Vanishing childhood

Heidi lives in a village in Switzerland. When she is only a year old, her parents die and she is left with her aunt Dete. Dete moves to Frankfurt and she takes Heidi to live with her grandfather in the mountains, but he does not want her but has no choice. Heidi is a sweet-tempered child and Grandfather soon comes to love her. She makes friends with a boy called Peter and she loves going up the mountain with him and his goats. Grandfather takes Heidi to visit Peter’s grandmother. She is blind and regrets the fact that Peter can’t read to her from her old song book. She is also afraid because the house is old and it might fall down. Heidi goes to visit her every fine day, and her grandfather goes sometimes to repair the house. Two years pass and Dete returns to take Heidi to the house of a rich family in Frankfurt, whose twelve-year-old invalid daughter, Clara, needs company. Heidi makes friends with her and learns to read, but she is homesick. She writes a letter to Clara’s father, who comes quickly and he finds out Heidi walking in her sleep in her white nightdress. He sees the child is unhappy and decides to send her home. On her way up the mountain, Heidi visits Peter’s grandmother and she also teaches Peter to read. Then Clara visits Heidi and loves the mountain life and eventually she learns to walk.

Heidi is a cartoon that accompanied us in our days since we were kids. The little Heidi was loved by everyone and has made happy our childhood happier: it cheered our mornings before going to school. She taught us humility and generosity toward others and the value of friendship. We like to remember when Heidi, despite the negative events, could find a way to solve the situation and make everyone happy… all by herself, without any help. Thinking about the new generation, we realize that curiosity that aroused in us in waiting a new episode was greater, since we didn’t have all the technology that features the media now. 

So, we wonder, can today’s children really grasp the message that the author was willing to send us?

Glossary

Sweet-tempered: a person who is friendly, cordial
Blind: a person who can’t see
Goat: an animal which was found native in mountainous regions but today is distributed in domesticated varieties.
Homesick: depressed or melancholy at being away from home and family