A little delicious food is not enough, but everyone is still very excited.

If they really can't find anything to eat, the older children will smash the ripe red fruit hanging on the wild pineapple tree with stones, then break the fiber and hard shell wrapped outside, take out the sweet and tender nuts like peanuts, and kiss them hard. If there are no big children strong enough to go with them, they can't break the thick nut shell of wild pineapple, and eager children will try their best to knock off a small piece of wild pineapple fruit and chew up the tender fiber at the root to get a little sweet talk to comfort them. In this era of material scarcity, every family's life is not rich, and the choice of snacks is equivalent to nothing, so any resources that can satisfy their thirst are precious and unusual, and they are all valued and cherished by children!

Wild pineapples usually bloom in July and August, with different male and female flowers and a fragrant smell. Its male flower is a pale yellow-white panicle, half covered by a spathe; Female flowers are green, densely arranged in a head shape, and finally grow into clusters of flowers and fruits shaped like pineapples, so they are called wild pineapples. The fruit is almost spherical or oval, with uneven edges and corners on the surface, close to wood. Each prominent drupe is wrapped in a hard drupe in its thick fiber. As time goes by, the originally green fruit turns red slowly, showing a mature color, and finally the whole fruit turns orange-red. At this time, if you insert a sharp knife along the convex range, cut off the fiber connected to the bottom of the stone in the middle and peel off a stone fruit, which is yellow, orange and bright red, much like the seal of Hongtian Huangshi.

If you are patient, smash the fibers on the outer surface of the wild pineapple core with a hard stone, soak them in water, and slowly remove the remaining fibers with a file, and you will get a bloody shell that looks like a lotus. Punch the upper and lower ends, take out the nuts inside and add tassels to make a beautiful pendant or bracelet. Because of the high power consumption, no one wants to spend a lot of time and energy carving this ubiquitous wild nut. As a result, decades later, it surprised all of us and turned into a string of blood lotus bodhi with a market price of tens of thousands of yuan! Surprised, people can only sigh: what makes the ordinary wild pineapple fruit become a mystery of market speculation?

Dragon Boat Festival. Cinnamomum palmatum

Next to the houses in the fishing village, there used to be wild pineapples everywhere, which were inseparable from the daily life of fishermen. In the past, when people were poor, the tough leaves of wild pineapples were used as cushions and shelter from the wind and rain. The herbalist in the village also collected its leaves and roots and boiled them in water to relieve the symptoms of cold, fever and urinary tract infection. Its fruit can cure dysentery and cough, stone can cure orchitis and hemorrhoids, and mashed buds can cure rotten feet, which has many uses in medicine.

As a fisherman who eats the sea by the sea, people in fishing villages attach the most importance to the Dragon Boat Festival-washing dragon water, rowing dragon boats and tying zongzi, which are three essential things for seaside people! Yinggehai people's zongzi must be wrapped in leaves of wild pineapple, which is different from the triangular zongzi wrapped in leaves of other zongzi in rural areas. It is a famous specialty food in four fields and eight townships.

Wild pineapple leaves are rich in rice flavor, and the zongzi wrapped with it is bright in color and rich in rice flavor-its fresh leaves are rich in rice flavor elements, which is 100 times that of ordinary rice! And its leaves are long enough and wide enough to easily wrap a rectangular jiaozi as long as an adult's palm. Do you have any good wrapping materials? Every year near the Dragon Boat Festival, women in the village will gather fresh leaves of wild pineapples together, pick them in bundles and process them into zongzi leaves. Wild pineapple leaves are prickly, so it is necessary to carefully cut off the thorns along the side and back of the leaves with a sharp knife, then fold them one by one, tie them tightly and throw them into a large iron pot for cooking. This process, first, cleaning and disinfection, killing insects and eggs attached to leaves, removing impurities and dirt; Second, it can make the leaves of wild pineapple softer, tougher and more folding-resistant, which is convenient for jiaozi's work.

Skilled fishing village women fixed the thick ends of wild pineapple leaves in their palms and made a rectangular bottom pocket. Then she lifted the leaf pocket round and round along the leaf ridge of the central axis, added glutinous rice mixed with seasoning, and closed her mouth when she reached a certain height. She bit one end of the hemp rope with her teeth, wrapped the zongzi in one hand and wrapped it up and down with the rope in the other, fixed it, tied it tightly and knotted it, and it became a green square zongzi.

My mother is also a master at making dumplings with wild pineapple leaves! She wraps zongzi and adds fresh pork belly, shrimp, salted egg yolk and peanuts to glutinous rice, which is rich in raw materials; Green zongzi piled as high as a hill are put in a large iron pot on the firewood stove, and the coarse firewood is boiled all night. When I opened my eyes the next morning, I could smell the fragrance of zongzi floating all over the house. Pick one from the hot pot, untie the rope and unscrew it along the leaves, and the soft glutinous rice will be exposed one by one. Open your mouth and bite it. One bite is shrimp with lost tongue, another bite is oily egg yolk and pork belly, and there is a lingering smell of glutinous rice leaves. What a beautiful word! This is the delicious food my mother left on the tip of my childhood tongue, and it is also the memory breath engraved in my heart by my hometown!

Once upon a time, adults collected wild pineapple leaves, and I found that the bottom of its new tender leaves was pure white in the absence of light, so tender that they would break when pinched with fingernails, but once calcined in the sun, they quickly turned bright green and became flexible in texture. It is said that the tender leaves of its top stem are edible and taste like fresh bamboo shoots. People in Southeast Asia also like to use its fresh leaves to wrap food processing and increase flavor. However, I have never seen people in my hometown eat the tender leaves of wild pineapples. Perhaps even in the famine years, the resources given by the sea to Yinggehai people are still rich. The infinite ocean provides us with fresh fish and shrimp, and we can exchange rice with rural people living on cultivated land around us, so no one has ever tried the idea of tender stems.

Generally speaking, food discovery is different from regular diet. Either in the absence of food and extreme hunger, people take all means to find something to eat, just to satisfy their hunger, regardless of life and death, such as grass bark Guanyin soil; Either in the extreme richness of material, your tongue is numb to the flood of food at your fingertips, and instead it produces an extremely exciting taste experience for everything, such as screaming at raw mice and burning goose feet. I don't know how people think of trying wild pineapple, a delicious food, but I always have good hopes. I hope its delicious discovery begins with a curious and civilized experience, without the panic of starvation and greed!