A bag of sisu

She was a slight, attractive and smartly dressed young woman who had come to speak in our local church. She had come to talk to us about the huge debt that we owed the Russians after the war, about the need to house and clothe our refugees from Karelia, about the pressing need to liberate ourselves from humiliation, the threat of poverty and moral decay. The world must know that David could conquer Goliath, that it was possible for each and every one of us to restore freedom and dignity. She said that we must never be led to believe that we had been trapped in a fissure between communism and facism. She told us that we could pool our resources, each and every one of us to the best of our ability, and thus contribute to the freedom of our people.
This was the bull-dog spirit, the Finnish sisu that this woman challenged us to incarnate.
I thought that she was very beautiful, this peasant baroness. Her lips were swollen and colorful. Her shiny dark hair was parted in the middle and braided in a knot that crowned the nape of her neck.
She continued to speak slowly, suggesting that we remove the wedding rings from our fingers and chains from our necks. Anything and everything of gold, mere tokens of our past, would help. Could we not make concrete use of these totems, by contributing them to a solid commitment to our collective future?
And so we did. We gave everything of apparent value that we had and dropped it into her gunny sack.
Suddenly, in the spirit of service, a handsome young man appeared before her. He offered to help carry the heavy sack to the bank. Slight and overwhelmed by the unexpected weight of her mission, the young woman fumbled with the strings of the sack, looked awkwardly up at the young man and said: “Yes, of course, please, and thank you.”

April 8, 1949
Lapinlahti Finland

So says the sooth

Dear L,

Trust that all the shards of our puzzle will gradually fall into place. In the meantime, please find here a note, however cryptic for the time being, that I just transcribed from my first interview with you last week:

“So how did your international career as a histologist get off the ground?”
“It started with a seed.”
“Just any seed?
“Well, it was a seed I found in the grass, behind the house where I grew up in eastern Finland. It was a Ranta-alpi seed, Lysimachia vulgaris," you added to aid in identification.

I looked up Lysimachia vulgaris when I got home and could identify it as a yellow loosestrife of the primrose family, sometimes considered invasive outside of its native range. The name stems from the Greek and Latin (lusis, lysis) meaning to loosen, deliver, solve, from the Indoeuropean word maghe for power, or battle. The plant is assumed to have soothing properties.

“My professor wanted to cultivate seeds in several nutrient solutions and see how their morphology and growth were affected in varying concentrations of amino acids. My Ranta alpi seeds happened to deviate in unexpected ways from other seeds in glycine-rich solutions. The stalks were deformed, there was rapid undifferentiated growth in the root system, and the leaves were thin and pale yellow.”

tbc...

Lysimachia vulgaris
Illustration from original book source: Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany. Permission granted to use under GFDL by Kurt Stueber.

Chin up

Along the blue brim
picnic posts in drift and dune
sweet orange is coming soon
dawn on me.