10 Years

I can't believe it's been 10 whole years since September 11, 2001. That day was a whirlwind. I was 18 and just about to embark on a life changing new experience - starting college.

That morning I was at home, enjoying one of my last few mornings of sleeping in, when I awoke to my clock radio and and a voice explaining "The first tower was hit by a plane..." I remember thinking groggily, this has to be a dream. I continued to listen, and when the sobering voices of the radio deejays didn't waiver, I rushed upstairs to turn on the TV. It was there I found my mom, sitting close to the TV in our kitchen, watching the footage, equally stunned and horrified.

It was a day I'll never forget, and people always say when something like this happens, you'll always remember where you were and what you were doing. It's true.

The crazy thing to me is that my second grade students were not even born when this happened. Their reality of this event will be forever be different that ours, because we lived it. No matter how removed by proximity or connections, we watched it happen in real time rather than just reading the sequence of events in a history book. It's a hard idea to grasp in a way.

I pray for those families who were directly affected by September 11th. I hope they have found some form of peace in the past 10 years.

image via chartreuse with a twist