Shi Xu

Liu Jiaoyang, Class of 2011, w88 casino of Foreign Languages

Returning to Beijing from the North, the scenery from winter to spring outside the train window is the mood of returning home.

Write an article about Beijing and stop at the sentence "The rising wind and the ruffled spring water", as if the Qingming Festival can still be touched by your fingertips.

I remembered saying goodbye to my friend before leaving, and said: "When I go back, the catkins will be starting to grow in Beijing. It's not like here, the willow leaves haven't been blown green by the spring breeze yet."

The ancients would say willow when they say goodbye, just like the flexible green on the hand, which can make the sadness of separation longer, farther and deeper.

One day earlier, I was strolling through the warm and soft streets of Beijing. The wicker branches that were just the right amount of green were hanging down soothingly. Sui Feng said hello to me as I passed by. It was like meeting an old friend again.

Involuntarily, my mind began to sort through the words and phrases about "Willow" in my memory. It is the sadness of "the willow bank, the dawn wind and the waning moon", the clarity of "the morning rain in Weicheng, the green willows in the guest house are new", the sadness of "red crisp hands, yellow silk wine, the garden is full of spring willows on the palace wall".

This is the first poem written when I was a child.

Everything about the origin of spring and poetry should be attributed to Liu.

In other words, it comes down to catkins.

My hometown is not Beijing, but a small city. To the north is the Central Plains, to the south is Jiangnan. As the four seasons pass, my hometown always stands there, flourishing and declining at will.

My family lived in the suburbs of my hometown, and there was a row of weeping willows on the street outside my door. So when I was very young, I would point to them and babbling: "The jasper makes up a tree as high as a tree, and thousands of green silk ribbons hang down..." Even if I don't understand the wonderfulness of "not talking about willows, but never leaving willows".

But this does not hinder my love for this poem, just like blowing catkins into my nostrils and causing a sneeze does not hinder my love for willow.

In my memory, the willows in my hometown began to turn green after the Spring Festival. Then one day, I found that Tingting Weeping Willow was dressed up and smiling wantonly in the spring breeze.

In a few days, the city will be filled with catkins.

I don’t know if I was born in this season, but I don’t hate catkins as much as others. When I was a child, my favorite game was to chase the catkins lingering under the stone steps on the street corner. I would deliberately slow down my steps when approaching, and then step out to create a small whirlpool.

I even liked it so much that when I was ten years old, I wrote a poem for the first time, and I wrote it to Liu Catkin. The specific words and sentences have long been blurred by the years, but I still remember the scene of a pencil crossing the paper, and a ball of lint gathering and dispersing in front of my eyes.

At that time, I just felt that time was passing very fast, like riding a white horse through the gap. The willows had just turned green, and the cicadas had begun to chirp. Then the leaves turned yellow and the grass withered, and the first snowfall of the year fell.

But when I think about it now, all this has stopped in a certain section of my memory, and I can replay it frame by frame, chewing it inch by inch, just like time is passing by me, and the pictures waiting in my memory are blooming and falling like lotus flowers. Slow, slow, slow.

Memory cannot withstand reading. Because the dust of time and space covers it, if it is blown away, the willow color on the yellowed paper will still be green, as if the short moment was deliberately stretched out.

I always feel that everything in the present is passing by like a river, and I am always pushed by the vastness of time to chase and run involuntarily. I always feel that the future is unpredictable and there is no joy in the present. I can only go to the past to lick my memories.

But every inch of the past is the present and the future.

Time is the fairest saint and will not make any journey easier.

It was not slow before. Look, catkins are rising again in a moment, flying up into the hair and turning it white.

But when I think about it, I always feel that my youth is within reach, but in fact, I am already old. You see that the four seasons are still flourishing and declining, the willow color you see is the same as in the past, and the catkins fill the city for another year.

They can go from their youth in the poems written thousands of years ago to today, and they can continue to play on the street corners from their childhood leisure activities. Why can't you continue to spend every period of your life calmly and happily?

Then one day, they will become "Slow before".