It was a beautiful morning. Sunlight glittered off the dew that beaded the grasses, and the garden trellis was a mass of blue morning glories, their blossoms reflecting the color of the sky. A few trees were starting to tint red and gold, and it looked like a perfect end-of-summer day.
I breakfasted and was getting ready for work, grumbling about having to spend such a perfect day indoors. Dad was in the garden, pottering around, and Mom was watching the morning news as always, dipping slivers of toast into her tea and griping about politics. I had a few minutes to spare, so looked over the baseball message board where I co-moderated the Red Sox section, and made a post about losing the second-baseman to a knee injury, just the latest blow to my fast-sinking team, while the damyankees just kept on winning.
Dad came in, and I heard him ask Mom, “What’s going on?”
“A plane hit one of the buildings.”
That caught my attention a little, and I thought there had been a crash of a Cessna somewhere. I was in another room, not watching TV, and did not see the images. I finished my post about the Red Sox, and was glancing over something else when Dad looked into the room and said, “Did you see what’s on TV? You ought to come see it.”
Still only half-interested, I shut down my computer and went to the living room, and there saw the twin towers, looking not like office buildings, but instead like monstrous industrial smokestacks, with the dirty black smoke boiling out and staining the sky. Pundits and commentators and reporters babbled frantically.
The phone rang — it was my sister in a nearby town. “Are you watching this?” Together we gaped at the TV and asked Who-What-Why. As soon as our call ended, another sister called, and my brother sent an email from his workplace (“Are we at war?” I asked him. “I think we are,” he wrote back), and we wondered about a dear family friend, an extremely elderly widow living in NYC. I tried to call her, but of course the lines into the city were jammed. (We got through later in the day, and found that Mrs. S. was okay.)
I called my manager at work, and asked her if she knew what was going on. She said yes, and told me not to bother coming to work, as she was closing the store early, to be ready to support her daughter, whose husband was a fire captain in Manhattan. He had gone off-shift only a little while before the first plane hit, and was in no danger himself, but he knew many of the firefighters on the scene, in the towers.
Another of my sisters called — a friend of hers who lived just outside DC had seen the fireball as the plane had hit the Pentagon. Word came of another flight that had crashed in Pennsylvania, and at the time they weren’t sure if it was connected to the attack. Rumors flew. No one knew where the President was — “As if knowing where that damn fool is would do any good!” Dad growled.
Dad refused to sit and watch. He said that he couldn’t do anything about it, and he had his garden to look after. He came and went, pausing to ask for updates, but not lingering. Mom flipped between news channels, watching all she could, until she had to walk away. I went with her into the garden, through the arched trellis buried in those sky-blue morning glories, and I held her as she cried, and told me that she hadn’t felt this way since she was a girl, and heard about the Japanese strafing the civilians in the streets of Manila during WWII.
Back in the house we shut off the TV, and I made Mom a cup of tea. Dad came in and sat to read in the kitchen. The afternoon sunlight poured in, warm and golden, filtered through the fading maple trees. A red-eyed vireo sang; goldfinches and yellowthroats chattered and rustled through the tangle of Jerusalem artichokes at the edge of the garden. Crickets and lacewings sang in the sun-warmed grass.
I went into the woods, away from the house, and laid on a big gray boulder, looking up into the green and gold of the treetops. The wind stirred the trees, and now and then a leaf slipped its mooring and sailed, spiraling down to land on the ferns. Insects flitted by; tiny spiders made their way through moss forests. The old gray rocks stood where they had for ten thousand years, since the glacier dropped them. The stone walls still stood where they had been built 170 years before. The sun shone warm on me. I could smell the clean, fresh air, the earth, the ferns, the moss. Here, in the woods, the world was whole. Here, the world was sane.
—
The following Friday, I carried a candle up to the top of the hill behind the house, where the tall pines cast deep, cool shade, and their scented needles made a deep carpet underfoot. At twilight I lighted that candle and set it on a log, and sat on another log, and there I stayed until the light was gone from the sky, and the single candle flame, quivering a little in the breeze, was the brightest light within sight. I grew cold as the dew formed, and my breath was a cloud before me. Still I sat, and thought about all I had seen and heard that week — the smoke and dust, the terror-stricken faces, and the screams, the wreckage of buildings, the anger, the sadness and desolation. My Mom’s tears, my Dad’s quiet anger, my manager’s broken voice as she told me about her son-in-law losing dozens of friends and colleagues. The Coldstream Guards at Buckingham Palace playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The note of condolence that came from our company’s president in France. The morning glories.
When I think of 9/11, one of the first images that comes to mind is the morning glories, the rustic arched trellis in the garden with hundreds of those heavenly blue flowers open to the heavenly blue sky that morning. I still love morning glories…but they will always have for me not just their ethereal, ephemeral beauty, but that indelible memory of sadness, as well.