COLUMN: Trip down memory lane takes a detour

My mother-in-law has been visiting for a few days, so the dinner-table conversation invariably has been dominated by reminiscing about my husband Tim’s childhood days.

He grew up with seven other rambunctious siblings, so the stories more often than not include the times when one of them got hurt or got into trouble. Tim, as it has been well-documented, was an accident-prone young lad. While he was chasing a squirrel one time, he fell through some glass windows that were somehow part of a makeshift greenhouse. Then there was the time he caught a toy tomahawk in the eye, nearly blinding him.

All of these earlier mishaps were merely precursors to a lifetime of other accidents. He nearly permanently lost the use of one arm when he slashed open his forearm while boning out an elk. He broke bones in his hand in a motorcycle accident and had a wrist splayed by a roll of barbed wire. The guy is more or less held together by scar tissue at this point.

Those Hintze kids were always scrapping and getting hurt. His youngest sister (who also recently visited) got the wind knocked out of her to the point where they thought she was dead. Trips to the ER were many.

All of this reminiscing got me wondering about what our daughters remember best about their childhood, so I texted each of them and told them to give me their three best childhood memories.

My younger daughter, the more mild-mannered of the two, sent back wonderful recollections of four-wheeling with her Grandpa Gus in Minnesota. She remembered a special coin game at the Northwest Montana Fair that we would always play together. And swimming in a deep bend of the Stillwater River west of Whitefish was another of her favorite memories.

My older daughter, on the other hand — the daughter I always say was “a handful from Day One” — chose to regale me with the details of one particular accident in the hayloft of my parents’ barn that I had never heard about before.

Apparently Grandpa Gus let her ride a hay bale up the conveyor belt and into the hayloft, where it was dropped onto a pile of other bales. During the process she slid off the bale but hung on until she was rescued. Good thing, because the only other option was plunging about 20 feet to certain injury.

They made a pact: “Don’t tell your mother.”

My rascally firstborn also remembered climbing through a hole in an old barn at our hobby farm in Eastern Montana, and then sitting on the roof unsupervised. She apparently helped her younger sister onto the barn roof, too.

“It was the ’80s and there were no [safety] rules,” she insisted. I’ll admit I let my kids play unattended at times, but I never knew about this barn incident, either. And this makes me wonder what else I don’t know about.

One of her favorite memories is also one of mine. At our little farm near Sidney we’d watch thunderstorms roll in from the west as we sat on the front porch, smelling the dust mixed with rain until the storm ushered us inside. She also remembered a trip to the Silverwood amusement park on a rainy day, when she and her other friends sang “Rain, Rain, Go Away...” for a solid hour or more.

It was misery for me, but a fond memory for her.

That’s the thing about memories; good or bad they’re so specific to us individually. Our past is a big part of each of us. I guess that’s why it’s so much fun to “remember when.”

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.