Tracing Home

This article is written by Matleena Huittinen and Emilia Voltti as a part of a collaboration between the Student Paper and a Finnish student paper,Varsinaissuomalainen.

-A freshman, a third-year student, and a recent graduate from Finland on finding home wherever life takes you

In March 2020, Vilma Toivonen packed up her shared apartment in Helsinki and returned to her childhood home, a farm in the village of Haveri. Since then, she has sometimes spent more time behind the wheel of a tractor than on her studies. “What would I have done in Helsinki when lectures went online because of corona? There’s always nature and someone to chat with around here,” the 21-year-old agriculture and forestry student comments.

While Toivonen returned to her family, 19-year-old Anastasia Seppänen broke away from hers. The autumn was a time of great change for Seppänen because she relocated to an unfamiliar city, moved into her own studio apartment, and started studying to become a teacher. “I’ve had to get used to the fact that there are no family or friends close by in the same way as before. I have to figure out and do everything myself, but living alone has still been wonderful. I can do things my own way and there is nobody to whom I’m supposed to report about what I’m doing and where I’m going.” Seppänen states that she has probably become more independent than ever during her first months of living alone.

Toivonen finds that getting a car was a similar turning point toward independence. Since getting a car, Toivonen has been free to choose where to go - and when. Because distances in the countryside are long, residents are practically forced to have cars. “Maybe independence is about paying your own bills and taking care of yourself,” wonders 27-year-old Juhani Riikonen, who recently graduated with his master’s in energy technology and began so-called adult life by acquiring an apartment in Turku and a day job in Espoo.

Let’s leave our interviewees’ present locations and go back in time to their childhoods. In what kinds of landscapes did they grow up? Toivonen cherishes her family’s three-hundred-year-old farmland, which includes a pig farm, fields, and forests. She expects that she and her siblings will continue operating the farm when their father retires. Greater awareness of the family farm and the rural environment of her childhood have increased Toivonen’s interest in the forest and motivated her to study wood processing.

Riikonen’s family lived in a rowhouse in the smallish city of Paimio. He says that Paimio was a good place to grow up. It’s a small, family-friendly, and peaceful city with plenty of opportunities for exercise. One con was that if you acted foolish, everybody knew.Anastasia Seppänen has lived in many different places despite her young age. She lived with her mum, stepfather, and siblings for a long time but moved in with her father when she started high school.

The trio’s stories always return to family and friends eventually. Toivonen describes how half of her relatives live within a ten-kilometer radius. Small, tight-knit circles of family and friends are fine, but she appreciates the sense of community in the village. “You can knock on any neighbor’s door and have a coffee together. At least I always say hi when I bump into someone in Haveri, even if I don’t know them personally!”

For Seppänen, the experience of home has been influenced by the people she grew up with; with her mum, it was family life with little kids, while she was an only child with her father. Seppänen feels accustomed to facing different situations due to changing family relationships. When she was younger, she sometimes felt guilty, for example, about not being able to spend Christmas with all her family members, but today she recognizes the richness of having a large family. Seppänen reflects that she has a kind of love—hate relationship with her childhood hometown, Turku, where she has attended school and lived in different corners of the city her whole life until now. “It has been refreshing to have a change of environment, and Helsinki has felt like my kind of place, so I’m not moving away for at least the next few years.”

“The best place in Paimio, if I can’t say home, is the parking area behind the high school. We drove there on mopeds to hang around. When our gang of friends turned eighteen, mopeds were replaced by cars,” Riikonen recalls. Wild youth on mopeds come up repeatedly in Riikonen’s stories. He and his buddies rode at least every other weekend to Turku or sometimes Salo. “We drove there and hung around in the city but we usually didn’t go to any bars. My moped wasn’t souped up or anything, but I saw lots of different modifications on other people’s. Fortunately, nobody got seriously injured.”

Most students probably settle down for their years of study and start thinking about more permanent living arrangements as graduation nears, like Seppänen or Riikonen, who lived on campus in Espoo while in university. There were always some students around and saunas warming up on campus, but as Riikonen’s graduation approached, he started planning a move to Turku, which he decided was the best location to live in his current life situation.“My relatives live there and we have a cottage there. Not to mention how cheap it is to live in Turku compared to the capital area.”

Toivonen knew when moving to study in Helsinki that she wouldn’t stay there for good. She doesn’t want to look at apartment buildings from the windows of her home, but nature. “Where I live is more important to me, and certainly to many others, than what I do for a living. I can’t get peace in Helsinki because all the places are full of cars. If you move in any direction in the city, the best direction is to move away from the city,” Toivonen says with a laugh. Riikonen prioritizes residence over work as well. For this reason, Riikonen has worked in the capital area and lived in Turku for a few years now, even though it means commuting for two hours.

For the interviewees, home is a place where they prefer to spend time. At home they feel free, like Toivonen when she gets into the woods after being in the middle of the city. Seppänen and Riikonen bring up the importance of having their own time and space, privacy and style. “I didn’t know any places in Helsinki beforehand, but it’ll become my home over time. It’s more hectic here, more traffic, people and activities, but I’ve enjoyed it because I have time and space for myself at home anyways,” Seppänen says. Bit by bit, Riikonen’s pad in Turku is already feeling more like home. He is able to condense the complicated concept into one sentence: “A place where I'm able to relax by myself, I think that’s the definition of home. Do you know the feeling when you walk up to the right door in the stairwell and just know that you’ve come home?”

ViewpointStúdentablaðiðApril 16, 2021