Tears ran down my cheeks

I wasn’t crying from sadness but from the beauty that was attacking me from all sides.

My housemate and I were in the mountains of Valais where she has a chalet. Part of the weekend was to relax and part was to escape the party her son was planning with his friends to celebrate their finishing their exams for the “Bac” the exam all kids need to take to show they finished their high school studies.

Les Marécottes is a tiny village and a ski station, but with only one hotel. It lacks the chichi atmosphere of Gstaad. No Hermes stores are here and you couldn’t find an Yves St. Laurent anything if your life depended on it. Most of the chalets are occupied by real Swiss whose families lived here for generations. One tiny chalet even looks like Heidi’s grandfather could be occupying it and I half expected goats to be nibbling at the lawn with Peter following behind. Much of the wood in the chalets is old and smells of sunshine and caramel.

www.tiscover.ch/ch/guide/1524ch,de,SCH1/objectId,RGN1584ch/home.html

My morning’s walk was out of the village into the forest. Trails all over this country are marked by 18x4 inch yellow arrows giving the name of the next town and the estimated time it takes to walk there. My first night in Switzerland when I was searching for the company flat in Môtiers I thought the time was for driving, but I learned the real reason quickly when I arrived in 10 minutes while the sign said 40 and I wasn't speeding.

I chose the trail to Les Granges. Within minutes the village was replaced by woods. Although I could still hear cowbells, there was no sounds of cars. The wind rustled and bird song kept silence at bay. All kinds of birds were chorusing. One gave a come-here baby whistle while another did the ha-ha-ha-ha of a soprano warming up for her performance at La Scala. They were accompanied by the drumming of a woodpecker or woodpeckers.

I passed a stream racing down hill over rocks. The water from melting snow added its music to the birds as it tumbled and fell to the valley below. I dipped my hand into it, and was instantaneously taken back to Maine waters where skin turns blue in minutes. The taste was the imagined freshness in the adverts for bottle waters that never quite live up to expectations. This water surpassed expectation.

As I looked up through the trees the soft yellow of the beech trees intermingled with the dark green of the pines I saw tan/brown pine cones that still hadn’t fallen from last year and the deep blue of the sky. When I turned in another direction, I saw a snow-covered mountain through the vista of trees.

Grey boulders, some the size of chalets, some more like pieces of furniture were in between the trees and the leaf covered ground. Moss added yet another shade of green to the scene.

Along the edge of the path dandelions, miniature daisies and buttercups bloomed. I am not good at wildflower identification, but there were also flowers that looked like lilies-of-the-valley only painted a deep yellow. Mingled in between were light purple flowers on a stalk. Flitting between them all was a white butterfly with the edge of its wings painted like a woman would line her eyes.

That was when I found myself crying. There was too much sun, too much colour, too much fresh air too much naturalness to not be swept up in a tsunami of feeling. A feeling of great fortune that not only was I experiencing this moment, but I lived close enough to it that I could recapture it with a small car or train trip. I didn’t have to plan a holiday for months and save up airfare. I was here.