2024.0404_Tomb Sweeping Festival

Preface and notification
The writing is based on my personal experiment and memory. In fact ,I haven’t join the family tomb-sweeping ceremony for nearly a decade. Moreover, seldom did I go home after I left my home town for university, though it only takes two hour drive between two town.
Two major kind of grave yard
There are few ways to choose to deal with the body of passed away ancestors. In the traditional ways, you can choose to have a coffin and burry it waiting the flesh to rotten, which is obviously cost lots more. Or you can choose to directly burn the body, put the ashes into a pot and place it in a particular place , I consider it as another kind of “grave yard”.
The bief process of tomb-sweeping 
As for the burry one, like my uncle chose for grandmam ,we will go to the grave yard, find our family tomb and sweep it on Tomb Sweeping Festival. After the cleaning , we set up the foods for ancestors, burned the insenses to talk to the diety and ancestors, and than burned the paper money.
How does a tomb look like in Taiwan
The structure of a Taiwaneese tomb looks like a castle protected by the river. However, the “catsle” is substituted by a pile of grass land, where the coffin(s) or pots burrind in ,held by the inner wall. And the “river” is substitued by the outter wall with an open for people to walk in. 

The whole construction are similar with the shape of Engish character small “n”. In the 3-D aspect, it looks like a shoe.
Walk into the shoe
When you walk into a family tomb, you can see a standing stone plate laid against the grass land ,craved with the name of ancestors, the owner of the place. In fornt of the plate, there is a flat rectangle space for family members to work around ,such as prepare for the worship ceremony. On one side of the flat rectangle, there is a place espciallay for the deity who helps look after the tomb.
How we work in the tomb
When I was young, following the adults sweeping the tomb, we stepped on a few stairs, walked along the aile beteween the outter and inner wall to pulled out weeds or bushes on the grass land to remained it clear. The walls decorated by tiles would be dusted as well. Afterwhile, we would put paper money along the wall and used stones to avoid money being blowed away. 

After the cleaning , we set up food and rice wine for the diety and ancestors and started the worship ceremony. We burnt the incenses to talked to them and waited for a while for passed-away ancestors to finish the meals. The Adults would always prepare some eggs as snacks. We would eat them up happily and saved the peelled egg shell. Because after the break, we scattered them on the grass land. 

Then, bags of paper money would be burned for ancestors to use as them wanted in a open place nearby.
After the works
My father growned up in a village nearby the sea. And the grave yard is just spread along the beach. We would collect the tiny lanter like pine cones near the tomb and run through the fence of spicky tress to the sea.

When my grand mother was still alive, I loved to chew on the herbal cakes she made ( I believed so ). They are made by white steamed sticky rice and colored green with cudweeds. My favorite flavor is redbean pasted with a little ground ginger. However, after my aunt passed away , this type of household handmade food wethered in shinny, windy ,salty memory.