In this piece of land, the grass has always been impregnated with the most primitive and simple beauty in the zero distance contact with nature.

And the sweet and sensual love from Cao'er's grandmother for her granddaughter makes Cao'er always be protected in the simplest relationship between people.

With such a happy grass, where does she need to crave the love of others, including the love of parents enjoyed by other peers?!

A child who has lost his mother should have lived in the pain of not being able to think about his mother, but he was well sealed by Grandma Cao'er's wholehearted love for her granddaughter.

But I don't know if it's the lack of love for her parents, there is still a gap in Cao'er's heart, or if she inherited her mother's sensitivity and kindness in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Cao'er's temperament is still a little weak in her innocence and simplicity, and she is timid, smaller than her peers.

Fear of the dark is a fear that Cao'er has been unable to overcome since she was a child.

Even if Cao'er and Grandma live in the room together, during the day, when Cao'er goes in alone, the door must be open. As for those dark houses, Cao'er would never dare to go.

Even, often from the darkness on the rooftop, when the grass escaped from the door and turned to look back, she could still hallucinate and see many little white people jumping down in the high darkness.

Frightened, she quickly slammed the door, and ran to her grandmother in a panic to let her hold her for a while before she could come to her senses.

This fear even spread to Cao'er's dreams.

Most of the time, Cao'er's dreams are miserable nightmares. It's not a dream of a cemetery with white paper flying, or the funeral of the Devil Crying Wolf. It scared the grass into a cold sweat in her dreams, but she was too young to fully express it to her grandmother.

Occasionally, she cried in fright, and she cried and cried about the terrible scene in her dream with her grandmother. Grandma always hugged the grass with pity, rubbed the back of her head and said:

"Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, ah, grandma is here, it's all a dream, it's not true!"

This fear, the little grass is deeply involved, and no one can help her. She herself couldn't understand it, and just blindly refused to enter the dark room to escape the fear of darkness. She is also accustomed to hugging her grandmother tightly when she sleeps, so that she can be sure that she is there when she wakes up from nightmares that she is constantly frightening.

Cao'er is also afraid of life, but whenever she goes out and meets someone outside the family, Cao'er always takes her grandmother's hand and looks timidly and does not speak. If outsiders greeted Cao'er, Cao'er would hug her grandmother's knees, hide behind her grandmother's buttocks, poke her head out and smile shyly, and would not answer.

What worries Cao'er is not only the old beggar who uses burlap bags to collect crying and disobedient children, but also the group of roads behind the courtyard gate that winds to the fork.

Every time Cao'er and her grandmother walked on these loess paths with green grass spreading on both sides and small stones falling in the middle, they were deeply worried in their hearts, what if they went far away, or if they forked in the road, and couldn't find their way home?

Will the daughters who marry out find their way back to their mother's house in the village? How did the women who had married from other villages get out of these paths and return to their own homes?

Cao'er told her grandmother about her worries, and after hearing this, her grandmother smiled and said:

"You'll know when you grow up."

Grandma's answer didn't solve Cao'er's worries.

However, as a young child, she didn't know how to tell the way to the road, so she began to experience how adults come and go every time they go out and come back.

In addition, every holiday, Cao'er would go to the nearby mountains and forests with her aunt and uncle, carrying a large bamboo rake made of bamboo, collecting the pine needles that fell from the mountains, forming a ball, and picking them back with a bamboo rake. Each time, there will be some interesting things, such as finding the skin of the snake that has fallen off, guessing where the snake has been, and finding a gray-yellow hare that has flashed by.

But every time, Cao'er will follow the little aunt and uncle closely, because there will always be unknown cemeteries! Cao'er was so frightened that she always ran to the little aunt in a low voice, pulled the corner of her clothes, and looked at the bulging loess mound in horror, as if she was afraid that she would wake up the people inside and come out.

The fear was almost the same as the feeling of the cemetery she dreamed of.

Cao'er didn't know why she was so afraid of these things about life and death.

When the village held funerals, she always dared not walk alone through the hall where the deceased elderly were parked in the village.

She couldn't understand how anyone would dare to pee on the grave and run to see the deceased man lying in the coffin at the funeral. She didn't dare.

