Hometown Memory‖ Picking up dung

When I was a child, the most common work I did early in the morning, after school, and on holidays was picking up excrement.

There were no chemical fertilizers at that time, and crops relied entirely on soil fertilizer, and animal excrement was the best soil fertilizer. "Every flower in a crop depends entirely on dung."

Picking up excrement is not an easy task, because at that time, rural children who were as old as me, younger than me, and older than me were all picking up excrement. The main sources of excrement are: Cattle, but the cattle in the production team are raised centrally, either working in the fields or tied outside the cattle house. The manure pulled by the cattle is promptly cleaned up by the cattle handler (the person responsible for raising the cattle and handling the cattle) to the production team The second is pigs, which are raised in pens in every household, and the pig feces are all in the pig pens, but some pigs will escape; the third is dogs, which are free-range Animals can run and pull wherever they want. In this way, a situation is formed where there is less manure and more people.

When I was in elementary school, I didn’t live on campus. I went to our school in Jiaozhuang Brigade, which was close to home, so I didn’t have to go there so early, leaving more time for picking up excrement. The schools in Jiaozhuang initially had elementary schools, junior high schools, and high schools. Later, the high schools were merged into Dafengying Commune; and later, the high school in Dafengying Commune was removed and changed into a junior high school. Every morning early in the morning, I pick up a basket with a shovel, put it on my shoulder, and go out to pick up dung. While walking on the road, the basket head behind my back would sway back and forth.

It was not very bright at that time, so I wandered around in the woods in our village and in the small ditch beside the village. These places are easy for dogs and pigs to poop. If I was lucky, I could poop in the morning. If you pick up half a basket of dung, you will get nothing if you are not lucky. Spring, summer and autumn are okay, the weather is not cold, but winter is more uncomfortable. When I was a child, there was a lot of snow in the winter, and it was very heavy. When I woke up in the morning, I opened my groggy eyes and was surrounded by a vast expanse of white. The snow covered the animal excrement, making it even harder to pick up the excrement. But if there is feces on the snow, it is easy to find. Once I saw a pile of black things on the snow in front of me from a distance. My sleepiness suddenly disappeared and my chill disappeared. When I crunched through the snow and ran over, it turned out to be a relatively large thing that could not be covered by the snow. I was so angry that I wanted to kick it away, but it froze on the ground. Not only was it not kicked away, it actually hurt my feet. Sometimes when I was lucky, it was the feces that a dog had just finished defecating, and it was still steaming on the snow. I carefully shoveled it up and put it into the basket. I couldn't help but look at the ground around it carefully. Expect to find another lump.

After school in the morning and afternoon, sometimes my parents were still working in the fields with other members of the commune and did not stop working; sometimes after work was done, the meal was not ready, and I went out again carrying a dung basket. Picking up dung at this time is just to kill time, waiting for the meal to be ready. Because at that time, not only did we children pick up excrement, adults also picked up excrement when they had nothing to do. Animals only pooped once a day, and usually in the morning. Even if these poop were not picked up by us children who got up early, they would wait for us to go to school. After they leave, they will also be picked up by the adults before they go to work in the fields.

The most impressive thing about picking up manure during holidays is picking up manure in the fields during the autumn harvest holiday. At that time, after the crops were harvested, the production team used oxen to plow and harrow the ground. Knowing that there was no manure to be picked up in the woods and ditches in the village, I kept my eyes on the oxen plowing and harrowing the ground. Some cows would poop when plowing, so I held the shovel and followed behind the cows. The cows' handles didn't stop me at this time. When the tail of the plowing cow raised up, I quickly put the shovel on the cow's butt, and the cow's excrement was pulled on my shovel. In this way, the cow's excrement was caught without any waste. The volume of cow excrement is relatively large. If it can be collected two or three times like this, the basket will be basically full.

Wheat is not planted immediately after the land is plowed in autumn. Moisture is needed and the weather has to wait. "Don't panic when planting wheat when the cold dew arrives; don't relax when planting wheat when frost arrives at the beginning of winter." Different seasons are suitable for planting different crops. At this time, the place where I pick up manure is still in the field, because not every manure pulled by cattle during farming will be caught by me or others, and there will still be "slip through the net". I would search in the field, and I would often find that the plowed soil had not been completely covered, with a little bit of cow dung still exposed. I would dig up the soil, pick up the cow dung, and put it into the basket. Even so, the cow dung that "snapped" in the field will not be picked up. When the wheat seedlings grow in the next spring, when we go to the field to dig for mahogany vegetables, we often find those dried cow dung, which makes us feel uneasy. Some regrets arose.

