When grandma walked up the stairs,

the last time I went to her house was last winter, and now we haven't seen each other for more than a year. I heard from my mother that her former best sister, who lived near her, had passed away not long ago. I can't imagine how she will go on with her life for the rest of her life.

the children are not around most of the time, almost no one cares about her every day, and her old friends are disappearing from the world one after another. She used to walk a few kilometers or take a long bus to see her children when she was still flexible, but now she is almost gone, and she is gradually unable to walk that far. Now she, like a tired bird, can only live alone in her narrow building.

this is her old age.

the life of lonely old people often makes me feel dark in front of me. I can't see what's in front of me. Like walking in a dark tunnel, the way to come has long disappeared, and the way to go is unpredictable, and, likely, it will suddenly fall to the ground in the middle of the journey. Like a nightmare that can't wake up.

however, this is the life she is willing to pay the price for. That's for sure.

I saw a black-and-white picture of her when she was young many years later. Like the posture in which many women took pictures in those days, they leaned over. She had a calm face and a light smile between her eyebrows. At that time, many things had not happened in her life, and she still had the vision of a maiden, and the goose's face was as bright as the moon. The graceful wool coat, with a wool collar wrapped around her slender neck, made people feel inexplicably warm. At that time, I saw the fate of half my life. So that picture always reminds me of Manzhen, who has not yet turned the corner and fallen, and fate has not held out a black hand to her. Her fate may not be as bizarre as Manzhen's, but looking back on everything that happened to her in her later years is also disconsolate.

I still don't know why she divorced her grandfather, who was a teacher. I can only imagine and infer from the fragments she heard chatting with her relatives. My grandfather, the man she once loved and gave birth to three children, his reticence is boring and boring, and he may not be popular with women in modern times. But I think Grandpa's character may require the other party to have a certain amount of energy to recognize. I always remember him with martial arts novels all day long. It must be because of this that she gradually lost interest in him. The strength and enthusiasm of her character are destined to be unwilling to spend on such a man.

since she moved out of there, she moved to that small building. I think she began to have no home. That is my childhood memory of the summer vacation being full of children's laughter and noise of the deep mansion. When I was young, my sister and I, my cousins, a large group of children will all come to her compound during the summer vacation and stay for a whole summer. But now it has kicked her out, even if it becomes deserted. Its cruelty is that it allows her to make her own choices, as if driving her to a dead-end step by step, asking her to surrender and taste the bitter fruit of her own. However, her personality is determined not to give in. Either put up with it or go the other way.

it is not a luxuriously decorated building. It sounds like a joke. Her adopted son got lucky in a lottery many years ago, and the prize was that building. But because of poverty, the building has been unable to decorate, so it has become idle. The building even became a reason for her adopted son to blame her many times. It is hidden in a secluded street where there is not enough light even during the day. She lives in it silently every day, doing all the trivial work of cleaning, collecting, or tidying up in the silence to relieve the time that is thick and sticky and almost impossible to flow.

she is an old-school person, clinging to the traditional and conservative habits, and is at odds with the modern style of the building in any case. So much so that the furnishings in her house, though well organized, gave a strange and abrupt sense of mix. I think she was uprooted like a plant and then transplanted to another place she didn't know.

an alarm clock on which a chicken eats rice is one of her personal belongings, and it still makes a regular ticking sound in the old days, as if her last remaining friend confided to her about the past. A taken-in wildcat sleeps all day long, and a stained country dog is hostile to anyone's arrival. She is now with these things all day.

A steep staircase leads straight to the second floor, but at the end of the building, she seals it and places it with cacti planted in flowerpots and pumpkins, potatoes, and sweet potatoes harvested from the fields. She doesn't go up the stairs and only moves in the small space on the first floor. Looking out from the window of the small building, there is no view. What you can see directly is the desolate hills and farmland. Time is sometimes like taking a nap in this place, making people feel sleepy. A friend once told me that people are not afraid of death but of aging.

her abrupt and awkward situation now can't help but remind me of her old deep mansion. Her life after divorce was inextricably linked to that place, where all the details of her life for the rest of her life were stored. It was as if she had been perfectly inlaid with the place. Now this painful divestiture makes it impossible for me to accept that she has been treated like this by fate. Although everything looks safe on her face, I know that she has been silent and patient in the face of twists and turns of fate.

many of my happy childhood memories were left in that courtyard.

the gate is a deep porch-shaped doorway, which is hot at noon in summer but can be hidden in a dark and cool doorway. We wrote with chalk on the wall, lined up with small stools, and asked a group of children to come over and play the game that the teacher taught the students. When I was playing, I listened to the people who came to sell bowl saucers from street to street outside, and the long voice called for selling cold bowl saucers, cool bowl saucers. The sound of bicycles filled with two buckets of bowl holders clicked and echoed in the deep alley. Grandma heard the sound and led us out. Go get a bowl of saucers.

there is a big pear tree in the courtyard. In summer, the green pear, which is the size of a fist, is so full of drooping that you can pick it off and eat it with your hand out. This was a temptation for me, who had few snacks at that time. I always remember it. I have a picture when I was young, in which the thin pear tree was grasped by me with one hand.

in summer, she took us to the farmland to pick beans. On the way back, there were very small frogs running around on the edge of the grass. My cousin and I caught a few of them. At our request, she especially found a large iron basin filled with water and put it in the shade of the pear tree. Let the frogs swim in it. Sometimes it will be a few ducks brought back from shopping on the street. We strangely ask her to try her best to satisfy most of the time.

