Chapter 16 jaggery

jaggery There are often four packs of bean crisp candies on my table. I think about not eating them, but I am reluctant to throw them away. That bean crisp candy was sent to me by brother Heguan from Aier last week.When he saw me, he didn't have time to greet me, so he carefully handed the bean crisp candy to my hand and said, "Grandma Da Mao asked me to bring it to you. I just went to Ningbo last month and I just came back yesterday." .” After finishing speaking, he said goodbye and wanted to go home, because the rickshaw that brought him was still waiting at the door. I held on to him stubbornly, and at the same time asked the servant to send the car away first.So he sat down and told me everything about his hometown. "This bean crisp candy," he finally returned to the main topic, mentioning authentic Shanbei products.Someone gave it to your grandmother, but Grandma Da Mao couldn't bear to eat it herself, so she insisted that I bring it out for you.She said: Ah Qing Ding likes to eat Dou Su Tang.When I was in bed with me when I was young, I woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to get out of bed. Before I put some bean curd crumbs in her mouth, she gurgled and stopped making noise..."

I felt a little embarrassed when I heard it, so I chimed in and asked, "Brother Heguan, how is my grandmother recently?" Brother Heguan turned his head and thought for a while, and replied: "Grandma Da Mao is in good health, but as she gets older, her memory is always worse." So he told me a story: even this time when she asked him to bring me shortbread, she insisted on keeping him for some snacks.So, she told Brother Guan that she groped under her pillow for a long time, and found a corner bag with a knot of black wool.She carefully untied the bag, took out a few tickets, looked at them again and again, and finally snatched one away!The green color of the day, I handed it to my brother and said: "Ah Yang, this dime... the dime can't be wrong, right?... Take it and buy ten steamed buns. They need to be hot....Brother Heguan Bring your sister a bean crisp candy, we didn’t get anything good to treat him to,... Rent dim sum, ten steamed buns... a dime can be held in prison..." My younger brother couldn’t hold back his smile when he heard this, and said to Heguan Brother winked and ran away.After a while, bouncing and bouncing into the bowl of steamed stuffed buns.My grandmother picked two for Brother Heguan and two for my younger brother, muttering, "Ten buns for a dime are so small....Ten buns for a dime, one for a penny...a penny is Three copper coins, it’s not enough to count the copper coins together..." My younger brother laughed even more from ear to ear, and even the last half of the bun was choked in his throat, and Brother Heguan also found it funny, he said : "Later your younger brother told me that Ningbo steamed stuffed buns were cheap and could be sold for fifty cents each, and what your grandmother gave him was an old central bank note, so they discounted it in half and counted it as five cents, and they didn't quite agree. want."

I listened, and I wanted to laugh, but when I looked down and saw the four packs of bean crisps in my hand, I suppressed my smile, and soon I said goodbye to Brother Guan, and I straightened the four packs of bean crisps Just put it on the table. Because of the many days and the poor storage place, this bean crisp candy has become damp, and even the wrapping paper has been soaked in sugar water.I thought, this was brought by my grandmother all the way, and I should eat it well, but I also thought that it is not good to eat something wet, so let it be moistened as a souvenir. So, these four packs of bean crisp candies were placed on the table until now.

As the saying goes: "Seeing things and thinking about people." When I saw Dou Su Tang, I easily thought of my grandmother.My grandmother is tall and tall, with a fair face and delicate eyebrows.Her only shortcoming is that her teeth are too bad.When I came back from my grandmother's house and slept with her when I was six years old, only the front three teeth remained.But she also likes to eat sweet things, when she wakes up in the middle of the night. We slept on a large Ningbo bed with Xiang Yifu cloth curtains hanging on it. The white roof of the tent had turned dusty after years of not washing it.Inside the bed, there is a wooden board on which food is placed.I slept in it, right under the board, and if I accidentally sat up in the morning, the top of my head would hit it, causing the food placed on it to be bumpy like a boat encountering a huge wave, and it was right and falling down .After I came down, of course there was no hope of surviving, either I ate it all by myself, or I shared it with my grandmother.

My grandmother is very active by nature, the first is that she likes to move her mouth.Waking up early in the morning, her mouth would be pounding, until everyone went to bed at night, she had no choice but to stop.As soon as she stopped talking, she fell asleep, snoring loudly.Sometimes I would stop talking to her, and I would grope around secretly, reaching out to steal the food on the board.The food on the board is always the most frequently eaten bean halva.So I squeezed 100 million, lay down quietly again, unwrapped the wrapper and ate it by myself.The bean curd crumbs were not scattered all over the pillow, under the quilt, and sometimes flew into my eyes, but I didn't care, I just picked up and ate it alone in the dark, and sometimes I even tore up the wrapping paper and swallowed it all together.

In the middle of the night, when my grandmother's snoring stopped, she too reached for the stencil to eat.Her ability to grope in the dark is really great, she never collides, and never messes up, and she gets what she wants.Sometimes she counted and found that a pack of bean curd essence was missing, so she woke me up and asked, I stretched my waist, rubbed my eyes and replied vaguely: "Ayu doesn't know, Uncle Mouse ate it." But her hand, her hand touched the side of the pillow, and the bean curd candy book was all over the bed, so she smiled and pinched me, and said, "It must be you, a little mouse, who stole it!"

