Reclaiming memories

In my first book Pocket Girdles (www.mariannelove.com), I included a chapter called " Sunday Gambles." It chronicles two generations worth of Sunday excursions for our family. Most of the story emphasizes hair-raising experiences on the primitive back roads in Montana with which we got acquainted when my dad would turn off the beaten path looking for adventure.

We often found more than enough adventures, and the trip usually turned out to be a gamble because some of those cow paths he chose were so bad we didn't know if we'd make it back to civilization. My mother held her breath a lot; in one case, that was important because the day we drove down the power-line path near Trout Creek, she was nine months pregnant with Laurie.

Such memories are dear to us older family members who now have chalked up at least half a century's separation from those days of our youth. Where DOES the time go? Whenever we piled into our brown and cream-colored '58 Ford ranchwagon (I always got stuck in the middle on the hump), Mother brought along a box of bacon thins to sustain our ever-present hunger pangs. My dad, Harold, also brought his binoculars. And, to keep us kids entertained, he introduced us early on to the game called "Count the Deer."

To this day, we still count the plentiful deer alongside HWY 200 from the Montana border to Missoula. Sadly, we now seem to count more and more lifeless corpses alongside the road. Apparently, these unfortunate beasts lacked the athletic skills to bound from one side of the road to the other other quickly enough to avoid bouncing off the front of a car hood speeding down the highway.

Today, my mother, my new pup Kiwi and I will once again point our SUV toward Montana. We were planning to stop in Paradise to visit with our old family friend Ken Best, but he's recovering from the flu. So, instead, we'll go to Ravalli and then on to Frenchtown where my brother Kevin and his wife Joyce live on a small farm. Kevin just returned yesterday afternoon from a caribou/grizzly hunt in Alaska. He and his son Scott both bagged caribou, while his daughter-in-law JJ brought home a giant grizzly.

Kevin promises a big stack of phenomenal photos from their Alaskan experience. We'll visit with them for a couple of hours and then head back home via the St. Regis cutover to HWY 200 just east of Paradise.

This will be a bittersweet drive for Mother who still tears up when she crosses the Montana state line. The memories of all those hundreds of hours spent with Harold in the car are still pretty raw. In reclaiming a part of the nostalgia and the spirit of her beloved soulmate, she wants to stop in Ravalli and buy a huckleberry milkshake, like they did on one of their last day trips to Montana.

It promises to be a beautiful day for our outing, and I feel confident that the mix of nostalgia, deer counting and good visiting will surely make it another cherished memory to reclaim some day.