Heidi comforts her grandmother by reading hymns

Heidi comforts Peter’s Grandmother by reading to her, making the literacy she has gained in Frankfurt a source of companionship and hope. The reading begins as a response to an old woman’s loneliness and bodily hardship, but grows into an ongoing practice: Heidi recalls the grandmother’s favorite hymns, reads them aloud, and then teaches Peter so that he can take her place during her absences. The act joins faith to ordinary care, while the contrast between Heidi’s clear, expressive reading and Peter’s reluctant, incomplete recitation shows how comfort depends not only on words but on the way they are offered.

From pictures to reading

In Frankfurt, Frau Sesemann first notices that Heidi’s supposed inability to learn does not match the child before her. When Heidi is shown illustrated books, she responds with wonder; a picture of a shepherd and his flock in a sunlit pasture suddenly makes her cry. The image connects her to the mountain life from which she has been separated, but Frau Sesemann offers more than sympathy: she promises to tell Heidi the tale associated with the picture and introduces her to stories she can read and retell. The grandmother’s attention thus becomes the beginning of Heidi’s education, and reading will later allow Heidi to offer another grandmother the same kind of attentive presence.

The picture book’s most compelling story for Heidi is the prodigal son’s return. Its three images distinguish the son’s happiness at home, his degradation far from it, and his father’s welcome when he returns repentant. Heidi reads the tale repeatedly, aloud and to herself, and listens as Frau Sesemann explains it to her and Clara Sesemann. The story gives her a narrative of departure, hardship, and return; when Heidi later reads it to Alm-Uncle, she pauses before the father’s response and asks what he thinks will happen. For Heidi, the answer is not condemnation but welcome. Her reading therefore carries an understanding of return and reconciliation that she brings into her life on the mountain.

A hymn gives comfort

Back at home, Heidi recognizes a concrete way to help Peter’s Grandmother. She announces that she has money and wants to buy the old woman a fresh white roll every day, with two on Sunday, and imagines that better nourishment may help her grow strong. She also wonders whether weakness is why everything seems dark to her. When she notices the grandmother’s old songbook, Heidi offers another kind of aid: she can now read and can read one of the hymns aloud.

Heidi climbs onto a chair to take down the book, which has gathered dust from lying untouched on the shelf. After wiping it, she sits beside Peter’s Grandmother and asks which hymn she should choose. The grandmother leaves the choice to her, pushing aside her spinning wheel to listen. Heidi selects a hymn about the sun and reads, growing warmer in expression as she proceeds. Its closing assurance, “I wait in peace—God's time is best,” gives the old woman words of patience and trust. Peter’s Grandmother sits with folded hands and tears on her cheeks, but her face shows joy; she asks Heidi to read it again. The reading changes the room’s emotional register: the grandmother calls the words a comfort that brings light to the heart, and Heidi sees that her face, usually marked by trouble, now seems peaceful and joyful.

The comfort is not confined to that first reading. When Heidi visits again, Peter’s Grandmother is ill with a cold and has had to remain in bed. Heidi finds her on a poorly covered bed, wrapped in a warm grey shawl. The grandmother is grateful for the bread Heidi has helped make available, the wrap, and Heidi’s visits, but her pillow is thin and flat from years of use. She explains that higher pillows keep her warm and make breathing easier, a detail that makes clear how material discomfort persists alongside the solace Heidi brings.

At the grandmother’s request, Heidi fetches the hymnbook and chooses familiar favorites, which she now knows by heart. As she reads, the old woman lies with folded hands and a peaceful smile. Heidi pauses to ask whether she is feeling better; Peter’s Grandmother says she has improved while listening and asks Heidi to finish. Afterward, the grandmother repeats the words to herself, while Heidi remembers the sunny day of her own return and says she knows what it is like to go home. The grandmother does not answer, but remains contented. She explains that lying alone day after day in silence and darkness brings sadness she sometimes feels unable to bear; hearing Heidi read makes her heart rejoice again. The reading cannot remove her blindness or keep her from being confined to bed, but it interrupts her isolation and gives her a renewed sense of comfort.

Extending the care through Peter

Heidi’s visits are not always possible. After an evening with Peter’s Grandmother, she worries that it may be a week or even two before she can return. She thinks that reading every day might keep making the old woman better, then resolves to find a way for her to hear the words she loves in Heidi’s absence. The next day Peter arrives punctually at school and, after lessons, goes to Alm-Uncle’s to see Heidi. She proposes that he learn to read so he can read hymns to his grandmother.

Peter initially refuses, but Heidi insists that he can learn and tells him she will teach him. She frames the lessons around the grandmother’s need: he must learn so that he can read one or two hymns to her each day. Her resolve turns reading from a private accomplishment into a shared responsibility. As the weather keeps Heidi from visiting for nearly three weeks, she presses on with the teaching so Peter can make up for her absence. Peter eventually announces at home that he can read, and his teacher verifies his new skill. The effort has extended Heidi’s care beyond the days she can spend beside the old woman.

Peter’s reading, however, does not reproduce Heidi’s. He reads one hymn each evening, but refuses to read a second. When he encounters a word he considers too long or difficult, he leaves it out, so that important words disappear and Peter’s Grandmother loses the sense of what she hears. Brigitta is pleased that her son has learned, while the grandmother looks forward to Heidi’s return, explaining that the hymns do not reach her heart in the same way when Peter reads them. This difference does not undo the value of Peter’s literacy, but it makes the scene’s emphasis precise: the words matter, and so do attention, completeness, and the reader’s manner.

Reassurance in a recurring practice

The grandmother’s need for comfort returns when Heidi’s possible departure troubles her. She fears that people from Frankfurt may take the child away and tries to hide her distress. Rather than ask for reassurance directly, she asks Heidi to read the hymn beginning “All things will work for good.” Heidi finds it at once and reads in her clear young voice. The request shows how thoroughly reading has become part of their relationship: a remembered hymn is now a means of steadying the grandmother when worry threatens to overwhelm her.

Across these visits, reading links distinct forms of care. Heidi brings food, notices the grandmother’s discomfort, returns when she can, and offers words that answer loneliness with companionship and distress with religious hope. The songbook is an old, dusty object, but in Heidi’s hands it becomes useful again; the hymns are not merely recited but heard, remembered, and applied to present fears. Teaching Peter extends that usefulness, even as his omissions expose the limits of a lesson learned without the same attentiveness. Heidi’s reading cannot change the grandmother’s blindness or hardship, yet it gives her a recurring experience of being accompanied, and makes literacy an act of practical tenderness rather than an abstract achievement.