Growing up, Heidi was one of my favorite books. I have vivid memories of turning those well-worn pages as I burrowed into a blanket-nest in the back of our El Camino, glancing up at the red sentinels of the Golden Gate bridge. Though I left the book behind long ago, I retained snippets of images—Heidi drinking fresh and foamy goat milk from a bowl, the grandfather’s stern eyebrows, Heidi’s desperation to reach the Alps again when she was forced to live in a city with no access to the color of the sky. 

So if you’d asked me a month ago, “Hey, what do you think about Heidi?”

I would have answered, “Love it! Great book!”

What I wouldn’t have said is what I couldn’t have known. That that book nudged my soul into a shape that fits the Swiss landscape, like a lock and key. A lock and key that, now that I’m in Switzerland, opens into an odd feeling of…home.

I’m not saying I want to move to Switzerland, more that this place, it feels familiar. I realized I’ve been nostalgic for a time and place I never lived—when goats were a part of life and toasted cheese was dinner and a trip up the mountain wouldn’t prompt one to check a watch to wonder how long it would take and whole hours could be spent wondering why the eagle screeches so. 

A cup of bubbling apple cider in hand, and my eyes fixed on the ridges of the snow dusted mountain ahead of me, I decided to reread Heidi. Johanna Spyri wrote the book in 1881, so it’s in the public domain, and therefore free, which is a treat. But the real treat has been falling back into childhood. Only a childhood that wasn’t mine, it was Heidi’s. Remember: I was in the El Camino, Heidi was the one picking wildflowers in the alpine meadow. And yet, it feels like it was me, like rereading the book is akin to turning pages in my childhood photo album. Her story…it’s now my story.

I wake up each day, pulled like gravity into the valley. It’s a craving, a physical need to move between these mountains, to let my fingers trail against the mossy sides of rocks, to stop and listen as the river rustles by. Some days I content myself with a long walk, always aiming to pass a vending machine so I can pick up alpine cheese (if you only know Swiss cheese from the rubbery specimen with cartoonish holes, you don’t know Swiss cheese, which is earthy and floral and nuanced with just a bit of funk—Heidi was right to love it). 

And some days I’m lead to fulfill Heidi’s promise of further up, and further in. Once it was walking the hour along Lauterbrunnen valley to Stechelberg, where I asked for a gondola ticket (in German!) up to Mürren. I tromped around for an hour and then reversed course. Another day was even better, I left the house with my skiing family in the morning and we hopped on the bus to Lauterbrunnen, where we caught the gondola up the cliff to Grütschalp. They loaded onto the little railway car to Winteregg to ski, and I caught the trail that winds along the cliff ridge through Winteregg, to Mürren. That walk, it left me breathless. Not because it was difficult—it’s fairly flat and the path is groomed, so even though it’s snow, it’s the good, crunchy kind that’s perfect for walking. But because playing peekaboo with the alps through the spice-scented evergreen forest, only to step into a clearing and find myself surrounded, Sound of Music style, well, I had to sag back onto the wall of snow to blink and remind myself…this is real. This kind of beauty, it exists in the world.  Astonishing.

Gabe is reading Heidi, now. And maybe that has something to do with the fact that even though he comes home from skiing exhausted, within an hour, he’s clamoring for us to take a walk, to look for goats, a cat, a turn in the path. The first time, he rambled and equivocated about routes he’d noted from this train or that, and I couldn’t follow him, so finally, I just told him to plan it. 

He did. 

He packed the backpack with snacks (savory and sweet, including his beloved Swiss apples—they really are something special, as is Swiss food in general, as you’ll learn in this post), gave me a 10 minute warning before we had to leave for the bus, then shepherded me from bus to train. When he realized it was a different kind of train and didn’t have the “stop requested” button to stop in Wengwald, he studied until he figured out what to do and then rehearsed how to confirm with the ticket checker (thank you Duolingo). Before the checker came by, Gabe noticed that someone else had requested the stop, so he stopped rehearsing to himself and instead told me the names of the Alps—Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau. He smiled and said he’d learned them, just like Heidi. repeated them, tracing them with my fingers in the air until I knew them, too. Eiger, Mönch, Jungfrau.

We hopped off the train in Wengwald and examined signs until we figured out how to walk back down the mountain to Lauterbrunnen. The alpine hike took us past the most frolicsome, adorable goats I’ve ever seen, sprawling vistas of alps, tender new wildflowers peeking out of the leaf litter, a mountain goat grazing, steep hills we slid down on our bottoms, and a rushing sluice of water that we criss-crossed the entire way home. We stopped at all the beautiful displays of moss, we paused to get a piece of smoked beef, an apple, a chocolate wafer cookie out of the backpack, we quenched our thirst at a fountain offering glacier water. 

I told him this adventure was the very best gift he’d ever given me. 

Partly because the experience of that constant wonderment with my son is irreplaceable. And partly because it introduced me to a new area to walk. I’ve been up Wengen way a few times since then. Once I hiked up and around the mountain, on my own, with the twittering birds as soundtrack. It’s funny, I think nothing now of hiking on my own—the mountains, the breeze, the goats, the once-in-awhile farm cat (cream-fed, with small ears, dashing and so friendly) are plenty of company. Similarly, I think nothing of embarking on a hike that’s slated to wind through mountains for several hours. A few hours? That’s nothing. It feels no more daunting to me than my usual trek to the alimentari in the piazza to pick up prosciutto. Time has expanded. It fills the corners. Like Heidi, I could easily spend a day in a meadow, my hands tucked behind my head, watching the clouds and admiring the goats and wildflowers.

Maybe my experience in Switzerland would have been just the same if I’d never read Heidi as a child. But I believe that what you read at an impressionable age, when your psyche is tender, it impacts you. The images, they settle within your soul. Thus, new places resonate with a blend of  familiarity and mystery that pulls you back, that brings you in.

Those new places? They become an embrace by a loved one you haven’t seen in ages.

Now if I could only convince Keith to let me bring home a goat.

What did you read as a child that changed what you look for in the world? Tell us in the comments and please do share this post with your friends using the buttons below!