I was going through some boxes yesterday, looking for God-knows-what. Really now, only God knows what I was looking for because I became so distracted I couldn’t remember why I opened the box.

What I found was the lower jawbone of a dog. It was bleached white by the sun, and now resided in a heavy plastic bag in an obscure box, in the corner of the garage. Those old bones and teeth took me back 20 some years to my hometown, Butte, Montana, and yet they had nothing at all to do with my own experiences in the mile-high city. It was all about my sons.

Whenever we used to go to Butte to visit my dad, I tried to spend a day or two helping him around the house. This left my San Francisco born-and-raised husband two days to roam with our sons.

He had come to love Butte, and he hoped the kids would love it, too. One day they would tour the caves at Lewis and Clark Caverns. They would spend a day at Fairmont Hot Springs, swimming in the warm sun, a real treat for rusty Puget Sounders.

But there was always one morning when the sun was peeping over the East Ridge of the Continental Divide that Lenny and the boys would disappear without telling me where they were going. If I “caught” them and asked, they would tell me it was just a “guy thing.”

I eventually learned that their first stop was at a restaurant called “4 Bs” where they ate enormous, gooey cinnamon rolls with extra frosting. Then they headed north toward the remains of the mining operations, stopping at the Granite Mountain Fire Memorial.

Not far from there was a hole in the ground covered by two boards, and in that hole was the carcass of a “wolf.” Lenny made up an elaborate story about the life of the doomed wolf, and how it had fallen into this old mine shaft. Every year, they followed this ritual exactly, even after they realized there were no wolf packs near Butte.

When the kids were almost teenagers, and Lenny realized our road trip days were coming to a close, he and the boys brought back the jaw of the “wolf,” much to my horror, and it is now buried in a box in our garage. I put the box back where it belonged, and wondered about the day when one or both of the boys would go through that box, and find the jawbone of an old dog that fell into a shallow hole. And they will think there is the slightest scent of cinnamon, and they will remember that they had the best dad in the whole wide world.