A Mother's Swiss Summer, Revisited Decades Later
While I was curling my mother’s hair one evening in 2018, a documentary sparked a memory. She mentioned, almost casually, that she’d spent a summer in Switzerland after her freshman year at Southern University. I was stunned. How did a young Black woman from segregated Louisiana in the 1960s manage that? Through a program called The Experiment in International Living, she explained. With help from a professor, donations, and a student car wash, she raised $1,500 and went at nineteen. The trip, she said, changed everything. She hadn’t returned since. Right then, I promised we’d go back together.
We finally landed in Geneva last September. Over a week, with Swiss Travel Passes in hand, we journeyed by train from Geneva toward Zurich, mixing stops from her past with new ones. The trip had gained a new weight; my father had passed away after years with dementia. I felt a sharp need to hold onto my mother’s stories.
In a taxi from the airport, chatting with our driver Alberto, the first hidden story emerged. Mom recalled walking by Lake Lugano in 1964, gazing at the Alps, and realizing with sudden clarity that she didn’t want to marry her hometown boyfriend waiting back in Louisiana. ‘The world is mine to explore,’ she remembered thinking. That decision altered her path entirely, leading her later to my father. My own life, I realized, hinged on that moment of clarity beside a Swiss lake.
We toured the UN in Geneva, dined at the city’s oldest restaurant, and celebrated her birthday with a spa treatment. On trains, the scenery of green hills and glassy lakes unspooled like the pages of her old, crumbling photo album—her sole physical remnant of that summer after her journal was lost in a fire. I watched her fill a new notebook, determined to keep the memories this time.
In Interlaken, she marveled like a child at the flowers. In Zurich, we savored chocolate. But the emotional peak was St. Gallen, where she’d lived with a host family. Hearing the church bells again, she squealed with recognition. We toured the historic abbey library and cathedral, places she’d visited six decades prior. That evening, under a pastel sunset, she spontaneously twirled in a square, singing. I asked what returning meant. She smiled. ‘The greatest joy has been to share this part of my life with you,’ she said. ‘To let you, through my 19-year-old eyes, see what changed me.’
This journey was more than a vacation. It was an introduction to the young woman whose courageous choice to see the world first made my own world possible.