HARVEST OF MEMORIES

My wife, Tina, and I live just a stone's throw from Yavapai Community College, where a beautiful vineyard stretches along the hillside. On our morning walks, we pass the wine-tasting center, catching a whiff of Arizona wines escaping through its open doors. As summer turns, we watch the grapes ripen, shifting from green to purple under the early morning light. The vineyard breathes and grows with the season, its vines stretching toward the sun, roots gripping the dry Arizona soil.

When harvest time arrives, volunteers gather in the rows, their laughter and chatter rising with the sound of pruning shears snipping through the heavy vines. The ripe grapes burst easily between fingers, leaving a sticky, sweet residue that draws bees and tiny ants from the earth below. Buckets fill quickly. Soon, these grapes will be carted away, crushed, and transformed into wine—bottled proof of another season passed.

This year, Tina and I decided to volunteer at the college vineyard for the first time, picking grapes on a pleasant Saturday morning. We wore long sleeves and pants to fend off the bees that buzzed greedily around the clusters. Our neighbor, who was coordinating the event, stood behind a folding table, her face lit by the rising sun. She handed out gloves and pruning shears, instructing us on how to cut the grape bunches from the vine and drop them into the buckets. She pointed us toward a row heavy with dark grapes.

"Good luck!" she called as we walked off, buckets swinging in our hands.

We found our spot and exchanged quick hellos with our fellow pickers. Most were older, moving slowly but steadily down the rows, their movements steady as if they had done this for years. Tina and I crouched among the vines, and I fell into the rhythm—the snip of the shears, and the plunk of grapes into the bucket.

An older man, tall and lean, worked near us, his hands moving deftly with the shears. He glanced up. "I catch a bit of an accent," he said, tilting his head slightly. "Where are you from?"

"Yugoslavia," I replied, watching his face.

His smile faded just a little. "I was there in the '90s. Military." His shears kept moving, but his expression tightened. "Right around the time, things started falling apart."

He paused, glancing down the row of vines, then back at me. His eyes had the look of someone sifting through old memories. "Went back to Europe a while ago," he said, his voice softer now. "Germany, for Oktoberfest, with my daughter. Ran into some guys there—one was Serb, the other Croat." He shook his head slowly. "They seemed friendly enough... but I've seen things. I told my daughter we should keep moving. You never know when... well, you know."

I turned back to the vines. Each cut with the shears felt more deliberate, more precise. I focused on the grapes and their dark skins, but his words lingered like a shadow —another reminder of how my homeland existed in fragments for so many people.

A younger woman appeared beside me, cheeks flushed from the work. She had an easy, confident stride and gave a quick smile. "Hey, I’m Anna," she said, her voice brisk. "Retired military." She’d been listening. "Bosnia, during the war. My job was to draw up invasion plans for American troops. Just plans, though. Never went anywhere."

She snipped a cluster of grapes, her movements sharp and practiced, as if she were still on a mission. "Spent months on those plans," she went on, eyes narrowing slightly under her cap. "Handed them over to my commander, and they just sat in his drawer. Never saw the light of day." Her voice carried a note of bitterness, like something that had curdled inside her over time.

As she moved away, I was left alone with my thoughts, the steady snip-snip of the shears and the murmur of voices blending into a kind of hum. I looked around at the others—most of these people knew my country only through the lens of war and conflict. But to me, it was something else.

As I plucked a cluster of sun-warmed grapes from the vine, a forgotten piece of me surfaced, something buried beneath years of distance and loss—a time when Yugoslavia wasn't just a name on the map. I could almost feel the pulse of my homeland as it once was, a place where East met West like old friends at a market, where our dark red passport was a magic key, flipping open doors from Cairo to Stockholm. I could see myself again, a teenager under the Adriatic sun, thumb outstretched to catch a ride, the wind off the sea in my hair, the air alive with pine and brine. I’d hop in with strangers who spoke foreign languages—all flocking to our sandy beaches to dive into waters so clear you could see the flick of a fish's tail ten feet down. “Brotherhood and Unity,” we’d chant in schoolyards and city squares, believing it was more than a motto, feeling its rhythm of possibility in our bones, the idea that all of us could share this land like neighbors passing bread at the table. Peaceful coexistence of all nations with the right to self-determination was its official foreign policy.

All that shattered in the '90s. I had watched from afar, here in the United States, as my new country imposed an economic blockade on my old one. I watched as the bombs fell on Belgrade, where my family lived, and on Pančevo, where I had once walked the streets. The life I knew, the country I loved, broke apart like glass, each piece reflecting a different story, a different reality. The news had been full of images—cities on fire, refugees fleeing, families torn apart.

I remember a letter I received from a friend who stayed behind, whose words still echo in me. His words came back to me now, each line like a knife cutting deep:

"Sometimes I think that death is not the most tragic event in war but understanding that there is no way out from the hell of war, even when we stop killing each other and shooting at each other. These shootings have opened our wounds forever and contaminated them with hate and evil. With bombs, we destroyed friendships, empathy, concerns, and good intentions. We destroyed children's plays and, in their minds, imprinted pictures of horror, hopelessness, and the question, why all this? Many people succumbed to the most morbid and aggressive forces in themselves so abruptly that I found myself perplexed by the fact that we are so wild and incapable of following the path of civilization. Many villages and towns don't exist anymore. There is only smoke in the remnants of churches, hospitals, and houses. Schools and factories are closed, bookstores and grocery stores are empty. We don't only kill each other; we kill our history and culture, our right for a future that is reserved for those who freed themselves from the past and who understood the role of eternal cosmic harmony. From this sin and madness, we will never recover."

His letter, with its raw truth and despair, was like a mirror reflecting the ruins of Yugoslavia within me. I looked down at the grapes in my hands, their dark skins cool and smooth, and realized that I’d been holding the same bunch for too long. I snipped them free, letting them fall into the bucket with a soft thud. The weight of them felt like something real, something I could hold onto.

I glanced around and saw everyone’s buckets filling up. Soon, these grapes would be crushed, their skins torn apart, their juices mixed and fermented into something new. I wondered if memories were like that, too—if they needed to be broken down and remade, their bitterness softened, their sweetness drawn out over time.

I took a deep breath and moved to the next bunch, my hands steady now. The vineyard stretched on around me, the vines heavy with fruit, the earth warm underfoot. And as I cut each cluster free, I thought of my homeland as it once was and might still be, somewhere beneath the rubble and scars—a place worth holding onto, one grape at a time.