Thirteen years since 9/11.

Thirteen years ago last night, our daughter Eve — then ten years old — was so excited that the next morning she was going to wake up by herself for the very first time, using the radio alarm clock we had given her for the occasion. She chose the station carefully (classical was it? maybe soft pop?), but when the radio clicked on at six a.m. in her Los Angeles bedroom it wasn’t music that woke her up. The second plane had just hit its target. Nobody yet had clarity on what was happening, let alone the news media. A fragmented noise skein of unfathomable facts, disbelief, sorrow, and fear came out of the radio that morning.

Eve’s experience is a bit of a metaphor for what we all went through: we woke up that day to a very different world than was familiar, and we didn’t have a mental framework for it, let alone words. In a further topsy-turvy turnabout of how things would have normally been, it was she who first alerted us to the fact that something very big and very bad had happened. {Read more at mothering.com}

Image:
slgckgc (Flickr / Creative Commons license)