After the first Lunar New Year of the new century, I bought more than 20 bags of anthracite coal and food, and returned to the old house where I lived in the countryside. I stood at the door and waved goodbye to my wife and daughter who sent me back, watched the car turn around the Guandi Temple at the mouth of the ditch, and turned around and walked into the gate into the small courtyard that had just been swept the fallen leaves of the following year, and my heart felt a little sour. I have already touched a sixty-year-old person, so why bother to return to this old nest that has been empty for nearly ten years.

Wisps of pale soot came out of the tin chimney sticking out of the window frame, and the stove was drying away the cold that had accumulated in the house all winter. I walked from the front yard through the front house to the small courtyard, the lilacs in front of the south window and the three jujube saplings under the roots of the east and west walls, the branches have not yet seen any movement, but small purple buds burst out on the branches of the three or five clumps of the moon season, which is obviously the message of spring. However, the atmosphere in the whole courtyard was too quiet and cold, and it was still difficult for me to convert the joy of returning to the countryside.

I stood in the yard, smoking my cigar. The house in the east has almost become a deserted garden, and the two brothers have chosen a new house to build and move out of the new house for many years. In the west, the village used to be famous for its eight courtyards, which were crowded like chicken coops, and they have all moved to the newly established homestead in the village. This house of mine used to be the "Three Kingdoms" of my father and two cousins, and in the heyday of the "Three Kingdoms", there were three generations of grandparents and fifteen or sixteen people coming in and out of seven or eight wide or narrow doorways. In the hazy and chaotic part of my life, I watched the villagers carry the black coffin containing my grandmother and the man called Xia Wuye out of the courtyard one after another, and then tied them up with a thick lifting pole outside the street gate, and carried them out of the village to the original slope and into the newly dug grave pit amid the cries of children and grandchildren. I followed much the same ritual, personally managing the process of my father and mother from the house to the cemetery, the final station. For many years, no matter how important the matter, I was not absent from the process of the two uncles and aunts who were handled by my cousins and finally walked out of the courtyard out of the village and into the grave in a corner of the original slope. Now, my brothers and sisters, my cousins, and my children, are stepping out of this house, either in one side of the heavens or in another corner of the village, living their lives in their own way. The current scene is that I am the only one standing in the courtyard of this ancestral home, which left a crowded and lively impression on me. A cold wind fell down the original slopes. Empty like never before. Empty like never before. Hollow like never before.

Beneath my feet is the land that my ancestors have repeatedly trampled on. I am now standing in this small courtyard with the footprints of many generations. I don't ask myself or explain to anyone why and why I came back, because that's a decision before the act. There is a word called filth in the rich Chinese language, and I have fully appreciated the inexhaustible connotation of this word for a period of time.

I heard the kettle on the stove popping. I brewed a cup of good southern Shaanxi green tea. I sat on the grayed rattan chair where I had sat for nearly twenty years, took a sip of fragrant tea, looked at the red-hot charcoal in the hearth of the stove, and seemed to hear the voices of my ancestors who had met or never met at all: Hey! You should have come back a long time ago.

The next day, I couldn't tell if I was awakened by the sound of a bird or if I woke up and heard a bird call. My first reaction was turtledoves. It must be the most monotonous and mundane call of a huge horde of birds, but it is also the most sensitive call on my life tape. I hurriedly sat up in my clothes and looked through the windowpane to see two gray-brown turtledoves on the ridge of the back room. In the cold wind of the early morning, one turtle dove circled around another turtle dove, nodding its head and cocking its tail, making a continuous cooing ...... Cooing and cooing. Oh! The melody of spring, which spurred the movement of life, was conveyed in the restlessness of the turtledove that was still covered in the bitter cold.

My eyes blurred with tears.