My brother and I were talking the other night about our childhoods. He told me that he couldn’t really remember any good times. That made me really sad. I reminded him of some of the things we did as kids in Montana.

There was one summer that the UofM was offering a program called NYSP (I can’t remember what it stands for) and we got to go on scholarships. We rode a bus for an hour to get to this program that lasted all day for a few weeks in the summer. We got to learn new sports that summer. I learned how to play rugby. I loved it. I also got to swim a lot which was a complete joy for me. My brother played racquetball with a partner and they won the tournament.

I reminded him about riding our bikes all over the town during the summers. “Remember going up to the river and swimming?” I asked him. We mused, reminisced…the streakers (it was the 70s) jumping off the bridge, afraid to ride our bikes down the huge hill at the base of the mountain because it was so high but willing to sit on a skateboard to ride down that hill. laughing

We reminded ourselves of the rope swing all of us kids in the neighborhood had fashioned over the ditch so we could swing over the water and, maybe, if we were lucky, fall in it on a hot summer’s day. We would catch crawdads in that same ditch water and play with them (kids are weird, aren’t they???)

I reminded him of the horse rides, the little Honda 70 trail bike, the basketball playing in the ash that had fallen from Mount St. Helens. We had to wear facemasks to go outside but there we were, playing in the ash. We collected that ash because we were entrepreneurs and wanted to sell it. We made solar ovens to cook cookies, solar viewers to watch the eclipses that seemed to occur all of the time there, and performed ice-skating and theatrical shows for anyone who would watch. We drove tractors and jeeps when we were 9 and 10.

We hated one another back then. We fought like cats and dogs. We did whatever we could to get under one another’s skin or to make life miserable for one another. We both have physical scars from the abuse we piled on one another.

Something happened along the way and we became great friends. That’s why it’s easy for me to remind him there were good times among the hardships. We were the poorest kids in our classes. We worked hard for everything we got. We built bikes out of scraps that other kids threw away. We took hand-me-downs from other families around the neighborhoods. We lived out of cars, in businesses, and took baths in cleaned out garbage cans. But these are the stuff that stories are made of and we came out ok in the end. We knew we were loved.

I reminded him of the days that I had to make dinner because mom & dad were trying to make their business work and they had to be down at the shop. “Remember the pancakes that were, in all actuality, frisbees?” He laughed.

I love that laugh.