Changing and Unchanging Values

Leaving Finland when I was ten years old I knew that the money in my piggy bank was useless to carry with me on the long journey to the next country or countries I might travel to. I had plenty of Finnish marks and pennies – more than I had ever owned before. What should I do with them? I never thought of taking them to a bank. There wasn’t enough to make the long walk to the bank worth it. I wasn’t even thinking in such terms.

 

The summer was hot. There was a summer ice cream seller within a few minutes walking distance from our home. I loved ice cream and used to look longingly toward the kiosk each time mom sent me on different errands that led past it. 
I seldom had any money to spend on myself.

I remembered family stories from 1949, our last year in Kunming, China. The paper money there lost all its value overnight. We even had small souvenirs in our home created out of real money that suddenly was worthless.  Small beautifully pleated hand-held fans that were created out of slips of paper money that had once been worth fifty thousand yuan each.

My Finnish marks and pennies would lose their value long before I returned to Finland. My dream of tasting the numerous flavors of ice cream became an obsession the last few days we were at home. I counted my money. I had enough for one cone of every single flavor the lady in the kiosk had available.

On our last visit to Grandma and aunts before our new long journey away, we still had time to pick enough blueberries for a final taste of Finnish summer. They grew in the forest across the gravel road, behind the spruce fence and white picket gate.

The family stories I had listened to in their home; the food grandma cooked on the large stove, heated with firewood; the awareness that my youngest aunt, Göta, had never lived anywhere else in all her forty- two years except in this small white-painted house; all gave me a sense of permanence that I never had experienced before.

Standing Aunt Elna and uncle Elis.

Sitting Grandpa, Grandma and aunt Göta 1947.

Grandma’s calm sense of contentment, despite her many losses, was real. Her oldest daughter, Ellen Verna had died at the age of twenty in 1925. Her husband, my Grandpa died in 1952, one year before we returned to Finland from our previous seven-year journey. Her only son, Elis, died aged forty-three in 1954. Grandma herself had lost the sight of one eye due to glaucoma. She had her remaining two daughters still living at home. They all needed each other for various tasks.  All water was drawn from a well both summer and winter. Firewood was chopped for the stove and for heating the rest of the house.  

She was sending her daughter Anna and her only grandchildren on a long journey once again, not knowing if she would be alive whenever they might return. Their relationship had become sincere and close in spite of the years Anna did not live at home during her childhood.

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Her trust in God’s love and providence and her constant prayers for us on our numerous journeys tied my heart permanently to the memories created in her home. None of those memories could be bought or sold for any amount of money. Their value grew with time – becoming priceless as I grew older.

I did not understand all that at the age of ten as I licked up one ice cream cone after another, spending every penny out of my piggy bank. Still, something of her confidence in God's care above and beyond her outward circumstances must have touched me. So when I later heard the words of the following song I felt the atmosphere of Grandma's home again.

I trust in God wherever I may be,
Upon the land, or on the rolling sea,
For come what may, from day to day,
My heavenly Father watches over me.

I trust in God, I know He cares for me;

On mountain bleak or on the stormy sea;

Tho’ billows roll, He keeps my soul;

My heavenly Father watches over me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-xPVn-f4Rk