My Grandmother’s Dress

And other things I carried home from Finland

This summer I have been working as an apprentice at the Pieni Kulttuuripuoti (engl. Little Culture Shop) in Finland.

For 20 years, the shop has organised cultural and recreational events for people and organisations, and this season I have had the privilege of helping out.

Kirsti, the heart and soul of the “Puoti“, is not yet 70 years old. She is a force of nature, loaded with knowledge, life wisdom and a killer sense of humour. Kirsti has a disarming air about her, speaking in a thick Tampere accent, and being absolutely genuine. She is a retired teacher, and for two decades she has been running these events on the side of her teachership purely out of passion. She lost her longtime partner-in-crime Kauko this past spring, also a teacher, so I was recruited to work with her alongside my father, another retired teacher. 

My days this past summer revolved around day-long gigs that started in the morning and ended in the evening. We travel with one or two full busloads of people, and we always experience incredible encounters on the bus, during lunch, or while walking. The people who join are usually much older than I am, which leaves plenty of moments to accompany someone walking a bit slower, chat while waiting in the restroom queue, and exchange views along the way.

Paying attention

This summer, we have visited so many incredible places: Amos Anderson’s home, the homes of Emil Wikström and Kari Suomalainen, Wetterhoff House, Lepaa Winery, and historical museums showing how people lived in the countryside in the olden days. And the list continues.

At the Paimio Sanatorium (Paimion parantola), designed by the famous Aalto design team for lung patients in the early 1930s, I was struck by how much they had created around healing through light, color, nature and the surrounding environment. Some of those ideas were developed at a time when we didn’t have the kind of medication, research, and evidence we expect today. There was a certain trust in observation and intuition, in noticing what seemed to help people feel better and then building around it. So much knowledge can come from simply paying close attention to the world around us!

The urge to make something

We also visited two extraordinary arboretum-type gardens that left a deep impression on me. In Salo, at the Ilola Arboretum, Ari Laakso alone built an absurd, breathtaking beauty on his family’s farmland. With practically free entrance, he does everything himself without a grand design program, driven purely by luomisvimma, an unstoppable internal creative force.

Then there is Pölkinvuori in Urjala, founded by Veli-Pekka Weckman, known locally as the “Peikko” (troll) of Pölkinvuori. His plant world was built on the ruins of a broken dream. He had originally planned to build a sauna restaurant and hotel rooms on the hill, but a severe bone-degenerating illness left him bedridden for two years. As he slowly began to recover, he started clearing a garden bed purely to rehabilitate himself, crawling on hands and knees with pruning shears while a neighbor’s boy gathered the branches into bundles. From that beginning came a sanctuary featuring over 250,000 hand-planted bulb flowers, planted one by one using custom-built drills, as well as ancient spelt wheat that woke up from the soil after centuries.

What we inherit

That creative force showed up everywhere this summer. And there doesn’t always have to be a grand plan. Sometimes there is just an impulse to make something beautiful, and then years of attention accumulate around that impulse until suddenly you are standing in the middle of something enormous.

 Kirsti has spent twenty years creating these events. My grandmother spent countless hours creating her national costume, which I got to wear during those events. People have maintained old homes, preserved recipes, planted gardens, built museums, written music, and kept regional traditions alive. These things don’t happen because they are the easiest or most efficient way of doing something. Someone has to care enough to spend the extra time.

And perhaps that is also why they create such strong feelings of belonging.

Feeling something familiar

Everywhere we went, I was reminded of the music, language and heritage of my people. Having lived abroad most of my life now, this felt especially nourishing. I felt so rooted hearing and speaking my language, and spending time with people from across Finland. I loved listening to their different regional accents and exchanging stories about how a single recipe varied depending on which part of Finland you were from.

These events, in my opinion, mirror a good life squeezed into one day. They always feature an element of discovery: local culture, food, folklore, Finnish history, beauty, music played on the bus or live music played by my father. And, of course, to keep everyone on their toes, an occasional quiz is handed out on the way home, created by my father. All these activities fit seamlessly together, and they are voluntary. Sometimes participants decide to listen to their strength and choose to stay on the bus instead of visiting another site. That is also part of the offering: listening to one’s own needs. We also cherish the quiet moments of reflection, often held in historically significant churches or, increasingly since this summer, among the trees.

I’ve noticed that wherever we go, people are always open to hugging trees. I never ask them to do it, neither in Belgium nor in Finland. They just do it on their own. These elderly Finns seem naturally open to nature. It is something they are almost waiting to embrace again. It has never really been gone, only subdued.

There are things we understand long before we can explain them. They can seem like small things, but they carry an enormous amount of information about who we are and where we come from.

This summer made me think differently about what roots actually mean. There is something grounding about knowing that other people lived here before you, made things here, struggled here, celebrated here, and passed pieces of their lives on to the next generation. At the same time, those traditions are always changing. We are the ones carrying them now, which means we inevitably adapt them to the lives we are living. Knowing where we come from seems to also give us more freedom to move forward.

Wearing my grandmother

One of my personal highlights was wearing my grandmother’s hand-sewn kansallispuku (Finnish national costume) during these events. It was the first time I had it on and it mostly fit me. 

People constantly ask about its origin and story. It is remarkably comfortable, never too hot or too cold. While there is strict etiquette surrounding how to wear a national costume, I adapt it slightly for modern times while keeping it respectful. Running around with it on makes me feel deeply rooted. The illusory image of the Elovena girl makes me smile inside. 

I love catching my reflection in a window or feeling the skirt move around my bare legs (another breach of the etiquette) as I run around tending to the group.

