Among the green tea bush, there are shadows moving slowly.  Wearing the bamboo hats and carrying the tea baskets around their waist, they are not afraid of the scorching sun.  Their hands move up and down skillfully.  The tea fragrance, which gladdens people's heart and refreshes people’s mind, is overflowing between their fingers.  Other than talking and laughing, sometimes, a brisk folk song reverberates among the mountain valleys.  Because of their adornment, the green earth becomes livelier.

Every time when I see the back shadow of a tea picker, it always makes me remember those days in the past.  In my memory, mother often dressed like this too in those years.  She crossed one and another mountain working early to greet the morning sun and going home late after the sunset.  Her diligent sweat soaked her garments.  When it was the time for a infrequent break, she always had to take care of me who followed at her side.  Thus, the light tea fragrance was the most familiar smell in my childhood.  After growing up, it always inspires me at the moment when I smell the fragrance of the tea.  The scenes of my childhood felt just like in yesterday.

I remember that my mother was always busy.  She seldom spoke and smelled.  In this big family, any miscellaneous and trivial things from inside out were almost always taken care of by her.  She woke up in a hurry at the crack of dawn in early mornings to cook breakfast then she went to the pigsty to feed the pigs.  Afterwards, she went to riverside to wash the whole family's clothing.  When she came home, she swept front and back yards and put everything in order.  When it's her turn to have a meal, the cups and dishes were usually strewn all over the dinning table.  Sometimes, the leftover wasn’t enough for her to eat so she gnawed the cooked sweet potato.  In addition, my mother also helped my father’s work up on the mountain and in the field to keep the livelihood.  She was so busy everyday to keeping our house.  But, my grand parents didn't favor her at all.  They were not only nitpicking and deriding her, but also beating and cursing her in every possible way.

I remember after dividing family property; once the tealeaves in grandma's teagarden were stolen.  Grandma accused emphatically that my mother stole her teas.  Without any evidences to prove it, they rashly picked up a wooden stick to beat my mother.  While in a rage, grandma beat my mother especially hard.  I only saw my mother falling on the ground and begging for mercy but the rod in grandma's hands never rested slightly.  We kids all knelled down on the ground crying and begging for mercy.  Finally, grandma abandoned the stick and kept on insulting and cursing my mother then left furiously.  We rushed to mother's side to help her up.  We saw her was bleeding heavily and it tightened our heart.  We couldn't take it any more and cried out loud.  After my mother getting up reluctantly, she pulled us up with her hands.  We tottered into the house to escape from a nightmare.

Later, we moved from countryside to the city to settle down.  My parents lived frugally and worked diligently so that our lives became more stable day by day.  One day, we learned the news that grandfather had passed away.  My parents rushed back home to arrange grandfather's funeral.  They brought widowed grandma home after grandfather's funeral.  At that moment, grandma was old and weak; she lost her teeth and she was bald.  Her temper wasn't as short as before anymore.  The pitiful thing was that her former wounded foot hadn't got better.  The wound had wicked into a bowl-sized wound that the pus was oozing out of it constantly.  The stink of the wound made people keeping away from her.  Sometimes the suppuration accumulated inside the footplate and caused the swelling.  If you pressed it with your hand, then the blood would give a fluctuating phenomenon.  The doctor told us that if the suppuration blood didn’t got pinched out, then the whole foot would be putrefied.  Thereupon, to squeeze pus out of grandma's wound became my mother's daily routine work.  She undertook it without any complaint.  Every morning, I saw her soaked tealeaves and salt in the water (people said that it has the functionality of disinfection) and brought it to grandma.  She gently squeezed out the suppuration with her hands.  The thick yellow liquid oozing out between my mother's fingers but she didn't even wrinkle her eyebrows a bit.  After squeezing out the bloody pus patiently, she soaked grandma's foot in the tea water then dried it off with towel.  This scene made me quite ashamed because I was still indignant about the injustice that my mother had suffered in the past and I didn't know how to dispel the negative mood towards my grandma.  But, my mother could let it go calmly and served grandma with all her heart.  Why shouldn’t I feel deeply ashamed?

Under mother's careful tending, grandma's condition was stabilized a little.  But, it got worse afterwards and couldn't be cured.  In a dark and stormy night, grandma gripped my mother's hands without word and with tears in her eyes.  Gradually, everything was calming down.  The connection between grandma and mother in this lifetime was ended with their gripping hands.

After learning Buddhism, I realized that mother really is a compassionate Bodhisattva!  She didn't bear in mind an old grudge and repaid it with lots of forgiveness and loving caring.  Although she hadn't studied any Buddhism at that time but she actually understood to render good for evil and to absolve grudges.  She substituted hatred with compassion to dissolve their resentment in many eons.  This type of loving kindness and filial moral is the best education to me.