Three years ago today I was running late for work because I had a broken toe and sore back from a fall down the stairs. As I was finally about to leave Doug called me from work and told me about the first plane. I asked him a hundred questions that he couldn’t answer and sat down in front of the television. I didn’t get up again for hours. After the second plane Doug came home and we watched together. I spent the next 24 hours trying to get in touch with my brother who lives in DC or his wife who works as a Russian languages translator for Colin Powell. The phone lines were so tied up that nothing was getting through. I tried talking Doug into checking the children out of school but he convinced me to keep their day normal. If I had known the teachers were showing it in all the classrooms (including my then Kindergartener), I would have gone to get them. I don’t need to say the emotions I felt because everyone felt them. The most striking thing for me over the next few days was the silence. For all of 9/11 – 12 the roads were vacant. Nobody went anywhere. Helicopters and planes didn’t hum overhead, people didn’t work or play outside, everyone stayed inside, watched television, wept and prayed. When the planes began to fly again the noise was jarring and unnatural. Although I only glance sideways at most planes, the sound of the military jets doing their sonic boom fly-by as they circle the nearby nuclear power plant still makes me cringe. I know a lot of people in other countries feel that it was America’s turn for terrorism. They are wrong. No one anywhere deserves violence. Americans have always had homegrown terrorists but this was so different. I am angry that the government is using our fears to control us. I hope that someday I will be able to remember this as the day that Amy was conceived.

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Martin Luther King Jr.