Because my main job during the holidays is to pick up dung, after visiting every corner of the village, I set foot on neighboring villages. I ran all over Zhangying in the north, Jiaozhuang in the west, Zhouzhuang and Xiaxu in the south, and Houzhaozhuang in the east, carrying a dung basket on my back. At that time, I didn’t even think about it. Not only did the children in our village pick up excrement, but children in other villages also picked up excrement. Looking back now, the behavior of picking up dung in other villages may be due to the excitement of adventure, experience, and inquiry that attracts me: in a strange environment, I can see everything I see and hear. The smells are all fresh; in someone you don’t know, there may be a female dog that has just given birth to a litter of cute puppies; the hotel’s Yue Diao troupe is going to perform some children’s play this afternoon; look at the commune’s film team, today Why don't you show a movie in Zhuang'er tonight?...... When I go to a neighboring village to pick up dung, my intention is not to pick up as much as I can pick up.

Because the feces are wet, the basket full of feces will be very heavy. For me, a 10-year-old child at the time, it was very difficult for me to carry a basket of feces home alone. of. In this case, I would put the basket head there and go back and ask my father or mother to help me carry it back. On the way back to call for help, I looked back every three steps for fear that someone would snatch away the excrement I picked up.

At that time, every dung collector had a small dung pit in his house, and the same was true in our house. Every time I come back from collecting excrement, no matter how much or how little, I dump the excrement into the pit. When the pit is full, my father will send it to the production team. Someone will weigh it and then pour it into the production team. At the same time, I recorded the weight in a notebook and converted it into work points. Of course, these were the work points I earned.

The process of picking up dung involves both the hardships of hard work and the joy of childhood. Dung pickers generally do not engage in "group operations" and are basically "individual operations" because they are afraid of "unequal distribution of the spoils." I remember one time when I was picking up dung, I met a friend from our village unexpectedly and found a pile of pig dung at the same time. He was one step ahead of me and covered it with a shovel to prevent me from moving. I was not to be outdone. I pressed my shovel on his shovel and didn't let him move. Just like that, after a stalemate for a while, the two agreed to share half. A few years ago, when I went back to see him and talked about it again, I couldn't help laughing. There is also a brother who is older than me. I saw him once pouring out the very small amount of excrement he picked up in the basket, put the mud dug out from the ditch into the basket, and then put the excrement he had just poured out into the basket. Cover it in the mud and carry it back. I asked him why he didn't pick it up, and he said that he had picked up all the baskets and handed them to the team. When I went back and told my father about this, my father smiled and said, just pick up what you have. This doubt was slowly solved when I got a little older.

When I went to junior high school in the commune, because I lived on campus and had only one day off on Sunday, I had no time to pick up excrement. But the experience of picking up excrement in the past few years as a child has been a treasure in my life. It tells me that the collective belongs to everyone, everyone must work for the collective, and there should be no idlers in the collective. Everyone should do something within their ability to contribute to the collective; it tells me that life is hard, and only in suffering can we Only by growing up can we withstand the test of all kinds of wind, frost, rain and snow, and stand proudly; it tells me that labor is boring, but labor will be rewarding, and what you can obtain by your own labor, whether it is material or material Spiritually, we can enjoy it with no guilt. We should be like a couplet written by Yunnan poet Lei Pingyang, "pick up more dung when you have time, and go to the market less often when you have nothing to do."

Later, with the development of science and technology, there began to be more chemical fertilizers: urea, ammonium bicarbonate, diammonium phosphate, compound fertilizer, etc. In addition, chemical fertilizers do have obvious effects on promoting growth and increasing production. It is easy and hygienic to use, and chemical fertilizers have gradually replaced soil fertilizers. At the same time, a biological cycle chain that has been passed down for many years: food - excrement - crops - grains - food has been completely cut off. With it, animal excrement has become garbage, and the rural land has become hardened and Acidification, crops are polluted, people's illness rate increases, and the types of diseases increase. Looking at the city, on the one hand, people want to eat green, pollution-free vegetables, but on the other hand, they throw pet dog feces in parks, green spaces, and trash cans without anyone picking them up, causing a serious problem in the urban environment. Pollution, such an irreversible chemical reaction, constitutes the tragedy of modern civilization.

Today, if I talk about dirty things like picking up excrement again, will it arouse everyone’s deep thought? (Text/Xu Rongxin)