Dear Reader,I have had one dream since I was 10—to have a cottage in the hills with a tiny, flower-bedecked garden, a verandah with a view of the snows, trellised windows, wooden floors, a hearth, and a hayloft. The last detail probably owes its existence to my reading of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi at a young age. For a long time, Heidi remained the book for me, saturating my head with visual and auditory images of Alpine meadows, the Milky Way stretched across the violet sky, shaggy dogs, cows with tinkling bells, bleating goats, and babbling streams.I haven’t got over it entirely. The one happy place in my head is still Heidi’s loft, with its bed of fragrant hay and a window overlooking the rolling green valley. Since the loft is accessible not by stairs but by a ladder, once I draw the ladder up, I don’t have to interact with anybody anymore. The cheerful thought of shutting the world out makes the dream complete.When I read Heidi now, its spirit of Christian goodness seems a bit cloying, but certain aspects of it still hold true. For one, its belief that nature heals. As an orphan who is not her remaining family’s first concern, five-year-old Heidi is woefully alone at the beginning of the novel. She is entrusted to the care of her emotionally distant grandfather, who initially doesn’t want her.Once they are thrown together, his heart opens up to the spirited child who refuses to be discouraged by his gruffness. What helps the process is their immersion in the life of nature in the Swiss Alps—the goats to be grazed, the house to be repaired, the cows to be milked, the humans to be helped. The ceaseless demands of that hard but fulfilling life put a poultice on the sorrows of the mind.Once Heidi is uprooted from that environment and replanted in the city, she falls sick. The cracks in her psyche reappear, and she starts sleepwalking. Frankfurt offers material comfort and education, neither of which she had in the mountains, but Heidi prefers to be taught by nature, in nature. I could identify with Heidi when she feels suffocated by the thick curtains in the house of the genteel Sesemanns in Frankfurt. To add insult to injury, her strict tutor would not let her keep her kitten. Heidi must flee.The children’s writer, illustrator, naturalist, and conservationist Beatrix Potter did just that in real life—fled her comfortable life (her parents were wealthy industrialists) in London to settle in a village farm with lots of sheep. When she was 39, Potter used the proceeds from her highly popular books and a legacy from an aunt to purchase Hill Top Farm in the picturesque Lake District. In my scheme of things, being a writer is worth the hassle only if one can use the royalties to buy a farmhouse. But I also wish that each of us had a mysterious aunt lurking somewhere, waiting to bequeath a legacy when we need it most.Once at Hill Top, Potter was so consumed by the practicalities of running the farm that she hardly had any time left for writing—which, again, is how things should be, I think. She built up flocks of her favourite Herdwick sheep, and there is a lovely photograph of her posing with a prized Herdwick and her head shepherd, Tom Storey, at a show. She employed farmhands and consulted experienced farmers but also did a lot of work herself. Another photograph shows her attending an agricultural show dressed in tweeds, with the ruddy glow of a weather-beaten farmer on her tanned face.Potter is chiefly remembered as the author of the Peter Rabbit books, but she was also a mycologist who made exquisite and accurate illustrations of fungi using microscopes. She even wrote a paper, “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae,” based on her observations and experiments, but could not submit it herself to the Linnean Society.Back then, in 1897, women were not allowed to present papers or even be members of that hallowed boys’ club. We do not know what happened to the paper, but the fact that it has not survived suggests that the naturalists at Linnean Society binned it. Potter’s work was way ahead of its time, with its focus on details like spore germination that were rarely studied then. Modern-day mycologists use her illustrations for identification and reference. Was Potter crestfallen at the lack of reaction to her paper? She probably did not have many expectations of men in any case, having spent most of her childhood and youth in closer proximity to dogs, birds, reptiles, and rabbits. Helen Antrobus, Assistant National Curator of the National Trust, writes in her blog: “In 1911, Beatrix Potter is recorded as an ‘authoress’. Ten years later, as Beatrix Heelis [she married William Heelis, a solicitor, in 1913], there is no mention of her earlier profession, only that of ‘farmer.’” For all we know, Potter might have been glad at the erasure of her authorial identity. To be a farmer is to be creative too.Not just Potter but many other writers, past and present, have not only dreamt of a pastoral life but have also actively sought it out and thrown themselves into it, embracing it with all its unanticipated inconveniences. A more recent example is Katharine Stewart, whose memoir, A Croft in the Hills, published in 1960, is a classic about moving to the Scottish Highlands, leaving the city behind.Disenchanted with urban life, the author, her husband, and their young daughter move to a small, rundown farm in the hills near Loch Ness. The narrative is brisk and no-nonsense: life on the farm is tough but rewarding. Once the family has tasted that life, there is no going back.“In the early afternoon we set off, with Helen perched on the sledge, in search of eggs from a neighbour, half a mile down the road. It was heavy going, but we returned home in triumph with all the eggs intact. The sky was a pure, deep blue, and there was a sparkling silence everywhere. Our little house looked more snug and secure than ever in its winter setting, and we felt the bonds that linked us to it grow perceptibly stronger.”Reading this made me weak at the knees with longing. Sadly, my croft in the hills is nowhere in the offing. Meanwhile, author Anuradha Roy has found hers—in Ranikhet, Uttarakhand.Roy has written about life in that remote place in novels and articles, each of which I have read in the hope of getting some tips. I felt her grief when she posted about her beloved pahadi dog being carried off by a leopard in the dead of night. This traumatic incident figures prominently in her beautiful, stirring memoir, Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya. It is reviewed with sympathy and feeling by Akhila Ramnarayan in the latest Frontline issue. Read it here.Also check out Rohini Mokashi Punekar’s review of the Booker-winning Flesh to realise how much-hyped novels can disappoint when you get to reading them.See you next Saturday. Till then,Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor, FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS