I Remember 9/11 - The 25th Anniversary of the Attacks

 

Photo by Andrea Booher

In September 2001, we were living in Castle Rock, Colorado. We'd just bought our first house two months before, and Steven was working overnight as a Field Engineer for General Dynamics. Maya was just over two years old, and she liked slow and leisurely mornings. The three of us were lounging in bed when our phone rang.

Steven answered the call in the kitchen. Judi, my mother-in-law, was on the other end of the line. Before Maya and I could talk ourselves into getting out of bed, Steven had hung up with his mom and was rushing back into the bedroom.

I didn't think I'd heard him right when he told me a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers. I remember asking him to repeat himself, and by this time, he'd turned on the television that was sitting in our room. I watched the smoke lift into the sky in a thick rolling plume from the wound in the building. I remember thinking about some of the reasons why something like this might happen. Everything came up either a mechanical malfunction with the plane or a medical emergency for a pilot. The truth of the matter never entered my mind.

I moved forward with our day. I couldn't have imagined that there was more to come. I got Maya fed, which only took a few minutes. She was wild about Nutri-Grain bars at the time and could eat one in record time. We were upstairs getting her dressed when I heard Steven yell from below us. I left Maya sitting on the floor in her pale green room with bees stenciled around the walls. There was a Winnie the Pooh comforter on her bed, and a small blue and green wooden table with a tray holding a plastic tea pot and four small cups. Getting dressed hadn't taken long, either, and she'd gone and pulled a dozen books off the shelves and was happily flipping through pages, her little voice quiet and breathy as she "read" the book in her lap out loud.

I ran down the stairs just in time to see a replay of a second plane flying into the South Tower. This was no accident. There were no health issues. The planes were strong and solid. Someone had done this on purpose.

Less than an hour later, we watched the South Tower crumble in slow motion. It was unbelievable to watch something so big, so tall lose its place towering over the city to wind up nothing more than a pile of rubble and clouds of smoke. Just a few minutes later, passengers aboard Flight 93 launched a counterattack on the four hijackers who had taken over the United Airlines plane. Two instigators of the attack claimed later that the target had been the U.S. Capitol building. It never made it. The plane crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about 130 miles northwest of the capital.

We continued to watch replays of both planes while Steven filled me in about Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon. I was stunned. Four planes. One ear was listening to the television while the other ear was listening for Maya. Steven and I just sat at the end of our bed staring at the screen. It was dreamlike. Neither one of us could wrap our heads around what had happened. It didn't even feel real.

At 10:28, we watched the North Tower fall. The sky in New York City was gray and gritty, filled with smoke and debris. The completion of those towers took place in 1972. They'd stood for twenty-nine years, which, at that point in time, consisted of my entire life. I'd never seen a photo or a film of the city without them. Then they were gone. 2,977 people lost their lives on that otherwise ordinary Tuesday. Thousands more were injured.

We didn't know anyone who was killed that day, but we mourned them all. The mood in our home was unusually somber after hearing the news. Both Steven and I had heads filled with our own thoughts. Perhaps it was our shift in mood that affected Maya, because later that day, she fell down the stairs from the top down to the bottom. We hadn't had stairs in our previous house, but she'd been up and down this flight every day since we moved in. Fortunately, she wasn't hurt, but it really scared her dad and I. Along with everything else I think about when this anniversary hits, I remember that fall.  

It happened twenty-five years ago, and yet it feels like it was yesterday.