But...

Every Mother's Day and every Father's Day I remember them. When some advertisement pokes at me to buy some frivolous and breakable thing as a gift, I imagine buying it and throwing it off the cliff where their ashes fell into the wind all those years ago, on the day my sister and I flung their mortal dust outward into empty air.

But— then I shake my head and realize how tawdry and garish that litter would look from above, lying on the pristine sand beside the red river 800 feet below.

Besides, what I wish I could give them, now they are gone, isn't something I could ever buy.

I want to give them all the questions I never asked, that I know they would have had answers for.

I want to give them the gift of my own aging: the wrinkles on the backs of my hands that look exactly like my Dad's, and the creases on the insides of my elbows that remind me of my Mom's— although without the freckles.

I want to give them all my abiding memories of them; the ones that only get more vivid as time goes by.

I want to give them those looks-without-words that all people who love each other know how to give.

I want to stand in the corner of the kitchen in the house that now belongs to someone else, and watch them dance the jitterbug to Dixieland jazz.

I want to hover silently at the top of the stairs, where my sister and I lay in our childhood beds in the rooms on either side, listening to them sing "You Are My Sunshine," and hear, just one more time, how the perfect acoustic pocket in the stairwell reflected their subtle harmony.

But— all the gifts are done with, now.

Memories are all that's left:  silently circling high above, riding the great desert thermals, serene and patient in the empty and widening air.