We often understand the depth of a gift long after the moment when we could have thanked the giver.
I’ve heard it said that the soul of a country lives in its music. Yesterday, as I looked through old photographs, lost in thought, while Peter played Finnish folk songs at the piano, I felt how deeply true that could be.
I was pausing over familiar faces when the music began to draw me away from the room. A melody would catch in my chest, and suddenly the photograph in front of me felt closer. These were people I had loved, voices I had known, a childhood I had lived and for a moment, I could almost reach it again.
My grandfather was what the Finns call a pelimanni, a folk musician. He was a talented fiddler and played the mandolin beautifully too. His music is woven so deeply into my childhood that I cannot separate the two. When I remember him, I hear him. When I hear those old tunes, I remember being a little girl.
I wonder whether he ever knew how much of himself he was leaving with me.
As a child, I couldn’t have understood the lasting gift in those ordinary moments. He played, and I listened. I thought I was simply listening to my grandfather play; I did not know he was giving me a part of Finland I would carry wherever life took me. There was no reason to imagine a future in which I would ache to hear him again, or sit with old photographs while my husband played a melody that brought tears to my eyes.
But that is where I found myself.
Peter’s playing stirred a longing I struggled to put into words. I missed my grandfather. I missed the childhood in which his music belonged so naturally. And through those familiar, melancholic folk songs that tell of Finland, its people, its culture and the beauty of its nature, I felt a painful longing for the country of my birth, each melody stirring this Finnish heart of mine and making me ache to be there once again.
Living far from Finland, I sometimes find that music reaches a part of me that everyday life leaves quiet. A familiar tune can awaken a sense of belonging that time and distance have never erased. I don’t have to explain my history or search for the right words. I hear the music, and something within me answers.
Perhaps that is why folk music moves us so deeply. We hear it through everything we have lived: the people who played it, the rooms where we first heard it, the years when those we loved were still within reach. A song may belong to a whole country, yet carry something intensely personal for each of us.
This time, mine carried my grandfather.
The photographs showed me his face. The music brought back the feeling of being near him. Together, they reminded me how much of our lives remains within us, even when we have travelled far and grown older.
I cannot return to those childhood days. I cannot ask him to take up his violin once more. That is the ache beneath the beauty of remembering.
Yet while Peter played, I realised that my grandfather’s music is still part of my life. It has crossed the years and the distance with me. It lives in the way I listen, in the tears that fill my eyes, in the love I still feel whenever a familiar melody begins.
He could not have known, as he played to the little girl I once was, that she would still be listening so many decades later.
Those melodies awaken a longing that all these years away have never quietened. As Peter played, I wished, for a moment, that the music could carry me all the way back — to sit beside my grandfather, listen to him play once more, and thank him for all those hours he played with such joy. His folk tunes became the soundtrack of my childhood, binding me to Finland in ways that neither time nor distance could ever undo.
