The stars in Shikumen can sing
Downstairs across the street at the entrance to the alley, the wind passed directly through the hall, carrying the smell of oil smoke from the neighbor's stove. Grandma Wang was sitting in a wicker chair, with a yellowed exercise book spread out on her knees. What was densely recorded in it were all nursery rhymes she had sung when she was a child.
Pull down the stone and move it up the mountain. What do you want? I want good things... She narrowed her eyes and said slowly, as if she was caressing a piece of soft silk from the past. The little grandson opposite could not understand these words, so he tilted his head and asked, "Auntie, what does 'pull off the stone' mean?" Grandma Wang smiled and held him close to her: "This is a song we sang while playing with rubber bands when we were kids."
At three o'clock in the afternoon, the sun slanted into the alley, making the bluestone slabs sparkle. Xiaomei, who was next door, held her brother's hand and was teaching him to sing a newly learned nursery rhyme. The nursery rhyme was "Little stars, shining brightly, copper nails are nailed on the bluestone..." The younger brother followed suit, and his tongue seemed to be knotted, and he sang "nailing copper nails" into "nailing red lights." This made the passing postman Lao Chen burst out laughing, and the bicycle bells also jingled.
The sound penetrated the bamboo pole on which the flowered shirts were hung, penetrated the gardenias blooming profusely in the corner, and finally fell gently into the patio. There, Xiao Zhang, who had just returned from get off work, was helping his mother choose vegetables. His mother suddenly hummed: "Shake, shake, shake, baby, sleepy soon..." Xiao Zhang was stunned for a moment, his eyes burning slightly - this was the song his mother sang when he was a child to coax him to sleep.
The gentle password hidden in nursery rhymes
The night has deepened and the alley has become quiet. However, there is still a warm yellow light in a window. That is Teacher Li's home. She is facing the mobile phone screen and teaching her little granddaughter who is far away from abroad to recite nursery rhymes sentence by sentence. The content is "A frog has one mouth, two eyes and four legs...".
The granddaughter giggled on the other end and asked with a smile: "Grandma, why don't the frogs here jump into the water with a 'plop'?" Teacher Li's face was filled with a smile, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes stretched out like flowers blooming, and said: "Wait a minute. When we get back, grandma will take Nong to the Chenghuang Temple to buy Nong a jumping frog toy, okay?" Across the screen, she vaguely seemed to have seen her little granddaughter holding the frog high and running happily in the alley.
On weekends, there was a group of gray-haired old people sitting around at the Civic Cultural Center. They are currently carrying out an operation that can be called a "big thing" - recording the nursery rhymes they sang when they were young one after another, adding pictures to them, and then printing them into a booklet. Lao Zhou wore reading glasses and wrote stroke by stroke: "In the past, there was an old uncle who was eighty-eight years old..." When he reached the point of writing "eight yuan, eight cents and eight cents, eight centimeters and eight cents, eight centimeters and eight cents with stripped copper", he was the first to show a smile and said: "Back then, we just couldn't remember this number, and we always made calculation errors!".
Xiao Lin is responsible for the illustrations. She is a "post-80s" who grew up in an alley. She used colored pencils to draw realistically "White Cat in the White Temple" and "There is a Cat in the Mountain", depicting the realistic and vivid scenes in nursery rhymes. Xiao Lin said that every time she writes, it is like adding color to her childhood, making memories that were about to fade away suddenly become bright and dazzling again.
A little firefly in ordinary days
Before closing the stall, Aunt Zhang from the vegetable market would always stay a little longer. She and Sister Liu, who sells onions and ginger next door, muttered while cleaning up: "Golden melons, silver melons, croaking down and playing with the little babies..." They chanted and laughed at the same time - in the past, they sang nursery rhymes and played hopscotch in the alley. Now my hair has turned white, but my heart is still warm.
Xiao Chen, who came from out of town, is the owner of a fruit shop in the alley. At the beginning, he couldn't understand Shanghainese. However, as the days passed, he actually learned to hum a few Shanghainese words from the regular customers. Next to the cashier, he wrote a line of words with the help of a marker, which read: "One big, one small, one watermelon and one date." He said that this was his "introduction to Shanghai dialect" and it was also the password for the friendship between him and his old neighbors.
The most touching scene appeared in an alley in the early morning. The ninety-year-old Grandpa Zhao was pushing a wheelchair, and sitting on the wheelchair was his eighty-eight-year-old wife. The old man took a few steps forward, then stopped, leaned close and whispered in his wife's ear: "It's very strange, a... Strangely, the sparrow trampled the old hen..." The old lady squinted her eyes, and a smile slowly appeared at the corners of her mouth. The sunlight filtered through the gaps in the sycamore leaves and sprinkled on them like broken gold. At that moment, time became very slow, so slow that a lifetime could be completed by just relying on a nursery rhyme.
At the end of the night, the alley quietly became quiet again, but those nursery rhymes that were gently chanted and raised were like scattered fireflies flickering in the ordinary days of this city filled with streets and alleys and people in the market. Emitting light softly and soothingly, they tell everyone who returns home at night that even if the world is vast and the road is long and far away, there will always be a nursery rhyme quietly waiting for you to return home deep in the memory of your heart.
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