I was looking at an old picture not too long ago and it was like having a time machine. The picture was of me in cowboy get-up. At the sake of dating myself, I loved the old westerns on TV: Rifleman, Wagon Train, Maverick, Death Valley Days, Zorro, the ones in black and white, during what some call the Golden Age of Television. There I am in the picture, my best sheriff pose, gazing into the camera on Christmas morning. This was in Alaska; Ft. Richardson, to be exact.

My father served 30 years in the Army, so my childhood was spent in many different places. Alaska was my favorite, even though I was young enough that I don’t remember a lot of it. The pictures help, but can’t pull everything back from sixty years ago.

I remember playing outside in huge mounds of snow. Our only restriction was that we couldn’t play in the snow near the road. The snow plows did a very good job of breaking up the snow and blowing it elsewhere. Being injured by one of those huge machines was a very real possibility.

Then there were the moose alerts. They were also of concern to our mothers. In the summers moose stayed deep in the wooded areas, but in the winter, they wandered through the base. Moose have nasty dispositions. So if the moose siren went off, we all dashed back home.

There was snow cream in the winter, which in our case meant using the snow in place of ice to harden the homemade ice cream mix. My mother made divine ice cream and my older brother, Bob, brought buckets full of snow down to the basement where the ice cream bucket sat. I was probably not a very good ice cream cranker. Back in those days it was kid-power, not electricity that ran the ice cream freezer. My brother probably would rightly say he did most of the work.

The nights were much longer in the winter, but the veggies were much bigger in the summer. That was a result of living in the Matanuska Valley, near the warmer ocean currents, and having lots of sunshine during those few summer months. Mother planted snapdragons in the flower bed in front of our quarters in late spring, and by the end of summer, she picked the flowers from a bedroom window on the second floor.

Most Army posts had PX’s (where you bought non-food items), commissaries (where you got your food), and hobby centers. My mother spent a lot of time in the post ceramic shop—I still have the amazing Alaska glasses she made. Later, she and I worked on ceramics together.

I remember the incredible seafood. There were the times Dad brought home King Crabs in grocery bags costing no more than $3.00. My parents canned salmon from the yearly salmon runs. When he was fifteen, Bob camped and fished at the Russian River with a group of friends. Each day’s quota came home on the train and my dad picked them up at the station in Anchorage. We moved from Alaska in 1960; the last can was opened in 1968. By that time I don’t think I could have handled one more salmon patty!

We had a cocker spaniel and a Siamese cat. I don’t think either one of them liked me much in the early days when I was a preschooler. The cat would nap out of reach on the pipes that delivered heated water to the radiators above the basement floor. The dog could only resort to growling a warning when I pulled his ears.

I saw glaciers, I camped, fished, skated, played with sled dogs, and I even got to ride on a dog sled. I started school in Alaska, had my tonsils taken out there, endured chicken pox. It was glorious. While I don’t remember as much as I’d like to of our stay in Alaska, I remember enough.

What are your childhood memories? Have you written them down or told them to your kids or grandchildren? If you haven’t, you should.

Susan Kite, a member of the Author’s Guild of Tennessee, is the author of five young adult books, and has stories in two anthologies. https://www.amazon.com/default/e/B00J91G0ZU/