Wallowing in nostalgia is better than red tape.

I used to write letters to family, friends, lovers and pen-pals. I've kept a lot of the letters I received, but have rarely been tempted to reread them over the decades. I have lost touch with many of the people who I used to write to, others I send an occasional email or see them on social media without comment. 

I miss writing pages and pages on special stationary and then waiting for the return, seeing stamps from abroad, wondering what's changed in the weeks since I sent my letter. The wait for the postman to arrive and the disappointment when he didn't stop or left only bills. I still check the postbox daily, but I rarely get more than one thing a week. 

I'm not even sure if there is more than one delivery a week anymore in our neighbourhood. My grandfather walked his route, knew the streets, the families, their dogs. The regular postman is no longer part of the community, zipping by in a little scooter-car. Even neighbours barely talk, just a wave as we drive past. 

Not sure where I'm going with this. I'm feeling nostalgic, I guess. I've been digging through boxes of paperwork looking for my high school diploma from 35+ years ago, reading old University course catalogues, calling my old high school for copies of my transcript and speaking the the same secretary that was there all those years ago. I think she's the Registrar now, though it doesn't matter because she's still the person who knows where everything is and how it works. 

I've been digging through old essays and my dissertation, remembering how I thought, who I was then and how I got to here. In Finland, trying to remember which country I left my diploma in. A certification agency is asking if I did my GCSEs in English and Maths. I'm not sure if I can prove it, but I've done 4 degrees since then in the 1990s and now in the 2020s, two of them in English/Scottish Literature. Pretty sure I passed high school. It doesn't help that I've studied in three different countries and not in Finland which is one of the countries I'm trying to be recognised in. I'm being asked to prove what I studied, where I worked, what subjects I was a substitute teacher for. Death by jumping through paperwork hoops.

So I have these boxes of postcards and letters I've received decades ago, ticket stubs, hard copy photographs that are so badly out of focus or dark, but there was no option but to keep them as they may have been the only record of an event. My analog past I can't bear to throw out. I've been scanning some of them to print in photobooks. I love the accidental finger, the overexposed blanch. That's who I was, I barely remember her. 

In the midst of this paperwork bog, I'm trying to write poetry about happiness and where I find it. Finland has been voted happiest country again and my writing group has decided the theme for our next anthology will be 'happy places'. So with war everywhere, job insecurity, my kids growing up and a lack of happiness where I am, I'm looking backwards, trying to remember what happiness looks like. 

Why is Finland so happy? They certainly don't show it. Is it low expectations, contentment, feeling safe, having what they need? Do they inwardly hold their joy and elation until the surveyor comes around? No one has ever asked me in the nearly 16 years I've been here. 

I'm sure I could look up the questions they ask for the survey on the interweb, but I'd rather not know. I like to think under their stoic surface, the Finns are dancing with joy, not just surety. That it bubbles up and leaks out when they least expect it. Not when they're drunk at Vappu or jumping into a freezing lake, but when someone asks on a busy street on a dark mid-winter day as they're trudging off to work on their life-sucking screens. 

I'm hoping I can unearth it myself again. Coming out of winter helps, the return of the sun and the earth warming for growth. 

Happy vernal equinox. Happy spring!