There are certain smells that do far more than drift through a house. They open doors to the past. They loosen memories that have been sitting quietly in the heart for years. For me, the smell of freshly baked cinnamon rolls, rich with butter and cardamom, does exactly that. It carries me straight back to childhood, back to my grandma’s kitchen, back to a place that no longer exists except in memory, and yet still feels as real to me as if I had only just left it.

Some of the sweetest memories of my childhood were made in that kitchen. My grandma would be baking, moving with the calm certainty of someone completely at home in what she was doing. Her hands seemed to know their work by heart. To me, everything she made looked beautiful. Even the ordinary became special in her hands. She would give me a little piece of dough to play with, and I would sit there happily, shaping and squashing it as though it were treasure, while she carried on with the real work of baking.

But it was never only about what came out of the oven. It was about her. It was about being near her, watching her, listening to her voice, and feeling the deep comfort of her presence. In my grandma’s kitchen, the world felt gentler. Safer. Kinder. We would talk while she baked, and somehow, in the middle of those simple everyday moments, she would pass on little lessons about life. She never sounded as though she was lecturing. Wisdom simply seemed to flow from her as naturally as warmth from the oven.

And then came the moment I loved most of all. The tray would come out golden and fragrant, the whole kitchen filled with that beautiful cardamom scent, and I would be given a hot cinnamon roll with a cold glass of milk. I can still feel the happiness of it. There was such comfort in that moment, such a deep and childlike sense of everything being right with the world, that I do not think it has ever quite left me. Some tastes live not only on the tongue, but in the heart. They become tied to love, to safety, to belonging.

In Finland, we call this beloved sweet bread pulla. It is soft and buttery and gently sweet, somewhere between bread and cake, and Finns often call it coffee bread. Pulla is so much a part of Finnish life that it is hard to imagine Finland without it. A Finnish coffee table without pulla would feel almost incomplete. But for me, pulla is more than tradition. It is memory. It is childhood. It is my grandma.

These days, people speak of life coaches as though wisdom must be searched for in special places. But when I think of the person who shaped me most in the quietest and deepest ways, I think of my grandma. Around her kitchen table, she taught me so much — not only manners and etiquette, but how to find happiness in life. Or perhaps more truthfully, she showed me. She showed me that happiness often lives in very simple things: in food made with love, in hands that are busy caring for others, in time spent together, in a home that feels welcoming, in knowing how to make others feel seen and safe. The things she taught me settled so deeply into me that even now, I can almost hear her voice in my mind.

The older I get, the more I realise how much of her I carry with me. So many of the things that brought her joy are the very same things that bring joy to me now — being in the kitchen, cooking and baking with love, gathering family and friends around the table, finding meaning in small everyday moments that others might overlook. And perhaps that is one of the tender mercies of life: that the people we miss most do not leave us empty-handed. They leave traces of themselves in us.

And yet, with that realisation comes longing too. A deep one. Because no matter how grateful I am for the memories, memories are not the same as presence. I cannot step back into her kitchen. I cannot hear her voice with my own ears. I cannot sit beside her as she bakes and ask her one more question, or watch her hands at work, or tell her how much of what she gave me has lasted. There are moments when the ache of that feels very near. Sometimes all it takes is the smell of cardamom, and suddenly I do not only remember her — I miss her.

When I look back on my childhood now, I cannot separate it from my grandma or from pulla. They belong together in my heart, wrapped in warmth and love and a kind of homeliness that is hard to put into words. My childhood without my grandma and her cinnamon rolls would feel like a night sky without stars. It would still be a sky, but so much of its light would be gone.

I truly think every child should know the love of a grandma and the comfort of hot cinnamon rolls straight from the oven. And perhaps even as grown-ups, that longing never fully leaves us. We still ache for the warmth, the safety, the tenderness of those moments that shaped us. We still hunger, in some quiet way, for the people who made the world feel good and whole.

And every now and then, when a fresh cinnamon roll comes out of the oven and is eaten warm with a cold glass of milk, it feels as though some small part of that love returns. Not enough to take away the longing, perhaps. But enough to remind me that what was beautiful then is beautiful still, and that my grandma’s love, like the scent of cardamom in a warm kitchen, has never really left me.