What remains

The week in Finland again has been quite an unexpected experience.

I couldn't anticipate how strange it would feel. After five months of living in the enchanting but rather barren Iceland, to come back to the stupendously lush and lively sceneries I have been raised in. The characteristic edgy rockiness has been replaced by firs, birches and fields and fields of spring wheat and hay. The greenness of everything is pretty much inarguably at its best this time of the year, it's the kind of new, sweet, light instead of the inevitably darker shades of the midsummer.

While visiting my mom and the region I lived in for most of my elementary and high school, I also got to take a look at what the most ubiquitous places of my teenhood looked like. One of these was a grove, just a couple minutes away from our home. The way there would go past a patch of forest next to a kindergarten, which was closed a couple of years before. The forest paths I always remembered from there were no more, lost due to no more hordes of children trodding upon them. Vegetation there wasn't exactly the thickest, the once paths now serving as a growing ground for some hay.

The grove itself had undergone an equally thorough transformation. It used to be a surprisingly lush little valley, surrounded by a lot less damp land, and having a little stream run in the bottom. Now, you can't even enter it any longer.

Instead of being the paratiisi it is called it looked more like a paradise lost. Trees were fell all over the narrow paths that lead to the bottom of the grove, the small bridge over the stream and back up on the other side again. Going down might've probably even been dangerous, as the valley looked very prone to suffering some small landslides. The once so serene grove was not walkable any longer. The laborousness and the dam engineering had run over it. And it was executed by beavers.

Very close to that site is the neighbourhood tennis court. That was still there, but looking completely abandoned. Sure it always was a little low maintenance, hard surface one, but it didn't have trees or other plants extending their branches through the fences, and the door had been broken. The net still looked pretty good though, so I guess it could be at least semi functional still. I know I would've played there.

The whole part of the little town once grew to support the hospital, originally designed as a tuberculosis ward. When the disease was decades ago banished from the land, it was turned into a common clinic. It has been under fire for many years now, some functions closed already. The area is bursting with life a lot less these days, which is hardly a surprise. Still, the grove served as an even better reminder that nothing really is permanent. I had expected that life is being siphoned out of the homes slowly, but I couldn't imagine it to happen for the parts of the nature I always loved.