I caught myself daydreaming today, though it felt like much more than that. In my mind, I had travelled back to the happy days of my childhood, back to my grandma’s house, back to everything that felt safe and warm and deeply loved. The Finnish word mummi has never simply meant grandmother to me. In my heart, it has always meant happiness.

There I was again, standing at her front door, reaching for the old-fashioned doorbell, the kind you had to twist instead of press. I had barely turned it when I heard the sound I knew so well, my beloved grandma’s footsteps approaching, followed by her cheerful voice calling, Tullaan, tullaan… coming, coming. Even now, those words seem to carry the same warmth they did then.

She opened the door with her half apron tied around her waist, her face full of that familiar love and welcome that made me feel as though there was no place in the world I belonged more. I stomped my red boots on the step to shake off the snow before peeling off my hat, mittens, jacket, and hand-knitted woollen socks. I noticed little white balls of snow clinging stubbornly to the yarn, and I smiled to myself. On another day I might have sat there happily pulling them off one by one. But not today. Today was for being with my grandma.

The moment I stepped into the foyer, the warmth wrapped itself around me like a blanket. It was not only the warmth of the house, but something gentler and deeper, the warmth of being expected, welcomed, and loved. My grandma cared about manners and doing things properly, so I knew to hang my outdoor clothes neatly and with care. Even that small act felt part of the rhythm of her home. My grandfather’s shoes stood lined up in their place, each with its stretcher inside, as they always were, quiet signs of order, routine, and the life they shared together.

My grandma beckoned me into the kitchen, that heart of the house where so much of life seemed to happen. She bent to check the oven where the Karelian stew was simmering away, filling the air with its rich, comforting promise, while on the kitchen table the pulla dough was rising beneath a tea towel that could barely contain it. There was something about that kitchen that seemed to hold the whole world steady. The gentle ticking of the grandfather clock drifted in from the living room, steady and familiar, as if time itself had softened there. That same clock now hangs on my wall here in Australia, and somehow, when I hear it tick, it still carries me back. It still knows the way home.

It is a strange and beautiful thing, how love refuses to disappear. Death may take away a voice, a hand to hold, the sight of someone standing at the door waiting for you, but it cannot take love. It cannot erase what has been written into us through tenderness, through memory, through all the ordinary sacred moments we once lived without knowing how precious they were.

So perhaps I did daydream today. Perhaps I travelled through memory, through longing, through love. But in the quiet places of my heart, it feels truer to say that I visited my grandma. And for a little while, I was with her again.