During wartime, these costumes were crafted using whatever materials were available. Every region has its own design; my grandma made hers in the style of old Karelia because those were the patterns and fabrics accessible to her at the time. Traditional costumes require intricate embroidery and must be sewn entirely by hand. My grandmother built hers stitch by stitch. And while she wasn’t originally from Karelia, my other grandmother was, so wearing it feels like honoring both of them at once. I am walking around in something that was made by a woman in my family, from materials and patterns connected to a place that another woman in my family came from, and somehow it has travelled all the way into my present life.

The dress has also become an unexpected social bridge.

Not only is it a conversation piece on almost every event, but also beyond out bus.  On my way back from one of the events, I stopped at a gas station. A guy on a motorcycle passed by me, paused, and said, “I really like your dress. Which area is it from?” I said, “Thank you! It’s from Old-Karelia. It was made by my grandma.”

“Oh, my grandma was also from Karelia,” he replied. “I always remember her Karelian pies.” And there it was again: a moment of spontaneous connection with a complete stranger. That kind of thing happened constantly on these events.

Making time for each other

On one event, I sat with a couple and the man asked me, “Why do you go through the trouble of serving us coffee and cakes on the bus? Why didn’t you just have us get coffee at the gas station where you picked us up?”

I asked him: Should everything be easier?

Imagine the scene. I am pouring coffee on a moving bus while the wife holds onto her husband’s jacket to keep her balance, making sure I don’t spill or burn anyone. We are joking around, three people who just met connecting in real time. We created this slightly ridiculous little ritual together, with people helping each other, laughing, holding onto things and talking. How often does that happen anymore in a world where so much of our lives is designed around convenience and automation?

On another walk, a woman sat next to me and shared her entire life story. She felt lighter afterward simply because someone had taken the time to listen. I don’t think there was anything particularly profound that I said. I just had the time and willingness to sit there. These events create a strange little pocket in which there is time for that.

Even the most stereotypically introverted Finns warmed up over the course of these events. People who kept to themselves in the morning would be smiling by the afternoon, looking me in the eye, or holding my hand with both of theirs to say thank you.

The things we remember

There was one moment at the Panagia Orthodox Community that captured something I had been feeling all summer. A monk-in-training shared words that Jesus had said, which resonated deeply with me: “Whenever two or three people meet in my name, I am present,” and “One Christian is zero Christians,” meaning that the faith is meant to be lived in a community.

Whatever one’s relationship to Christianity, pure intention when it is shared is powerful. So much of what happens on these events depends on people being willing to meet each other where they are. The activity itself is often almost secondary. The real thing happening is that people are spending a day together, bouncing around on their seats on the bus, most often being surprised by where they ended up at every stop, trusting that they are cared for and that someone has taken the time to plan an interesting day for their group.

Finding our way back

In Vesilahti, a local pastor offered another perspective, reminding us that Christianity was imported to Finland and that we all remain tied to our Finnish heritage, nature-based roots and ancient belief systems. Getting better acquainted with those roots makes complete sense to me. I don’t feel a need to choose between old and new. I am more interested in what happens when we remember what has been there all along and then find our own way of carrying it forward.

This connects closely to the work I have always done around nature connection and encouraging people to care more about the environment. That path has led me to a fundamental question: how do we get people to care? When people are content, they don’t feel the same urge to overconsume to fill an internal void. Instead of continually putting a plaster on a wound, I keep wondering what would happen if we addressed the void itself. Joy is one powerful way of doing that, even if what brings joy is different for everyone.

Making room for joy

That is what I love about these events. Nothing is forced. You can sit an activity out if you want, but the program is curated so well that people naturally want to participate and explore.

We don’t spend the day telling people that they should care about nature. We visit an arboretum, a park, or a place that someone has spent their life caring for. Sometimes we discover that we have questions about our own heritage that we hadn’t thought to ask before. And somewhere in all of that, people begin to feel connected to something.

It is difficult to care deeply for something when it feels completely separate from you. When you feel that you belong to a place, a landscape, a community or a living system, its wellbeing starts to matter differently. The same seems to be true of people.

What travels beyond the bus

Towards the end of one event, I was walking back to the bus with an older woman who lives alone. I asked her how she enjoyed the day.

She said, “Well, I have this bad habit of blabbering about these events whenever I get back.”

“What’s bad about that?” I asked.

“I have a friend who lives in a care home, and nothing new ever happens to her,” she explained. “So when I visit, I tell her all about these adventures.”

“That’s wonderful,” I replied. “You’re bringing the outside world directly to her.”

She went on to say, “When I saw the itinerary for this event, I thought: I have the energy to do this now, but next year I surely won’t.“

I looked at her and said, “I’m so glad you came.”

What we carry forward

The idea of her returning to her friend with stories from the day moved me. She was collecting experiences that could travel beyond her.

A day on a bus can continue in a conversation between two friends. A story about a museum can be told to someone who wasn’t there. A new recipe can be brought home. Leaning your back against a tree in the company of others and connecting with your breath can stay with you and perhaps find its way with you to your home forest. A conversation with a stranger can become something you think about weeks later.

The experience doesn’t always end when the bus gets home.

Culture seems to work like that too. It survives because something that someone started before we arrived gets carried somewhere else by someone else. We inherit these customs, change them a little, and eventually pass something along ourselves, without even knowing exactly where it will go. Whether it survives must depend on whether it is valued highly enough. Kirsti told me, that with Kauko they used to say, “This moment is a memory of the future”.

It certainly is.

My grandma’s dress is one such memory that I have found renewed value in. As soon as I tie the apron embroidered by her, feel the wool and the cotton on my skin, and answer questions about its origins, I am connected to my lineage and heritage like never before. But for now, the dress gets to rest in the closet waiting for the next summer of bus tours.