CHANGING AND UNCHANGING VALUES

Changing and unchanging values

I was ten the second time I left Finland. I knew the money in my piggy bank was useless to carry on the long journey to the following country or countries I might travel to. I had more Finnish marks and pennies than I had ever owned. 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. A summer ice cream seller was a few minutes' walk 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 made out of real money in our home—money suddenly worthless—small, beautifully pleated hand-held fans made out of money that had once been worth millions of yuan.

My Finnish marks and pennies would lose their value long before I returned to Finland. The last few days we were at home, my dream of tasting the different flavors of ice cream became an obsession. I counted my money. I had enough for one cone of each flavor the lady in the kiosk had available. She had five flavors: vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, raspberry, and blueberry.

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

Grandma’s calm sense of contentment, despite her losses, was real. Her oldest daughter, Ellen Verna, died at age 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 two daughters still living at home. 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. 

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.