When I think of my grandmother, I think of love and labour, tenderness and toughness woven into one. She did not merely feel love - she gave it form. She stitched, kneaded, stirred and scrubbed it into every task tirelessly and doggedly, like she was trying to lay love down in reserves, to sustain us through the winter.
Until I grew too tall, she would sit on the floor, legs outstretched, my small body balanced on her shins, my head resting against her toes as if they were a headboard. She rocked me to sleep in that posture, singing, while her hands remained busy. They’d knit, they ground coffee, they shelled peas, they cut pumpkins into neat little cubes for borek. She thus embodied the fusion between women’s work and love. But far from being invisible, her labour and her love were palpable to me.
She was celebrated in our town for her jam, produced with a technical exacting mastery that would have made her Instagram famous today. As a child, I followed her into fields to gather rosehips or berries, her watchful eye protecting my fingers from thorns like she protected my heart from grief from the moment I was born. At home, she washed, sorted, and poured everything into the vast copper pot, the size of a kiddie pool, which she had once bargained from an army sergeant. Then she stirred, and stirred, and stirred. Witchy alchemy poured into rows of gleaming jars—enough magical sweetness to share with a whole street.
But her truest act of love for me was forged in terror. When we fled Sarajevo, I left behind my toy rabbit, Tim. My grandparents were not able to escape the occupied city. For two months, once we reached the relative safety of Slovenia, my mother tried in vain to reach her. And when at last my grandmother heard of this loss, she was indignant—not because she thought a toy mattered more than survival, but because she understood that love dwells in the smallest attachments. When she was done scolding my mum for forgetting my toy, and ignoring all warnings, she walked through shelling and sniper fire, elbowed her way past checkpoints and soldiers (some of whom also received a scolding for their rudeness in trying to hold her back), and reached the ruins of our home. There, she dug in the rubble until she found him. Weeks later, he arrived to me in a Red Cross box, the shrapnel holes in his body patched with bits of yellow tea-towel, transformed into a symbol of her ferocity and tenderness.
My grandmother lived with a quiet heroism: resourceful hands, a will sharpened by necessity, and a heart that never stopped giving. She showed me that love is not an abstraction, not merely spoken—it is practiced, it is risked, it is borne out in sacrifice and presence. From her, I learned that love is like jam: not easy to create in its true form, nourishing and sweet, and a quiet labour that sustains and transforms.
