9/11 2001- 2011

This year's anniversary of 9/11 is different from the others.  For one things, my girls are old enough to start understanding what happened that day.  How people were Hell bent on hurting America and what we stand for just because they didn't like it. 

My husband bought a lot of newspapers after the attacks.  Pictures of the destruction and stories about what people went through.  We've managed to keep them all these years, even with all of our moves and theft from a storage unit.  This year we pulled them out for the girls to see.

Another thing that makes it so strange this year is something that happened last week.  We were shopping at Walmart.  The girls and I stopped to look at the electronics counter, amazed at how the gadgets keep getting smaller.  It turns out the woman behind the counter we had started chatting with had survived the attack.  She had been in one of the towers and knew a couple of people who had died. 

Though not nearly as traumatic or important, here is my 9/11 memory:

The weirdest things happened the night before 9/11. My husband got out his antique gun to clean. He never did that. And while he cleaned it we had a conversation about what would happen if someone from the Middle East attacked us. No lie. Later that same evening I cried myself sick (just about), for no reason.



My husband had left early that morning. He was working at a Firing Center; a place where the train soldiers to shoot tanks. He watched it live at work.


I got up when our nearly one year old daughter woke. She was exactly 11 months old that day. I turned on the TV and saw all the images of the towers and the smoke. I couldn't call my husband at his job. I called my dad. "What happened?" I asked. "Oh, some guys flew some planes into some buildings," he replied. His friends had already discussed sneaking their boys to Canada so they couldn't be drafted. (Yeah, nice people.)


I put our flag out. It was the kind you just stick on the side of your house. I couldn't put it at half mast, so I tied some black fabric to the top of it.


I spent most of the day staring at the TV in disbelief. The local news at noon did a story about the Firing Center my husband worked at; about how security had been tightened.


When my husband finally got home from work. I ran outside and hugged him. It seemed the longest day waiting for him to come home.