My family moved from Great Falls, Montana in the winter of 1994-95 and I do not recall much from my time there. I do not remember what our house looked like though I was there when the bush in the front of the house caught on fire during a Fourth of July mishap, and I remember the long and tall set of stairs that were there in front of what I believe was the front door, stairs that I fell down as a young child when my middle oldest sister Kathy left the child gate open and I do recall the large egg shaped bump on my head that was the result. But for the life of me, I can not remember the shape of the house nor the color nor what the roof was constructed of or if there was even a tree in our yard. This is due to how our minds work in the way of retaining certain important impressions or events rather than having a clear and concise recollection of everything from when we exit the womb to when I write or you read this piece. We cannot hang onto every single thing that has happened in our lives whether this is because our brain doesn't have the capacity to hold it all, like a hard drive in a computer where we must pick and choose what is most important and send the rest to the recycle bin in order to delete later, or that maybe we do have a subconscious memory of every single little thing that happened in our lives but we do not have the mental power needed to extract such ideas from within such as how many times we cut our finger nails when we were nine years old or how did one enjoy a non-fried bologna sandwich as a child when one is repulsed by the product itself as an adult. Of course, there are other explanations for such things as there is no important or necessary reason to keep mental track of how many times we have clipped our nails, and it is quite possible that the reason that we don't enjoy bologna nowadays is that we have found out what it is made of and how it is made itself.

The word memory has an exceptionally dense presence in our language as it encompasses so many different ideas. Memory could be the mental faculty of retaining events and impressions as discussed above, but it could also mean how this faculty is held by a single person as a personality trait such as that person having a good memory. Memory also dips its hand into the area of length of time as in the memory of living people and how we have memories of people in the past and will have memories of the people in the future. Memory is something that we recall from, such as discussing through your earliest memories, and memory will also be the reputation of a person whether there are influential, famous, or dead. But I also see something else in memory which is that through much of mine, especially from childhood or some distance away from who I am now, I tend to have what I would explain as a mystical view attached to these memories where in reality they were probably mundane and different in a grand manner than how I recall them. While I was in Great Falls, I remember my father taking my sister Kelley and myself to a hot dog stand often that was in town where I loved ordering a normal hot dog or two but always seeing the foot long hot dog on the menu or in someone's hands while they awkwardly would hold it up in order in attempt to eat it. They had toppings of all sorts, fountain drinks, and ice cream as well. This is all true and factual. However, where I remember this hot dog stand being, a memory so strong in my mind that I can even visualize this location, was on an interstate through the city that was long and winding. The hot dog stand stood on one of the winds right off the interstate where we would park in the pullout and walk right in. Now, this is how I remember it exactly. I can see the stand, which probably does not look like how I remember it at all, I can see the parking lot right directly off the interstate which does not exist, and I remember watching all the cars drive by at 70 miles per hour which also, most likely, did not happen. But why do I remember it this way? I do not have a single answer for that question. It's baffling. Another memory I have such as this was of a seagull migration that happened every year in Great Falls. My father would wake us in the morning and get us dressed, down the stairs (another thing that may not be true as I am not entirely sure I had to go down a set of stairs from my bedroom to get to the kitchen of the house we lived in), fed, and rushed out the door. Kelley and I would lay belly down on the ground and were covered with a bed sheet that we could peek our heads out, usually after we rolled over onto our backs, and we would watch as these birds flew over us. Now this probably happened. However, I remember there being so many seagulls in the air that even on a cloudless bright sunny day, the density of the birds would darken the environment enough that what was daytime appeared to be the middle of the night. This was something that most likely did not happen, but I also clearly remember being shit on by a bird for the first time in my life and looking into the mirror in the bathroom, next to two cacti that belong to my sister and me, and seeing the stiff but soft tight twirl of avian feces as it rested in my young blonde hair. Why I imagine falsehoods in my past memories is a mystery to me, as I am not blocking out terrible memories as I did not have many of those as a child, but it is quite possible that I like to make my older and boring memories that I hold dear more spellbinding. Whether this is from being raised by a mother who was a storyteller by trade or that I have an ego so strong that I believe that my childhood life was much more exciting than it actually was, I do not have a clear answer.

Karl Ove Knausgaard had a reading of his book Autumn in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 12, 2017, in which during the Q&A, he said, “Consciously, I don't remember very much. If I were to reconstruct my childhood from memory, it wouldn't be much. But the magic is that something happens when you are writing about the past. Something opens up and it's a matter of getting access to it...You do remember more and more and more if you write about it. I think it's the same in psychoanalysis. If you focus on it throughout the year, almost everything will come back...If you've done something you cannot live with, memory will make it so you can live with it.” Knausgaard makes a good point here that by the process of cracking open old memories, there are times that the person makes revisions of what they believe happened and what really happened. Writing about the past does allow me to tear open my old memories and slowly extract what I really remember from them. But what I remember from them might not entirely be the truth. And I do not think that there is anything wrong with that.