Once, on the way home from planting vegetables with her grandmother, she saw a half-section of gray bones exposed from the loess pit on the side of the road. She kept herself calm, followed her grandmother closely, looked back at the big pit, saw nothing, and told herself not to be afraid. Still, she couldn't stop being afraid.

After all, Cao'er is a child who does not understand the vicissitudes of the world, and is actually ignorant of life and death. This ignorance sometimes makes her unconsciously cruel. Grandma caught a small colorful fish that had accidentally swam into a bucket from the river canal during laundry and brought it back to Cao'er as a pet. Cao'er doesn't know how to cook, and she doesn't know how to release it after playing, so she was raised to death by her, she didn't throw it out by herself, and she didn't look at the dead fish anymore, everything was handled by her grandmother, and there was no fear and nostalgia in her heart, let alone sentimentality. She also toyed to death the greedy little sparrow that her uncle caught in the barn, so she let the little uncle deal with it, she really didn't feel very much about the stiff little sparrow, but she didn't see sentimentality and fear in her heart.

Therefore, her fear of death is actually the fear of the unknown after the loss of her life or her love in her life, the fear of the unknown after death, this breath of death makes her very sensitive, and it seems that there is some familiarity, so she is so afraid of death, this fear seems to be beyond her age.

But her indifference to the death of small animals is not really cruel, but the fearless bravery of an ignorant person, and this ignorance hides the natural goodness in her heart.

It is precisely because of the fear of loss that she realizes that the people around her will one day also die, and the older ones will leave first, and her favorite grandmother is moving towards aging, she is vaguely worried about losing her grandmother, without her grandmother's love, she can't survive.

In addition, Cao'er's fear of her father Yunxin is another fear of strong authority. As long as her father is at home, she doesn't dare to laugh, she doesn't even dare to walk around, she does what her father says, she doesn't dare to disobey, and even, like a mouse seeing a cat, she doesn't even dare to call "Dad", and because of this, she has never called her father Yunxin "Dad".

At the age of six, Cao'er's school became a major event in the family. According to the rules for the first grade at the age of seven, Cao'er can wait until September of the following year to go to the first grade, but then Cao'er will be seven and a half years old, but Cao'er's father held a family meeting and thought that his daughter could go to the first grade at the age of six and a half, but then she would not be able to go to preschool.

So, Cao'er's father began to discipline his daughter's reading and writing. Every time Cao'er saw her father standing at the door, even if she was playing with her friends, she would stop, look at her majestic father timidly, stand stiffly, and dare not move half a step if she wanted to play.

Her father beckoned her to come over, and she obediently walked into the house, and sat down on the coffee table where the pen and notebook had already been set up, as her father had instructed. According to his father's request, he drew a scoop according to the gourd, tracing those Arabic numerals. Sometimes, Cao'er really didn't want to write, so she moved into the house slowly and reluctantly, sat down with her mouth open, just didn't grab the pen, sat straight in the chair, and no matter what her father said, she didn't speak or move.

Cao'er's father was very helpless, so he had to pretend to be angry and went into the kitchen, broke a branch for firewood, raised it high, and said solemnly to his daughter:

"Do you write? If you don't write, you'll really fight! ”

As she spoke, she waved the branches, as if the grass was about to fall on the backs of her delicate hands that lay on her knees.

Cao'er had no choice but to choke back tears, endure it, bow her head and begin to write stroke by stroke.

When her father saw her move, he put down the branch on the table, looked at her writing, and duly praised and encouraged her.

But for Cao'er, I just didn't want to disobey my father's will, I was not afraid of my father's intimidation, and I didn't take my father's encouragement to heart, but just wrote at my own pace.

The fear of her father is the fear of the unknown caused by her father's unfamiliarity, but it is not the fear that her father wants to beat herself, which should be due to the fact that no one taught her how to face the unknown!

Or, it stems from her nature of exploration - only fear of the unknown, so in order to eliminate the fear in her heart, she has to continue to explore, and then obtain the fulfillment of the unknown from the unknown and the pleasure of overcoming herself.

Perhaps, the germ of her natural introspective ability was also born from this.