New Year's Day Feelings

It’s not even the first day of the new year yet, but my heart is filled with excitement and anxiety. I can’t sit still, so I go to the bookshelf where the block calendar is hanging. The first new page of the year is bright red, dated January 1, 2023. My heart is filled with emotion, thinking back to the old year when I overcame difficulties, challenges, and joys. The new year comes with so many dreams, so many plans for changes in my homeland.

The commune is striving to complete the final targets to reach the advanced new rural standards. Our village is also changing every day. The movement to donate land to build roads and expand village roads is urging every household and every person to implement. The small communal house pond bank has now been re-banked, the pond soil has been dug up, and widened to ten meters, with beautiful purple flowers planted on both sides. From the communal house pond bank, it has been extended to the East and North hamlets, curving down to the South hamlet, past the pagoda and then to the village cultural house. This place will be crowded and bustling during the village festival. Again, the seven-piece and three-piece shirts, the conical hats, the singing voices of the young men and women, the meaning seems to pass by but is profound: "Love each other standing far away/ One eye looking back is equal to three standing close". But the strong, youthful spirit is still the young men and women in smart clothes in the joyful atmosphere of the new year, singing loudly: "The big road has been opened to the future/ Tomorrow is starting from today...". And far away is the cool green winter crop field. Kohlrabi, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots... spread out across the village fields. Among those vegetables and fruits, many products have brands and export codes.

I remember when I was a child, coming home from school, following my mother and sister to the fields to work in the winter crop. I happily carried a hoe, eagerly walking on the field. My feet walked, my heart filled with joy, reciting the poem: "Our hands can do everything/ With human strength, rocks and stones can also become rice". Thinking back to that day, old memories flooded back, my heart felt happy. It has been decades. My mother has gone far, far away! But her image is still imprinted in the fields of my hometown. Now, sometimes my sister calls and says: When you come back on Sunday, I will still leave a small portion of the sweet, red-fleshed sweet potatoes that you still like. Listening to my sister, my hometown fields appear familiar and nostalgic. Next to the intensively cultivated vegetable fields, the young, green rice fields waiting for the day to go to the fields for the spring crop are the greenhouse fields of melons, tomatoes, and automatic water sprinklers. Traders' cars come to deliver goods right to the fields. The road to the village in the new residential area is being cleared and divided into lots. Soon, this residential area will be a highlight of the commune's new, improved rural area, with flower gardens, trees, electricity, and roads that meet urban standards. The road to An village, the row of trees that the commune's Youth Union had just planted at the end of the year, has now taken root, sprouting young leaves, welcoming the spring.

In addition to the winter crop fields, the vast fallow fields stretch all the way to the bamboo foothills of the neighboring village. The fantails and wagtails look around, chirping and scratching the soil for worms. After the winter crop comes the spring crop. Here and there, there are already a few fallow fields, soaked in the soil...

The first day of the year will come with so much joy, hope and anticipation for a new year with plans ahead. The front is calling us, urging us to go with a burning desire that shines in the first days of the year...

Essays byVU HOANG LUYEN