One summer when my kids were young, I took them along on an assignment that involved finding unusual flavors of ice cream (tough job, I know). At one ice cream window, I asked the server about some flavor I’ve long since forgotten the name of.

“Would you like to try it?” he asked.

My younger daughter, peering up at the window, giggled.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, as the server turned to get my sample.

“He’s going to feed you!” my daughter, 4 or 5 at the time, blurted with some nascent sense of social norms being broken.

I’m not sure how she construed the server’s offer to mean that he would put the spoonful of ice cream into my mouth, but we still think of that moment now and then and laugh.

It’s weird and random, the details that lodge in our memories and those that escape. Once in a while, the realization that I’ll forget more of those little moments than I remember seizes me with something like homesickness.

So, like everyone else, I try to document the events I want to remember.

The task is far from an exact science. The historical record of my two children exists in shoe boxes crammed with photos from the pre-digital age, scrapbooks adorned with stickers and ribbons, digital folders organized by year on photo storage websites, sporadic posts on social media sites, handwritten musings in a couple of journals and several boxes of artifacts ranging from standard construction-paper creations and playbills to broken Christmas ornaments that call to mind bizarre inside jokes.

Taken together, this record seems almost as weird and random as my memory. There were years when I photographed virtually every outing and milestone and years when my daughters’ birthdays were about all I managed to record. There were periods when documenting our lives was my creative outlet and periods when organizing memories into digital files soothed my frazzled brain. There were times when I preferred pen-and-paper musings over photography and times when I had nothing to say.

As another summer, with all its photo-worthy moments, rushes by, I’m wondering anew about the best way to preserve our memories.

There’s always been a certain segment of the population that loves to frame every moment of life in a photo lens. In the smartphone era, their numbers have

proliferated to the point that they’re the butt of jokes, and a live-in-the-moment counter-movement has arisen.

Finding the right balance between experiencing life and documenting it can be hard. If I am fully present in a given moment, will I remember it better than if I’d been recording it? Or will the physical record of it ensure that I remember it five or 10 or 20 years later? Is there any way to know?

Next, there’s the matter of curating these memories. Years ago, at the dawn of the digital era, I wrote an essay about the difficulty of deciding which photos to delete and which to save. I wondered if the ease with which we could now erase photos would lead to the loss of something special: namely, stashes of hilariously horrible photos.

Turns out, there are still plenty of embarrassing photos floating around, and social media has given us a whole new way to ensure they never go away. But at the same time, our ever-improving technologies increasingly put our real selves at odds with the images we project and, ultimately, preserve. Maybe that trend suits the way our minds filter memories, often casting them in an inauthentic glow. But maybe it also robs us — and future generations who inherit our keepsakes — of some subtle truths.

Just as perplexing as the question of what to keep is the question of how to store those images and items.

The ways we preserved our family histories when I was a child shares almost nothing in common with how we preserve them today. Even in the 17 years since my first child was born, the ways in which we archive information have undergone drastic change.

Businesses and organizations have devoted enormous amounts of money and manpower to transitioning their records to digital formats. Should I do the same (assuming I can ever find that kind of time), or is there value in keeping those boxes of photos and other random physical records to pick through with my kids and grandkids and pass on to them one day?

How will people view family memories in the future? Will Facebook and Instagram still be around in 50 years? What about those photo-storing websites? Will my future grandchildren visit those sites and find old family photos the way grandchildren in the past stumbled onto boxes of keepsakes in basements and attics, or will those digital mementos languish in cyberspace, never to be rediscovered? Will the young people of tomorrow look at flash drives with puzzlement, the way today’s kids look at floppy disks?

Photos and videos, of course, are just one way of documenting our lives. I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to write down the memories I want to save: funny things my kids have said, places we’ve visited together, ordinary moments that have struck me as special in some fleeting way. For several years I made digital scrapbooks every year, combining photos with titles, captions and blocks of text.

I realized, too late, that I don’t want my photos narrowly interpreted this way. Looking through those books, I find my commentary tiresome. I want to divorce the writing from the photos and let them each have their own lives.

I want to edit my journals as well. They offer no deep secrets or revelations, but there’s much that, looking back, I don’t want other people to read.

Memories are slippery things. Efforts to spear and salt them away often fall short. And sometimes those left swimming in the dark waters of our minds appear to us unexpectedly, independent of these efforts.

I’ll keep taking photos and collecting the physical evidence of our lives, and I’ll keep fretting over how to preserve these keepsakes.

But when I think about it, the unstructured time spans of summer — the road trips and beach days and late bedtimes — lend themselves, on occasion, to sitting back and simply telling a story, the way families have passed down memories for millennia.

I never wrote down the story of the ice cream sample, until now, anyway. I have no photos from that day. But the memory keeps coming around, and each time we share it and laugh, it grows a little easier to retrieve. It’s less a record of life than a part of it, a moment that chose me, rather than the other way around.

Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com or 603-727-3268.