Time passes
My baby hit the 18 month mark this week. She's incredible. Her laughter is the best music I've ever heard.
The weather here today is somber and wet. It is a far cry from the absolutely stunning weather eight years ago. I had taken vacation time away from work- my mom and my aunt were visiting. We'd spent the day before in DC doing touristy stuff, and we were preparing for more site-seeing that day as well. The sky was stunningly blue and there was no trace of the stifling humidity so common in this area late in the summer.
Keith and I only had one car at the time, so we were going to take the bus to the Metro station, but we got off to a late start and missed the bus we wanted. When we reached the Metro station, a gentleman with a portable radio stopped us, mentioning that we looked like we "hadn't heard the news." It was right around then that the station closed- no more trains into DC. Something had happened.
The rumors we heard were varied. A car bomb at the Senate. Something happening at the Smithsonian. As we waited for the next bus to come take us back to my neighborhood, federal employees came flooding out of the station. They'd all been evacuated because something had happened at the Pentagon. We didn't get the details about the planes in New York until later.
The bus was very crowded so I wasn't sitting next to my mother at that point. Instead, she sat next to a young woman who couldn't stop crying; she couldn't get through to her parents on her cell phone. I watched my mom comfort that girl and calm her down, and knew that we had missed that first bus by design- not so that we wouldn't be caught in the chaos in DC, but so that my mother would be there for that young woman.
Mom and Aunt Karen were supposed to fly home on the 13th. Instead, on the 12th they managed to get a rental car. The rental agency was on the grounds of Dulles Airport, the airport from which the planes had taken off. My husband's car was followed by military vehicles as he drove, with no other cars around, on normally bumper-to-bumper airport access road. I later heard stories about agencies all over the country that ran out of cars, of people doubling up with strangers to drive to far-flung destinations. I guess everyone assumed that they wouldn't be able to get anywhere near Dulles that day, because the place was a ghost town.
I lived then, as I do now, very close to the airport. You don't even realize you're taking the sounds of the airplanes overhead for granted until they are silenced. For the next several days, the only planes in the sky were military. Whenever you heard them, you'd glance skyward nervously and shudder.
The weather here today is somber and wet. It is a far cry from the absolutely stunning weather eight years ago. I had taken vacation time away from work- my mom and my aunt were visiting. We'd spent the day before in DC doing touristy stuff, and we were preparing for more site-seeing that day as well. The sky was stunningly blue and there was no trace of the stifling humidity so common in this area late in the summer.
Keith and I only had one car at the time, so we were going to take the bus to the Metro station, but we got off to a late start and missed the bus we wanted. When we reached the Metro station, a gentleman with a portable radio stopped us, mentioning that we looked like we "hadn't heard the news." It was right around then that the station closed- no more trains into DC. Something had happened.
The rumors we heard were varied. A car bomb at the Senate. Something happening at the Smithsonian. As we waited for the next bus to come take us back to my neighborhood, federal employees came flooding out of the station. They'd all been evacuated because something had happened at the Pentagon. We didn't get the details about the planes in New York until later.
The bus was very crowded so I wasn't sitting next to my mother at that point. Instead, she sat next to a young woman who couldn't stop crying; she couldn't get through to her parents on her cell phone. I watched my mom comfort that girl and calm her down, and knew that we had missed that first bus by design- not so that we wouldn't be caught in the chaos in DC, but so that my mother would be there for that young woman.
Mom and Aunt Karen were supposed to fly home on the 13th. Instead, on the 12th they managed to get a rental car. The rental agency was on the grounds of Dulles Airport, the airport from which the planes had taken off. My husband's car was followed by military vehicles as he drove, with no other cars around, on normally bumper-to-bumper airport access road. I later heard stories about agencies all over the country that ran out of cars, of people doubling up with strangers to drive to far-flung destinations. I guess everyone assumed that they wouldn't be able to get anywhere near Dulles that day, because the place was a ghost town.
I lived then, as I do now, very close to the airport. You don't even realize you're taking the sounds of the airplanes overhead for granted until they are silenced. For the next several days, the only planes in the sky were military. Whenever you heard them, you'd glance skyward nervously and shudder.