The season of burning fields

(Baonghean.vn) - It's been a long time since I last felt that scent. The smell of straw smoke rising from the village fields after the harvest season. Suddenly, childhood memories of being buried under the rice stalks flooded back to me…

Back then, every summer, we children would follow our mothers to the fields to harvest rice. It was called "harvesting," but we were just kids doing small tasks; some of us tended the cows, others ran errands carrying water and sickles. In the evenings, we'd sprawl on the cart full of rice that our father drove us home.

Then the busy days of the harvest season passed. To prepare for the new planting season, my mother would once again carry her bamboo rake to the field to gather the scattered straw. She told me to gather the straw and burn it, both to kill the weeds and to clean the field, otherwise the dry straw would make the plow too heavy.

My mother's figure in the twilight. Photo by Minh Chau.

That day, the whole village did the same. In the late afternoon, my mother's figure bent under the golden sunset, the fields dotted with mounds of dry straw. Of course, this was an unmissable occasion for us children. Each of us would grab the rake from our mother's hand, competing to see who could gather the biggest pile of straw before setting it on fire. The straw burned, the flames blazing brightly. We cheered each other, jumping over the flames until they died out completely. Sweat poured down us, our faces smeared with straw dust.

From the burning haystack, smoke drifted on the wind into the village. The smoke wasn't acrid, but carried a faint, gentle fragrance. Perhaps it was the scent of the rice plant's soul, of the sweat that soaked the fields. Even now, I can't quite describe that smell of straw smoke. Just catching a whiff in the wind brings back a flood of memories. A season of burning the fields…

Minh Chau