“Why didn’t you ever tell me that? “, I shrieked. „Well, you never asked“, she replied. I am unsure whether the spec of reprimand and remorse came from her or if I poured this tint into her answer, but the smile she pronounced it with hinted that she had been waiting for this moment. My grandmother has been a world to me. I loved both my grandparents with all my heart, but truly realized it a couple of decades later. My growing up with them was consumed with academic excellence to make them proud, cave explorations as a token of my defiance against their world of order and safety and the thirst to try even the things „unbecoming to girls“ spurred by their unuttered and covert support. We all cherished our city of Valjevo, Serbia. In their early twenties unpromising rural life drove them here in search of their future. My brother and I were born here. Our childhood with a devoted housewife and an industrial bread-winner charted our life maps. In the milieu of shared experiences different ones imprinted our memories. My brother treasures the days our grandfather sleigh-pulling us through the snow-clad city. I would sit behind my baby brother clinging on his shoulders, cheeks a furnace of excitement that melted the snowflakes falling from plane trees lining our city center street. The smile under the brim of our grandpa’s hat, as he turned to check on us, beamed the same kind of exhilaration boiling under the blood-red and dark navy-blue coats we wore. Sometimes the three of us sang together, having the silent streets for ourselves. Our grandmother allowed me to help her make cookies. Her oily hands gently pressed the dough flowing through her fingers. I would sit there in a small old-fashioned but meticulously managed kitchen in a workers’ block apartment waiting for the dough to rise. Dreaming over the city blanketed in late afternoon light from the sixth floor kitchen window was a privilege of a few living on top city floors. The valley opened seemingly endlessly towards Belgrade, but I felt protected by the mountain range half-circling the city behind our backs. Our small family with values rooted in communism was proud of the construction marvel of the second largest Orthodox temple in the Balkans. The newly-built white addition to our view to the right lay comfortably on the confluence of the rivers cutting through the city. I knew that she knew how my sneaking in an extra spoon of jam into the dough would irritate her. She threatened through her high-pitched voice to hit me on the hind, but I would laugh and she would laugh and then she never did. With a sigh, her gaze then drifted through the window towards the hilly neighborhood on the left where they lived when their children were but toddlers. I hoped she was happy, but there was an earlier life inside her, distant and ever elusive. “Why didn’t you ever tell me”? “Well, you never asked”. She filled a short silence with fingering on the blue-grey wool she was knitting. “Each Labor Day I walked down the hill…” “The entire street?”, I budged in. “It wasn’t really a street back then. But, yes that way. And I walked to the to the cattle market to buy...“. „A cattle market?!“ „Yes, it was in the park you sit in every night. And then...“. „You WALKED all the way there?!“. I learned to listen some time later. „And back with an entire goose and a sack of potatoes. Then your mum and uncle ran down that hill to help me carry things“, she said with a lulling simplicity of the days gone by. „All the kids did. Women walked together, chatting to pass the time“. „I was in charge of the decorations, music and firecrackers“. It was my grandfather’s turn. „I would bring a little extra charge from work...“and chuckled like a school-boy. This was before her dementia hid the stories and before “I’m at grandpa’s” started to translate into going to the cemetery. I should have known better to perceive the layers of realities. Fortunately, the magic words unraveling the whole new world in my old place came in time. Seated together on the couch we would let the dusk turn into street lights. “Tell me about that time when…”.