Switzerland trip

     Across the ocean, there is a land where there are no mosquitoes. Where the soil is so healthy and clean there are no trash plants like poison ivy -- only wildflowers and grasses. Water melts and rushes off the mountains and along the roads and paths every few hundred yards there is a trough of spring water that you can drink from. The chocolate and cheese there are so good not because of different processes but because of what the cows eat all day -- clover, gentian, buttercups, forget-me-nots, daisies.
     The troughs at the farms have a steel vat of this morning's raw milk sitting in the icy water. You slip a franc into a wooden box and pour yourself a cup. When you drink the fresh milk you can taste both its past (all those flowers) and its future (there is the slightest suggestion of the potential for a cheese unlike cheese from anywhere else).
     Even though you're not eating bread much these days, you find you must eat this land's bread because it is so simple and fresh, with a crust that is somehow crisp but not dry. The bread allows you also to savor the fresh butter that you slather over it, followed by a layer of apricot spread that your friend has just cooked up.

     You sleep at night with windows wide open. No one has screens. Why would you need screens? 

     You walk through this land, breathing in the crisp mountain air, and you imagine the possibility of living there in your old age. You'd be like Grandfather in Heidi -- wizened yet vigorous. You hope with all your might, as you walk down the mountainside after the long hike up, that you have the privilege of living a long life.