it was supposed to be the most stable and peaceful period of her life. We are still young so that she can enjoy the joy of her children and grandchildren around the knee. The man she remarried has not yet begun to linger on the sickbed, and her adopted son has not spoken ill of her because of marital problems. And then she began to encounter these unexpected changes one after another.

when I was older, a resident from Sichuan moved into her yard. A small Sichuan man, his wife died young, with a teenage daughter without a mother. The man affectionately called his grandmother's sister. On the surface, grandma is at peace with their father and daughter. However, behind her back, she always expresses all kinds of dissatisfaction with foreign families to her children. I could vaguely understand at that time that it was because the occupation of outsiders was not decent. Her description frightened me. She said that the Sichuan native specializes in dealing with the aftermath of funerals, so she has been worried that that person will come back with dirty things. He also said that the man secretly caught her pigeons for cooking while she was not paying attention. It's a lot of things like this.

she is more sensitive and paranoid than ordinary people, and later I think it is not only because of her nature but also because she has experienced too much pain. When she lost her mother when she was young, her uncle raised her, soon separated from her uncle, married her, gave birth to three children, divorced, remarried, and disappointed in the remarried man. She hardly trusts anyone and is naturally alert to everyone. My mother completely inherited this from my grandmother but did not inherit any other advantages in her, which made me feel unacceptable in retrospect as an adult and had to try to understand and forgive.

she likes listening to the radio, and when we were there during the summer vacation, at 09:00 in the morning, she turned on the radio and played us the children's program of the Central people's Radio. She likes to raise plants, especially the cactus, just like her character all her life. Or it is a highly contrasting plant with a rich and warm blossom. She opened up a field in the backyard, fenced it, and secretly raised several poppies in it. It is not easy to show people, only when close friends visit, she will lead them quietly into the backyard and show them the very good ornamental and poisonous plants. She likes cleaning very much and her hair is combed without a mess. She also smokes and is a heavy smoker. I like keeping cats. There has never been a shortage of cats in her house. She believes in Buddhism and goes to the temple early to ask for lucky charms made of red wool during the Spring Festival. I followed her to the temple and saw a whole piece of horrible murals on the wall of the temple. In retrospect after adulthood, I know that the content drawn above is the phase of hell. She believes in karma.

this is her personality, her unusual place. There are many kinds of grandmothers around me, but only she is different.

Transform you to look more beautiful in our rustic bridesmaid dresses! This is the part for the unique, as you.

but I never felt her tenderness when I was young. She has never been like the grandmother I have seen in books or movies, warm, soft, flat-mouthed, her eyes narrowing slightly, looking at her children and grandchildren with a smile behind a thick presbyopic glasses, sinking into an armchair to sleep because she is sleepy, or constantly knitting. Its property is like a warm yellow lamp waiting for people to return at night. But she's not. She is always like a taut string, always sober, always majestic. When I grew up, I knew that she didn't have any love for people, she just didn't know how to use that kind of soft way.

I always remember one sunny summer afternoon when she singled me out and asked me to pull the bellows for her. Other cousins are watching TV in the house to enjoy the cool. I still remember that she only picked me out to help her pick up a heavy field harvest when she came back from the farmland. The unhappiness in my heart at that time is still clear and profound, but I already understand her intention of asking me to do these things in the first place. Of all the children, only I was born poor, so I have had to experience it since I was a child.

because of her superstition in God and Buddha, her impression in my childhood has always been mysterious. It was not until adulthood that the mysterious veil seemed to be gradually uncovered as I grew up and matured. She has experienced so much pain in her life that she hopes to help her swim in this way for most of her life, and she doesn't trust anyone and only depends on herself. As if so as not to be swallowed by the whirlpool of fate. She tried to turn the ensuing disaster into a miracle but was repeatedly knocked down until it was destroyed. She struggled with hardship all her life and lived a tougher life than a man.

I read Duras's novel many years later, and she described countless times in the book the crazy woman who gave her blood, but her feelings for her were entangled with love and hate. She said she was born crazy. There's this madness in the blood. She didn't become a patient because she was crazy. She lived like healthy life. The crazy woman, her mother, suddenly overlapped with my grandmother. I suddenly found out that my grandmother was like this.

I remember her being very tall, perhaps because I was so young that I often gave me a kind of dignified pressure. When I was an adult, I went to work out of town and didn't see her for almost all the years. Now when I go home and see her with my own eyes, I always feel a strong untruth when I see that she is not as tall as my shoulder. A real feeling. I don't think she should be so short and fragile. As far as I can remember, her height seemed to be a confrontation against her unfair fate, and she never stooped as if she were supporting her body and carrying a mountain on top. In the end, she gave in. His height was halved in an instant. She didn't even have an angry face, only a peaceful smile. They will not even make a decision and resolutely implement it as before, but keep wandering and wondering.

so she is no longer real, like a shadow like a piece of paper drifting away.

she has a tiger in her heart, but life doesn't give her a chance to sniff the rose. She was plagued by illness and mental infirmity all her life. I still have to do farm work in the fields when I am old. She is like a trapped animal, unable to use her hands and feet. The mother said that her heart was strong and her life was not strong. I'm afraid she'll never step up that steep staircase again. It seems to shake hands with the world and doesn't want to fight anymore. However, I often look at her in a trance and have an illusion, as if she is standing on the stairs, suddenly stop and look back at me. I look up at her and see that she is smiling at me.