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“I have little contact with Swiss people here. But every day I am reading the Tages Anzeiger and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung online. Both Fred and Hester are proud of their Swiss heritage. Both are American citizens but speak Swiss dialect. Fred studied at the University in Basel and is active in Swiss-American events; and he is good at Jass, a Swiss card game that my father taught them. Probably it is the first years of life and one’s mother tongue that shape our sense of ‘home’. Everything else is just sauce for the roast.”

Ellen says that she still can delve into each layer of her life; “I have only given you excerpts. I took life as it presented itself; I lived according to the Greek expression panta rhei – to let one self be carried along. This requires no courage. The process, the development, was always more interesting and more satisfying to me than the end result.

“I was mother, wife, teacher, therapist and handicraft artist. And with this versatility I was probably little suited for a professional career. Even today I take each day as it comes. This is wonderful. And actually it is even more interesting today than in earlier times. Looking back I see how everything fits together. Is this wisdom? I have no idea! This is the time for me to look back, time too, to check out the apples in the basket and to throw out the rotten ones.”