Loess and Dust

In 1975, Chen Dehou was born on the loess slope of Liugou Village, Shaanxi Province. He is the eldest son of the family, with his younger sister Xiulan and younger brother Deming. He cut pig grass at the age of seven, helped the plow at the age of thirteen, and his father coughed blood and fell on the field ridge at the age of sixteen. He became the god of the family. In order to help her younger brother Deming pass the high school entrance examination and college, Xiulan, who always ranked first in her grade, took the green train south to Guangdong for three days and nights with 200 yuan and a dozen boiled eggs raised by her family. Dehou married Wang Guilan from a neighboring village, held three banquets in the adobe house, and gave birth to a daughter, Xiaoyan, and a son, Zhiyuan. In the 1990s, I followed the wave of migrant workers to the city, where I carried bricks, kneaded mud, and tied steel bars on construction sites. My palms were worn out layer by layer. I finally got a mortgage on a 60-square-meter house in the county town, and became the first generation of migrant workers to be house slaves. The scythe of fate became more severe each time: daughter Xiaoyan died of cancer due to overwork, and her son-in-law died suddenly from overwork in order to collect medical expenses, leaving behind an infant granddaughter; son Zhiyuan had just worked for two years after graduating from college, and got into a car accident while driving a black truck to catch up on a project. The daughter-in-law remarried with the compensation, leaving only her one-month-old grandson Xiaobao; his wife Guilan never enjoyed a single day of happiness in her life, and her rickets turned into lung disease, and she passed away in a snowy winter. When he was sixty years old, Dehou sold his house in the county, paid off all his debts, and returned to Liugou with his grandson Xiaobao. After Xiaobao went to boarding school in the county town, he guarded the dilapidated old house alone, bought back an old scalper that no one wanted, and named it "Dehou". To live is to carry everything you have to carry and then grow old quietly.