I used to think growing older meant moving further away from the girl I once was, but in many ways it has brought me back to her.

Getting older has not made me less myself, but more so. More Finnish. More reflective. More aware of time. More tender toward family. More drawn to beauty, memory, colour, and the quiet pull of the seasons.

Christmas and autumn have always captivated me. They are the seasons that seem to reach most deeply into me. Christmas, with its warmth, wonder, candles, traditions, and memories. And autumn, with its earthy colours, golden light, and gentle reminder that change can be breathtakingly beautiful.

I have always loved the colours of autumn. The browns, golds, rusts, ambers, and deep burnt oranges have always felt like my colours. When I was a little girl, I told people my favourite colours were yellow and orange. I still love orange in all its shades. Perhaps some things are placed in us early and stay there, quietly waiting to be recognised again and again.

I have visited Finnish Lapland many times, but the first time was when I was a child, and it was autumn. I think I left part of my heart there. What touched me most was that autumn was not only in the trees, but on the ground as well. The whole landscape seemed to glow with colour — the trees, the earth, the low plants, the mosses and shrubs beneath my feet. I can still feel something of that place in me: the crispness in the air, the quiet beauty, and the sense that I was standing inside a season that had completely wrapped itself around me.

Some places do that to us. They enter us quietly, and somehow stay for the rest of our lives.

I think Lapland did that to me.

Maybe that is why autumn has never felt like just another season. Maybe it has always carried a kind of longing for me. A memory. A piece of my Finnish soul. A reminder of where I come from, and of the little girl I once was, wide-eyed and full of wonder in a landscape that felt almost too beautiful to take in.

Driving through the beautiful alpine country these past couple of days, I have felt that same stirring again. The autumn trees have been breathtaking. They are all beautiful, of course, but it is the orange ones that draw me in the strongest, almost like a magnet. I see them glowing along the roadsides and scattered across the hills, and something in me answers before I can even find the words.

It feels familiar. Not because I have seen these exact trees before, but because I know this feeling. I know what it is to be stopped by colour. To be moved by a season. To feel beauty reach into some quiet place inside me and touch something that has been there since childhood.

There is something about this alpine region in autumn that stirs my soul like no other place. It captivates me. It thrills me. It draws me in. The mountains, the winding roads, the old trees, the villages, the cool night air, and the leaves scattered across the ground all feel like a kind of homecoming.

Some places are not just beautiful. They seem to awaken something in us. They remind us of who we are beneath the noise and responsibility of everyday life.

As I get older, I find myself noticing time differently. I feel its tenderness more. I think about family more deeply. I hold memories closer. I notice beauty with more gratitude. I find myself looking at the world not just with my eyes, but with all the years I have lived.

Perhaps my Finnish soul has always understood the language of seasons — the pull of light, the ache of beauty, the comfort of colour, and the way nature speaks when we slow down enough to listen.

In Victorian times, women were sometimes whisked away to the seaside, far from their ordinary lives, in the hope that fresh air and beauty might cure them of all kinds of ailments. I can understand the idea completely. Only for me, it is not the seaside that does it. It is autumn in the alpine country.

Being surrounded by this much beauty feels like medicine. The orange trees, the mountain air, the quiet roads, the earthy colours — they seem to cure something I did not even realise was tired in me.

Perhaps this is one of the gifts of getting older. We begin to recognise what has always been ours. The colours we loved as children. The places that stirred us long ago. The seasons that speak our language. The beauty that brings us back to ourselves.

I have not grown away from the girl who loved orange.

I have grown back toward her.

And here, among the autumn trees, I feel more myself than ever.