On Sunday night, I found myself waiting for my seventeen-year-old grandson to arrive. He was making his own way from home to our place, travelling more than one hundred kilometres from door to door. I had a warm meal prepared, the house felt soft and welcoming, and yet I could not settle. I paced the…
Tag: generations
A Tender Legacy
As part of a six-week course I am doing, I was asked to take a test to discover which emotions most strongly drive me. When the results came back, they stopped me in my tracks. The two emotions that rose above all others were empathy and compassion. They surprised me. Not because I have thought…
A Year of Reflection
I have often thought that life seems to move in ten-year chapters. The first ten years are our childhood, when so much is formed in us quietly and deeply, long before we understand what is shaping us. The second ten are our teenage years, when we begin reaching for our own identity and trying to…
Echoed Dreams
She talks about her dreams as if they are already beginning to take shape — a life imagined in bright strokes, full of meaning and promise. There is certainty in her voice, the kind that doesn’t yet know how easily the world can complicate things. I listen, and I am taken back. I remember dreaming…
My Treasure Chest
When I look back, it isn’t the big moments that rise first. It’s the small hands. The weight of a child asleep against my chest. The way time softens when you are watching someone you love grow. Life keeps bringing them to me — first as babies, then as children, then, almost without warning, as…
Next To You
As love deepens, excitement can soften into something quieter: the feeling of being safe with one another. Yesterday was one of those days that start normally but end with your heart in your throat. My elderly dad had a fall. It ended well, thank God, but at the time it was frightening. The ambulance came,…
To my grandson
We do not always have to know what to say or do to comfort someone; sometimes our presence offers more than we realise. You made me a nanna —from the very first moment your dad placed you gently in my arms,just a minute old, soft and new,you stole my heart completely.And you’ve held it ever…
Grandfather Clock
What lasts across generations often does so because someone chooses to care for it, then places it in the hands of someone new. There is a particular kind of solace that lives in my family’s old grandfather clock. It hangs on the wall downstairs, keeping time with its steady, gentle tick-tock. On days when life…
Let me Tell you a Story
The past can become a source of courage when we understand the lives behind it. In the midst of this busy and noisy modern world, storytelling feels to me like a quiet place of rest. It is more than a way of remembering. It is a way of holding close the people, places, and moments…
Childhood Home
Written by Jaana M. H. JokinenTold by my mother, Mirja AnneliSeptember 1949, Kallio, Helsinki, Finland Slowly but surely, the days were growing colder and darker. School had started again, and autumn had arrived. I have always been a summer person, so even as an eight-year-old, I was not at all pleased by the changing season….
