Snowflakes, cypress and sarsaparilla

My boys were late to school Monday morning and it was all my fault. We were already running behind schedule -- there's nothing like two weeks of not having to get them up, dressed, fed and loaded in the van to make you forget how it's done on time. As we huddled in the 11-degree morning air, I froze. Figuratively as well as literally. Despite the bright, seemingly cloudless blue sky, despite the sunlight gilding everything it touched, it was snowing.

Tiny perfect, individual snowflakes swirled around us like Jack Frost's glitter confetti, resting on an eyelash, a coat sleeve, the dark frame of a car window.

"Look," I said. "Millions of them -- and every one is different. Every one is beautiful."

"I don't know," said the snotty teenager, pointing to one on the mirror with a few of its six arms broken off. "I think this one's got a serious case of ugly going on."

"Just because it's broken? That's shallow."

"Noooo," he rolled its eyes, faking a vain pose. "Because it's between me and my reflection."

Laughing, we hunted down a few more snowflakes, then realized we were running even later.

I'll take the heat from the schools and not even care. Those moments of discovery are too rare to be neglected. In the future, those boys may or may not remember being late to school, but they will remember hunting for snowflakes on cold glass and admiring their beauty.

By the time I got to work, the sun was even brighter, the clouds were even fewer -- and it was still snowing, fairy dust glinted in the air, swirling around me as I got out of the van. I am not a fan of snow, ice, or temperatures below 75 degrees, but even I was enchanted by the sparkling show.

"So pretty," I thought. "So magical. So get over it and bring me spring."

My dad was one of those "seize the day, relish the moment" kind of people. He's the one who woke us up at 5 a.m. to watch the sunrise strike his iris bed, scattering a fine mist of rainbows from the drops of dew. He's the one who wanted to drive to California on the back roads instead of the interstate so that our memories of the trip didn't consist of mile markers and McDonald's. Yes, we got our kicks on Route 66.

He was right, too. When I think back on the California trip, I remember dangling our toes over the Grand Canyon. I remember getting out of the car on Highway 1 to see the lone cypress (years before it finally fell) and to hear the sea lions barking on the beach below. These memories are etched so clearly that I can smell the sharp pine of Big Sur, see the glowing gold sunflower farms in Napa, and the bone-white skull of Alcatraz, glowing in the pure blue San Francisco Bay.

I can see him clearly, too, even after 32 years.

He wasn't the only one in the family who taught us how to stop and savor. Mom wasn't into the scenery, sounds and scents as much as she was into people. She and I would sit in a restaurant and invent lives for the people we saw. She was my Sherlock Holmes, teaching me how to read body language and underlying meanings.

It's sad that when we look back at memories, the bad ones, the hurtful ones, seem to stand out. The time I got licks for skipping school, the time my mother criticized my cooking in front of my soon-to-be-husband, the deaths of beloved pets and more beloved family members ... yet my wedding day is a blur, flavored in happiness. The day I sold my first short story, the day my sons were born -- all important, all happy, but seen through a veil, whereas the painful memories are much more vivid.

But thanks to my parents who knew how to look and how to remember, that isn't always the case. The memory my dad handed me when we sat side by side on a rock log in the Petrified Forest (back when they still let you do that) and share a nasty-tasting sarsaparilla soda and a wonderful frijole is stronger than any bad memories from that trip. I can smell his Old Spice, I can feel the hot, dry wind coming off the Painted Desert, and I can hear the rattle and hiss of sagebrush rolling across the path in front of us.

It is as vivid as the six perfect sides of a snowflake, trapped for a second on the windshield and for an eternity in the mind and memories of a child.