故乡.织—奶奶的九月 Original

Dusk lingers a long time in the Third Martian Settlement. Chen Xiulian, seventy-eight, sits by the window humming an old Wu-dialect lullaby. Halfway through, she forgets the next line.
She is from Hangzhou. As a young woman she embroidered silk in Manjuelong. Forty years ago she came to Mars with her family and never picked up a needle again. Three months ago the doctors told her she had homesickness syndrome: first she lost her memory of scents, then even the look of home grew uncertain. The smell of osmanthus faded, the words of the lullaby slipped away, and the outline of that little lane blurred, little by little. What did osmanthus actually smell like? She thought about it for a long while, and all she could say was, "It's sweet." After that, the words wouldn't come.
Her granddaughter, Xiaoman, was born on Mars. She has never seen Earth, and has never once smelled osmanthus. From the descriptions her grandmother had given countless times, she drew Hangzhou in a notebook: a stone-paved lane, a golden osmanthus tree, an old window, a lazy cat. Then, without telling her grandmother, she sent the drawings to the Mr. Seven Family, asking only one thing — while her grandmother still remembered, let her smell it one more time. The family took the lane from Xiaoman's drawing, along with the scent of osmanthus and the birdsong of a September morning in Manjuelong, and embroidered them, stitch by stitch, into a coat, then sent it four hundred million kilometers across the stars. Her grandmother slipped it on, lowered her head, and caught that familiar sweetness at the collar; and on the chest, embroidered there, was the very lane she had talked about all her life. This time, when she hummed the lullaby again, she did not forget the words.
She had never imagined that home could come back to her like this.