Filial piety can't wait.

The annual Ching Ming Festival came again, and every family went to visit the grave with sacrifices and hoes. When I was a child, I hated Ching Ming Festival very much. If it was wet, I would put on heavy rain shoes, wear a straw hat that was always blown off by the wind, and sweep the grave with a hoe on my back.

If it takes a few people half an hour to clean up a tomb in Nuoda, there are only four or five hoes to hoe weeds, and people without hoes have to use their hands to pull weeds. Wearing airtight rain shoes on a hot day is a very tangled feeling, coupled with the tiredness of grave-sweeping. I don't understand that adults can talk to us about the death of the owner of the tomb while sweeping the grave. When the ancestors were around, the adults were children, and the ancestors were adults, talking about their adults and children. I always thought at that time that there was a dead man living in the tomb. A person who can't talk or laugh makes me think that sweeping the grave is a boring task.

Now that we are married and have children, we take the children who can run, carry hoes, carry sacrifices, and carry the children running around to sweep the grave, hoe the grass, clean up the graveyard, and have to look back at the children and wipe the sweat on their faces from time to time. After cleaning up the graveyard, we placed sacrifices and lit incense, so that we could have a rest. After a rest, we sat on the edge of the graveyard and told the children about the relationship between our adults and the people in the grave. I was suddenly in a trance. I paused: at that time, I was still a child, and the people inside were still adults. He taught me a lot of things and didn't know if the children had listened to them, so I said to myself. Recalling that I wanted to visit the next grave with the adults, I coaxed the child into putting a hoe on his back, put his straw hat on the child's head, and said he looked like a man. I don't want the child to realize it as late as I do, and I don't want the child to talk to his own child about him and the people in the grave when I'm lying in the grave. I just hope he doesn't realize the meaning of Ching Ming Festival so late.

Author: Liu Hengjie