Little Mima always loved to read, watch cartoons and films, and dream. She dreamed of the strange worlds she read about, and created worlds of her own. She wove reality together with fiction, stitched past and present, and daydreamed about the future. And in those daydreams, the most frequent magical object was always a music box.
She had read about them more than once — as relics of the past. Boxes that, upon opening and with the first notes, would awaken an indescribable nostalgia in their owners, all those feelings and memories and untold stories.
Perhaps the most perfect example of such a box is the small music box from the animated film Anastasia. The story of the lost princess of the Romanov family and the final recognition and reunion of grandmother and granddaughter — brought about through the melody of a tiny music box, in which an entire world had somehow found room: the whole story of a family, and even of a country.
So I decided even then: if I didn’t have such a music box — one whose music could awaken existing memories, known and unknown — I had to get at least a new one, with which I would start a tradition of my own and set the magic in motion.
Grandma and Grandpa, at our request, bought Ana and me one each for Christmas, so that we could keep our jewelry in them. As similar as these two boxes were, they were just as different — exactly like my sister and me. Each had its own charm. Mine, when wound up, played Mozart’s enchanting melody “Für Elise.” The melody of Ana’s box I never managed to identify among the known pieces of classical music — which doesn’t mean it wasn’t one. What particularly distinguished Ana’s box was a couple that danced while the music played. These small differences reflect the two of us perfectly to this day. Her life is dance — she loves it, it’s part of who she is. And me… music itself has always mattered more to me.
I could sit beside my box for hours, winding it up over and over, and with my eyes closed invent stories about it. How old was it? Who had it belonged to? What had been kept inside it? From whom had the previous owner received it? And on and on. Always a new story, always new characters — never entirely real, because the box was brand new, but close enough, because they had to be part of a family. That was all that mattered.
Those boxes stayed behind in my childhood home, in the country where I was born and grew up.
I moved away, got married, and had Sofia. My grandmother left Serbia for the first time when she heard that I was pregnant. Although on the verge of her 80th year, she got a passport for the very first time and set out on a long journey — without a moment’s hesitation or doubt.
She came a second time a few months after Sofia was born. And several more times after that. But the moment she first laid eyes on Sofia was special in so many ways.
On one of those visits, during a walk, all three of us stepped into a nearby shop at Grandma’s request — one of those places that sells all kinds of things, from household necessities to the most pointless trinkets that no one will ever really need, yet someone will always buy. On one of the shelves stood snow globes. I had never owned one, though I had always wanted one. I had never told my grandmother that — but she always somehow knew how to grant my wishes before I had even put them into words.
She chose one of the globes on offer, inside which sat a beautiful angel, and said: “I’d like to buy this for Sofia, so that she will always remember her grandma Bia.” I didn’t object.
Although far too small to hold it herself, Sofia was captivated from the very first day — first by the music the globe played when wound up, and then by the magic of the trapped snow that never stopped falling over the little angel with folded hands.
That globe sits in our living room. Sofia is big now and can pick it up and wind it herself — which she does, and often.
For the past week, whenever she talks to her grandfather — my dad — and the conversation nears its end, she asks him to wind up his music boxes. At the same time, she winds up her snow globe and sits beside the phone, listening to that cacophony of different yet so similar sounds, without blinking once.
In her gaze I recognize little Mima from many years ago, who dreamed so vividly of something exactly like this. And the grown-up Mima always finds a few tears in her eyes that she tries to hide.
Magical boxes and music that tells a family’s story. Feelings, distance, loss.
If I never had an inherited music box with a story behind it, my daughter now has two. One her great-grandmother bought for her mother — waiting for her in a house far away. The other belonging only to her, always right in front of her eyes.
Great-grandma Bia is no longer with us.
But the music is — bringing her back with every single note to exactly where she was until not so long ago.
And as long as that music plays and those boxes exist, Sofia will have her own small, nostalgic story about a wonderful person who loved her beyond words — even before she had come into this world. She will have an angel watching over her, and memories that won’t fade. Not as long as we’re here.
And so, at thirty, I too received my own story about family and legacy — a legacy that passes quietly, in small things, from one generation to the next. Now my box holds so much more value than it ever did before. Now its sounds unleash a flood of mixed emotions and streams of tears down my cheeks — from grief that she is gone, and from gratitude that she was ever here.
Thank you, Grandma.
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