it will feel beautiful

dispatch 29a

hi friends,

Back in your inbox after an unplanned off week because unfortunately my gruesome jet lag turned out to be be gruesome COVID. While I’m grateful to feel so much better now, I’m definitely still not at 100%. So, as I get back to baseline this month, bear with me while I find some new routines.

This week’s essay is from some writing I did in Finland to document and process, and which I’m slowly starting to unpack. I think this trip will be something I’m processing for awhile.

These small, old structures dot the fields in the farmland my family lives on. While they aren’t used anymore and are mostly being taken down, they used to store loose hay after harvest.

it will feel beautiful

Since I’ve landed, time and place have started to overlap. I am writing this from my grandmother’s house near the western coast of Finland, three generations of my family sitting around a table drinking coffee. The air smells like cattle from the dairy barn a hundred yards away, exactly how I remember it from when I was sixteen, from when I was ten, from the sliver of forever that is my life so far. Coming here is both discovery and remembrance and I am caught in the act of witnessing family dynamics against the harsh and beautiful landscape of the place we come from. 

As can happen with immigrant families, my little family pod has cultivated a particular mythology around the home country. There is a sense of closeness and a sense of removal that exist simultaneously and I am realizing at thirty-four just how my conception of this place has been shaped by my mother’s longing. How the place and the people became entwined when she wasn’t sure how to miss them, just knew that she did.