I remember…The Journey of a Travel Writer…

I remember…

1970, the San Francisco Sunday paper, fat and full of magic, sitting on the doorstep. It would provide precious, stolen moments from my life as the young mother of a toddler. I’d have one eye on her, as I opened the paper and dove into its contents.

I always went to the Travel section first, devouring the photos and stories of faraway places that lived in my imagination. I still remember fragments of an essay, by a writer named Judith Morgan, to this day.

Morgan described the sensory details of a journey driving through Switzerland. There was some delectable Swiss chocolate, the lush countryside passing by, and something about a border check–this was way before the European Union.

“Wow, what a life, to be able to have such powerful experiences and to write about them. And then so many people, like me, read about them and experience them through those words on a newspaper page. Pure magic,” I thought.

Each Sunday, I would search for her essays and savor them and sigh. Her life was so far from my reality. But those essays planted a seed that stayed within me, waiting for the right moment to grow and blossom.

A few years later, when I returned to college, I discovered a love of writing, the heady experience of expressing my thoughts through words. Words that were, at that point, typed on a typewriter, using ‘easy erase paper’ and two carbons. But after graduation, writing went underground in my life, where it remained for several decades.

The fall of 1993, I stood on a cliff in Normandy, there to retrace my father’s footsteps, to write about his place in history during the Normandy Invasion of World War II. The essay that I wrote about that experience appeared in many newspapers for the 50th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1994. It became the first of many travel essays I would write, which led to two travel memoirs, related to my love of and connection to France.

In 1994, when I returned to France to accept a medal in my father’s honor at the 50th anniversary of D-Day, I found Dad’s French orphan, Gilbert, who he tried to adopt during World War II. Gilbert became my French brother, just 50 years after originally planned.

I am about to fly to Europe again for a writer’s conference. I will visit Gilbert’s widow in France this trip, which I always do. For 25 years now, we have remained close and there are four generations in France who know the touching story about my father and Gilbert.

When I look back now, I feel grateful for Judith Morgan, for the power of her vivid words and for the longing that they stirred in me. And for the grace that travel writing is, now, my profession.

Ironically, I will be going to Switzerland for the writer’s conference. I will think of Judith Morgan as I enjoy some delectable Swiss chocolate and the lush countryside passing by the train’s window.

I have learned that, as a writer, we never know how our words might touch and move someone. That thought alone, along with a passion for writing that I can’t explain, inspires me to keep putting words on paper, and into my laptop.

©Diane Covington-Carter 2022