Micah Mattix moved his family from Switzerland (his wife’s home) back to the US in pursuit of his academic career. They now live in Houston. He wrote this last summer from Switzerland, where they were visiting:

About a week after we arrived, my oldest daughter asked me why we ever had wanted to leave such a beautiful place. I told her we hadn’t. “So why did you?” “Circumstances,” I told her. In 2005, I received a grant to do research at Yale. It was “an opportunity we couldn’t refuse,” to use an apt cliché. I resigned my assistantship at the University of Neuchâtel, we put our things in storage, packed up the kids and left, planning to be back at the end of the academic year. One year became two, two became three, and with no professional opportunities on the horizon in Switzerland, we ended up staying in the States. It just happened.

But, of course, it didn’t just happen. As is the case, I suppose, with many young people just starting out in life, profession trumped place in terms of importance—partly out of material necessity, partly out of a sense of calling, and partly, I’m afraid, out of male ambition—and so the result is that we are now living in Houston, Texas, not Morges, Switzerland. Our kids speak English much better than they speak French and understand themselves to be American, not Swiss, even though they possess both nationalities.

It’s not easy to visit a place that used to be home but is no longer—especially a place as beautiful as Switzerland. Within a day it’s as if you had never left, and you feel as if you should do everything you can to return. You question the decisions that led to moving away in the first place and wonder what life would have been like if you had chosen differently.

I have never really been to Switzerland, only traveled through the Alps on a train from Milan to Heidelberg, but I think it was without question the most beautiful landscape I’ve ever laid eyes on. In my imagination, heaven looks like Switzerland. I don’t know why.

Ever moved away from somewhere and regretted it?