Inheritance

Inheritance

In Finland, they don’t use the flag like we do in America. They don’t fly from front porches every morning. You’ll never see little plastic Finnish flags flying from toothpicks taped to a convenience store register. The Finnish National Flag only flies in all of its glory from the front of state buildings on national holidays.
My mother learned all of this when she spent her junior year abroad in Finland. I can see her perfectly, drunk on vodka, bored, wandering around through grey ice streets and searing her lungs with a cigarette, listening to her friend Anna prattle on. I can see them stopping to look, two girls in shapeless black pea coats, watching that flag hang limp, stark blue and white against the darkening grey infinity sky. I can see her drop the butt into dirty snow, reaching for another, saying, “I want that.”
Deciding. Ignoring Anna’s annoying yammering, walking straight for the flag pole, not looking around – because if you look like you don’t belong, you don’t – stripping off her thick gloves, coffin nail hanging forgotten on her lips, taking down this flag. Only, it’s bigger than she realized, and as it drops, it billows out, wrapping around her and Anna, cracking in the sudden wind. The latch sticks, and for a moment my mother is afraid, but she folds the flag carefully, reverent in the cold, her head wreathed in smoke. She shoves the flag under her coat, and walks away with her trophy, to hang it on a wall, and then put it away in a trunk, where one day I will find it, and after that, I’ll pass it on to my son. Maybe I’ll tell him the story.