9/11

9/11 will always be a linch pin...
a day in which the world changed.

On the morning of 9/11/2001
Jenn (2nd daughter) called.

"Have you heard the news?"

"No"

We never watch early morning TV
or turn on the radio first thing.

"A plane hit the World
Trade Center."

God forgive me.
My first thought was, so.
Another plane accident...

"Turn on the TV."
We rushed to the den
in time to see the second plane
hit the twin tower.

It was much later that we realized
that one of the planes had flown
down the Hudson River past the house
to trace its route to the Trade Center.

Terrorism entered one's vocabulary.
Evil deeds were not relegated to a few crazies
somewhere else.

Six years later 9/11 remains incomprehensible.


At the time I wrote a flash fiction
through the eyes of an old woman
in the mansion across the way.

Fiction is always my easiest venue.
One step away from reality...


UNRAVELING

The old woman on the bench had been unraveling the torn green sweater for a long time. She likes to unravel yarn. Raveled yarn is better than new. The wool fibers hold a bit of lanolin, the scent of lambs. The yarn holds the memory of the garment's shape and the wearer's presence. The winding rhythm enhances her memory.

On Sundays she often looks up at the sound the bi-plane buzzing the mansion, crossing the river, completing the circle and heading home. She likes the lazy confident loop he makes-a circle, a complete circle every time. The pilot has been doing it for years. He takes city people up on a twenty- minute flight: a small adventure, exposure to the heady thrill of a flight in an un-pressurized cabin.

Sometimes the pilot waves. She likes to imagine that he is acknowledging her. But no one acknowledges the old and lonely.

Yesterday a quick succession of sounds: rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat startled her. *Gunfire,* she’d thought, and was disoriented for a moment before she realized that it was the jackhammer being used to repair bridge.

She'd have to stop making-up scary stories. Sometimes she pretends-the Red Baron- is a spy plane;

Other times she fantasizes that it is cosmic plane come to take her to another realm.

But she doesn't dare share these imaginings. If she did, the matron wouldn't let her sit out here in the sun. Miss Manson would make her stay in her room, take pills, call her psychotic.

She doesn't tell anyone that she has seen a bald eagle twice this summer. The staff would scoff and say that an eagle hasn't been seen in these parts for years.

She tried to tell them the story of the mansion before it became the home: how the bride in the white silk kimono ran down the hillside to the railroad tracks to escape the drunken groom… and a stranger on a stallion had crashed through the woods and spirited her away. Nurse Alice had chided her, told her in no uncertain terms to stop telling tall tales.

So, on Tuesday, September 11th, when the commercial plane--a big plane, a 747- dipped and wavered and almost hit the bridge, she didn't say a word. Terrorism wasn't a word in her vocabulary; a reality she could unravel.