Finding Petronella
A young woman, a 90-year-old legend, and the journey of a lifetime.
About
From June to October 2014, Jenny O’Connell embarked on a walking journey across Finland, following the footsteps of the legendary Petronella Van Der Moer into the wilderness above Finland’s Arctic Circle. This is her blog from the journey.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…do not seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” -Ranier Maria Rilke If you wanted to take the direct route… Read More
Petronella has come home! Retraction: (n.) withdrawal of a promise, statement, or opinion. I apologize. I owe you all a retraction. The entirety of my previous post is true, except for this one part about Solange: “My heart breaks knowing that she will not be able to experience the kindness that both Petronella and I have found within this amazing community of gold diggers. I hope to share my stories of the magnificent landscape of Lemmenjoki… Read More
“I’ve let both you and my mom down, and I’m sorry.” I blinked back tears as I read the email again, and disbelief washed over me. It was from Solange. On my first day in Finland, I met with a reporter from the largest paper in Finland, the Helsingen Sanomat. He was charming, seemed earnest, and worked hard to gain my trust with copies of articles from the National Archives. At the… Read More
I was curious to know what would come out of my pen when I wrote my last “Hello Dear Friend, I love today” letter in Oulu. It was simple, it was everything that felt true, it was this: Hello Dear Friend, I love today. I love today because it is both an ending and a beginning. It has been a little over a month since I arrived in Finland, and what a… Read More
On Monday, I began walking north from Jyväskylä toward Oulu. I have been trying to learn the Finnish language, without much success. Each day of my walking journey, using the Finnish dictionary I had on hand, I wrote a letter to a stranger and left it in a mailbox along the road. Given that a lot of Finnish words have multiple meanings and my grasp of the language is terrible at best,… Read More
I am finding it difficult to put the last week and a half into words. The words “week and a half” feel strange when I say them, because I have removed my watch and begun to mark time by wild adventures and the periods of intense personal growth in between them, rather than minutes, hours, days. The lesson to stop asking questions about where I’m going, who I’ll meet, where I’ll sleep, and what… Read More
Drawn by something I could not define, I walked the road to Monikkala manor. It seemed vaguely familiar, like a road I had walked in a dream last December. The crunch of the dirt road underneath my shoes, the fragrant smell of the evergreens lining the way, and the occasional mosquito bite reminded me that this time it was real. It feels almost ludicrous to explain how I came to walk down… Read More
I knew this would come, but I kind of hoped it wouldn’t. Today’s journey found me in a town called Kotka. It was the last destination I had to check off the list of places Petronella visited around Helsinki before I begin my trek north tomorrow. Tuukka and I explored the empty cathedral, and I noticed as I walked around the balcony that my footsteps were echoing in a beautiful way. Without thinking about it I started to… Read More
When I first set out to retrace Petronella’s steps across Finland, I was under the impression that she walked straight from Helsinki to Lapland. While that would be pretty impressive, in reality it would not leave nearly enough time for her to accomplish the trouble/fun/adventures that turned her into a legend during the four short months she was in Finland. With the help of Mauno J. Pyhtilä’s Balladi kauniista Petronellasta – Lemmenjoen Legenda,… Read More
Finding Petronella 