When my brother and I were children, we loved playing hot and cold. One of us would hide some small object, and the other would become the hunter, searching, guessing, listening for clues. The closer the hunter came, the louder and more excited the cries would be: “hotter… hotter…” until at last came the triumphant shout: “Now it’s burning!”

That childhood game came back to me with unexpected force as I travelled through Finland. Strange, how something so simple can carry such meaning years later. But if you are a migrant, or the child of a migrant, perhaps you will understand. There are questions that do not leave us, no matter how long we have lived elsewhere. They sit quietly beneath the surface of ordinary life, and then suddenly rise: Where do I truly belong? What place in this world holds my deepest knowing? What is it that made me, formed me, named me before I even knew my own name?

As I returned to the land of my beginnings, those questions seemed to stir awake in me. The moment I landed at Helsinki-Vantaa airport, I felt it — something ancient and tender moving under my skin. It was as though my whole being recognised something before my mind had time to catch up. And somewhere deep inside, I could almost hear my brother’s voice again, playful and familiar, calling out across all those years: “Hotter… hotter…”

But it was one bright sunny day, standing at my childhood summer cottage, when the cry finally came: Now it’s burning.

I broke down in tears. Not polite tears. Not the kind you wipe away quickly and move past. I mean the kind that rise from somewhere wordless, somewhere buried deep, where memory and longing and love have lived quietly together for decades. In that moment I was no longer simply a woman revisiting a place from her past. I was that little girl again, barefoot in the yard, belonging without question. The light was familiar. The scent of the air was familiar. The earth beneath me felt familiar. Everything in me recognised it before I could even begin to explain it.

It is a strange and powerful thing when memory enters not only the mind, but the body. Sometimes we feel something so deeply that it bypasses thought altogether. It goes straight to the heart, straight to the soul, and leaves us undone. That is what happened to me there.

And then came the moment that pierced me even more deeply. The current owner of the cottage kindly invited us inside, and it was there, in the quiet corner of that little summer place, that I had my this is it moment. There stood a chest of drawers — old, unassuming, easily missed by anyone else — but not by me. My mother had bought that chest of drawers for my baby clothes while she was expecting me.

There it was.

My roots.

Not as an idea. Not as a theory. Not as something abstract and poetic. But there, tangible and real, tucked into the corner of a small summer cottage in Itä-Pakila, Helsinki, Finland. And in that instant, I could almost hear my brother’s voice again, full of excitement and certainty: “Jaana, you found it.”

Even though the cottage had been restored over the years, that chest of drawers had remained there untouched since 1966. It had quietly stayed, as if waiting. Waiting for the little girl who once belonged to it to come back and find it again. Waiting for me to see in it something far greater than wood and drawers and age.

Because that little chest of drawers became, in that moment, a symbol of everything I had come searching for without perhaps even fully realising it. It spoke to me of history, of origin, of belonging, of the invisible threads that tie us to people and places long after life has carried us far away. It reminded me that our roots are not always loud. Sometimes they sit quietly in corners, hidden in ordinary things, waiting for the right moment to call us home.

And I came to understand, more deeply than ever before, how much it matters to know where you come from. To know your history. To know your culture. To know the stories and people and places that shaped you long before you had words for any of it. A person without that knowing can feel like a tree without roots — still standing, still living, but missing something essential beneath the surface.

And isn’t that where all true growth begins? In the roots. In the hidden places. In the deep remembering. In the quiet rediscovering of what was always ours.