I give her a twist and she wakes up fully. So the two of us lit the bean halva again in the dark. She would never light a lamp in the middle of the night, firstly because she was reluctant to bear the oil, and secondly because she was afraid that if she was not careful, the fire would burn the tent.She pinched some bean curd candies into my mouth and told me to hold it in my mouth until it melted by itself before swallowing it. With a "goo", I swallowed it, and she lifted some and put it in her mouth.So slowly and quietly, the mother-in-law and grandson were eating bean crisp candies in the middle of the night. As she fell asleep, she started snoring.

We never make the bedding, there are jaggery crumbs and other broken things, on the pillow, under the quilt, it feels a little rusty when we sleep, but we are used to it, and we will never feel too uncomfortable.When I woke up the next morning, I just straightened the quilt slightly, and never patted the mattress or anything, so that the crumbs were still scattered in the same place. Sometimes the powdered jaggery sticks to my ears or my face, and when my grandmother finds out the next day, she carefully removes it and puts it in her mouth, saying that she will not eat the sin.When I saw it, I quarreled with her and asked her that it was on my face, why didn't she give it to me?She couldn't bother me, so she had to go in and open another package, pinch some for me to eat, and then carefully wrapped it up herself, ready to eat it in the middle of the night.

She regards bean crisp candy as a treasure, and that old big summer bed is her treasure house.Later, my attention was finally focused on this treasure house, and when I couldn't get enough, I wanted to steal it.From then on, she hid the bean crisp candy elsewhere, and never let it enter the treasure house until night. But I miss it more and more, and I can't look forward to the night.At night, I would urge my grandmother to go to bed early, hoping that she would wake up earlier and eat jaggery. One day, my father came back from Shanghai, and they all talked until midnight. I woke up alone, I couldn't see my grandmother, and I couldn't touch the bean crisp candy. I wanted to shout, but I was afraid of the strange father, and I felt extremely sad.After waiting for a long time, I couldn't bear it anymore, so I had to grope by myself beside the pillow, under the quilt, and pick up some leftover bean curd candies that I hadn't eaten. When I was choking, I heard their voices coming into the room, so I He didn't dare to make a sound, and quickly got his head under the blanket, pretending to be asleep without moving.

"Where's Ah Qing?" asked his father's voice, putting down the lamp. "I think I got caught in the quilt." Grandma replied. "It's unhygienic to sleep with your head covered at night!" My father said, approaching as if he wanted to lift the quilt for me. I was startled, but fortunately my grandmother stopped her immediately: "The child is asleep, don't wake her up." "..." Father said nothing, and grandmother Fan Zhai Feng Li Xiang was taking off her clothes. The bean crisp candy was contained in the mouth, and the melted sugar juice mixed with saliva flowed into the bottom of the throat, and the throat was itchy and unbearably tight.I tried my best not to make a sound, and after a long while, the "goo" finally broke out, and my father immediately lifted the quilt and asked, "What are you eating, Ah Qing?"

I was startled, looking at the flickering lights, Yan Sheng replied: "I didn't eat it——Uncle Mouse is eating jelly beans." "Double crumbs? Where did you get the bean curds?" My father asked, and once again he lifted the quilt and looked at it with a thick lamp. go. But my father took my hand, held the oil lamp to shine on the crumbs and asked, "Where did these dirty things come from? The bed is so dirty, is it okay to ask?" As he said, he wanted to brush off the crumbs. such as. But the grandmother took off her clothes and sat down under the quilt angrily. She shouted to her father: "What's better than a good thing? Shanbei Bean Crisp Tang is famous. Take out the lampstand quickly, I will Sleep well, blow out the lamp to save some fuel. Seeing you are so reckless, be careful that burning the tent is not a joke. The most important thing is to be careful..." She nagging more and more, Father's brows became more and more wrinkled. On the second night, my father installed a small bed for me and forbade me to sleep with my grandmother. My grandmother was very angry and ignored my father for more than ten days. Now, both my parents are dead, and my grandmother has not seen each other for six or seven years, and I miss her forever.Maybe her only three front teeth are already gone?These four packs of bean crisp candies are just for myself to eat, so why send someone from thousands of miles to bring them to Shanghai? I can't bear to eat them—in fact, I'm afraid to eat them.Thinking of the uneaten crumbs on the pillow and under the quilt when I was a child, I feel even more disgusted, and I don't have the courage to unwrap them.Am I thinking it's dirty?No!If I let my grandmother know this kind of thinking, she might ignore me angrily for more than ten days, or ignore me for the rest of her life.How can I not eat it?How can I eat it? After hesitating, after less than ten days of hesitating, he finally ate all these bean crisp candies.Although they are already wet, they are authentic Shanbei products, and they taste very sweet. ——Sweet into my mouth, sweet into my heart, I wish you health, my good grandmother!