story3694.xml

story3694.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

It was a beautiful sunny day and we were having a fence installed in our yard. A neighbor came out and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I went inside and put the news on just in time to see the second plane hit. I don't remember screaming, but I must have because my husband and the fence man came running. I started watching the news. The reports & images - planes missing; the airways shutting down; the Pentagon on fire. It was like a Tom Clancy novel and I kept waiting for Jack Ryan to come and save the day. But it was real. The phone call to our son's school; do we bring him home, what did he know. The call from the school nurse telling us he was hurt at recess. Everyhing seemed beyond our control that day. The dreaded feeling of "What else can happen?" Yet we survived. Though it was difficult to explain it all the our 1st grader and preschooler. How do you explain something like that. And when our first grader asked if the bad guys were in heaven with Baby Jesus and all the other people who died, it was the innocence of a child that let us know that everything, while maybe never being right again, that everything would be okay. America and her people would survive like they always have.