It’s, harvest time again, everybody gets to work! Translated…
Harvesting the grains, was a shared experience that children from the countryside who came from impoverished families all have. Getting to the fields where the grains were severed down, to pick up the stems of rice was called, “The Age of Harvest”.
After I was in the higher grades in the elementary school, the classmates with land from home were already, all helping out with the harvest at their homes, but, because we’d owned NO land, every time at harvest, my mother would tell me to go over to my uncles’ to help collect the harvest. And because it was, voluntary on my part, I’d always earned a full and hearty lunch, which I’d called the “meals served after the harvest”—with too many mouths to feed at home, it was, trying, for my mother, to prepare ANY of the meals, but, these “meals after harvests” have all the proteins we normally couldn’t have at home, which made up, for our lack of nutrition.
My aunt had, poured her heart, into preparing every single meal right after the harvests, the fatty pork, chives with squid, ribs with beans, bamboo shoots with meatball soup, sauté milkfish. With a few bowls of rice, it was, the treatments of, emperors that’s for sure.
here comes the meats “department”…photo from online…
And now, as I feel that I wanted to, I can make a plate of sauté milkfish myself, but, I could never quite, get the foods I cooked, to match up to the tastes of that grand meal after the harvests.
Guess why that is? It’s because, back then, you’d, worked hard, and, that was, a once-in-a-year sort of event, which made it so special for you as a child, but now, although, you can make the same food items for yourself to eat, it, just no longer, has that same sort of feel to it, does it??? Nope!