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Fairbanks often feels like a living museum. This is a place where pipeline parts serve as front yard planters and rusty old engines decorate public spaces. Our kids grow up among relics from the past.

Like the sawmill we found last week at Pioneer Park. Maybe it was used to cut the boards for the same cabins that are now strewn along the street in the Gold Rush Town, a replica of tea shops and souvenir stands with dated placards. We can run down the middle of the road like visitors from another time.

Playing among these pieces of history and knowing what they mean are two different things. That’s what real museums are good at. We’ve got plenty of those, too. The giant among them, the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

My friend Jill grew up climbing on its boulder–sized copper nuggets and reverently touching the salt lamps glowing with the earth’s own force. The building may not have been as impressive, with its glacier-inspired curves of pristine white, but many of the same specimens are there, summoning our sons like Longhorn Beetles to a moose hide.

When we bring both our boys to the museum, one adult actually gets a chance to look around while the other wrangles the kids. Our job is to help them make connections between what they’re seeing and what they’ve experienced in their own lives.

My son, who’s four, dreams of traveling to Mars to count volcanoes. He wonders what meteoroids look like and how they land on earth. Maybe that’s why he spots the Hubble Space Telescope display right away. Tucked inside the entrance to the Gallery of Alaska, in a case I’d overlooked on scores of visits before, he sees several meteorites, chunks of debris caught in our atmosphere.

He kneels down, eyes wide, pointing to each piece. We talk about where the rocks were found, what that must have been like, to see a meteor in your own backyard. And there in the front, a chunk of space rock found right here in Alaska. Maybe he’ll unearth one of his own someday.

Two-year-old Harper looks for the bison, perched high above the room on top of the display case in the Interior Gallery. “Come down buffalo,” he shouts. “Come down!” He’s been obsessed ever since he touched a bison’s thick hide at our house, the result of a state permit drawn by my lucky husband and weeks of walking around farmers’ fields in Delta Junction, proof that we still gather food from the land just like people have done for thousands of years.

Then Owen pipes up. “I want to show you something.” He leads us to a porcupine display. “Watch out for those sharp points,” he tells Harper. We talk about the quills and how the animal uses them to protect itself. The conversation is brief, because now they’re both looking at something else.

Folded into the display cases surrounding the main exhibit are drawers full of samples. Kids can open these and look inside. Harper explores the drawers themselves, watching how they open and close, experimenting with where to put his fingers so they won’t get pinched.

Owen notices the different colors of weasel fur and surmises that the white pelt must be from an animal caught in the winter. “And maybe this brown one was from the summer.” He notices that they look different in between seasons, mottled with both brown and white.

Now the kids are restless, so we explore the building itself. The stairs where they can look out the windows as they climb. Owen says it looks like we’re higher than the mountains, the towering Alaska Range with some of the continent’s highest peaks. On the first floor, we notice objects from the surrounding world: airplanes and birds, dandelions and cars.

And then, before we leave, a visit to the Western and Arctic Coast display. The boys pretend to be whale hunters climbing into kayaks. We talk about how the hunters feed the whole village with the meat, use the oil to provide heat and light, and then create dances to tell the story of the hunt.

All these stories of long ago people. Some of them stretching back even further. As we leave the museum, I ask the boys about their favorite thing. “Dinosaurs,” they say. They’re fascinated by animals that lived here long before humans, only overlapping in proximity to some of the same plants and maybe the dragonflies that play in the midnight sun, the light glinting off their jeweled wings.

Museums are supposed to connect us to the past. They remind us who we were and how we found our way to what we’ve become. Walking through the halls of a building that stands in a valley carved by a glacier, seeing items that have been in this collection since my friend Jill was a child, watching our own children explore, I realize they help connect us to the future, too.