Giant buttercups umbrella the meadows

Topping the grass, daisied blue and white

Shaped for a mound rounded alongside

Alpine peaks pinked by a setting sun

Unclothed of their ice, unfreezing

In the warm love of spring and an early summer.

Beyond Mayenfeld, Dorfli and a Graubunden valley

With my own Heidi browning in the sunshine

Helping recapture youthfulness

In the frolic and play of a carefree meadow

Breathing the purified air of the mountains

Touching the stars of a nearby heaven.

A diamond glints unpretentiously on a finger

Pledge of three decades marriage and more

Transmitting Arosa's brilliant sun

Into a glint of light on an emerging future

Glimpsed down the shaded valleys walked

With the unseen friend of another road.

Arosa

26 June 2001

We had been hosted in Switzerland in celebration of my 60th birthday. The Sunday before I'd preached on 'the valley of the shadow of death' at the SAMF weekend in Berne. Then en route to Arosa we'd stopped at Heidiland - Mayenfeld and Dorfli, and been given the book, which I read. Arosa is in Graubunden.

Margaret is of course, 'my own Heidi'.