Nita V

A Finnish Heritage

by Nita Countryman

Sometime soon, I must go to Finland. I must go to see the Finnish farm landscape and smell the hay in a field far from here, and to hear the songs I remember only from sight-reading the pages of the musty songbook I found, when I was still a young girl, in an upstairs bedroom closet.

Although American, I have a strong Finnish heritage, and feel as if I am a true "Suomalinen" (Finnish person). I exhibit the same round face I have seen in the yellow-gray pictures of my father’s family—among them, the eternally teen-aged aunt Sophie who died in the farmhouse on the family homestead (not far from where I now live), from the Influenza outbreak of 1918. My father once said that he saw his mother’s eyes in my face.

The family homestead—established in 1897—where both my father and I grew up (though in different times), has the appearance of a transplanted, nineteenth century Finnish farm. The somewhat harsh climate, the evergreen trees towering over winter-bare alder and scrubby salal bushes, the now-leaning outbuildings with their hand-hewn wooden door latches, and even the moss-covered piles of basalt rock that lie beside the cleared fields lend a Northern European appearance to the landscape. My grandparents surely must have found some relief from their homesickness for Finland as they saw the farm take shape through their efforts.

The same “homing” urge pulls at me that pulled at both my parents, who were first generation Americans, and yet, felt a familial allegiance to the land where their four parents were born. My parents felt such a pull toward Finland that they joined a Seniors’ travel club and made two trips to “Suomi” (Finland).

Yes, someday I must go to Finland, and stand in the cold beneath a sky with stars arranged in ways different from the patterns I know. Learning the Finnish names for the constellations would be challenging. I would like to lie in bed at night, under several heavy hand-sewn quilts (as my mother did, when she made her first trip to her “homeland”), with my mind adrift between true wakefulness and sleep, and listen to the street noise below the window. A peculiarity of the Finnish language is the accenting of the first syllable in every word. I imagine hearing far off laughter and muted men’s and women’s voices mixed, and relishing the lilting of foreign (yet familiar) phrases repeating on my ear like a physical stroking.

Britta Marie is the name of my last-born child. I chose her name from a wrinkled and treasured copy of our family tree. In my seventh month of pregnancy, I leaned toward the kitchen counter, reading carefully the names of long-dead relatives. When my eye fell on “Briita Maria,” I knew that would be my daughter’s name. Briita Maria was a distant great aunt who may have worked to mound the hay in rounds in the fields or helped bring in the green harvest—all a continent away. I felt that my daughter could possess some portion of that piece of land on which Briita once worked, if I gave her an American version of that enchanted, or at least, enchanting, name.

The bittersweet part of having strong feelings for a family heritage is realizing that this feeling will become diluted in the generation that follows, and eventually, even lost. (Perhaps even my daughter Britta will wish, as she matures, that she had been given a more American-sounding name.) Nevertheless, I plan to visit Finland and enjoy the Finnish connection for as long as it endures.

This essay appeared in VanCougar Volume 3, No. 19, April 1993.