Anticipating the Anniversary

A woman saw me taking the picture below. "I never can get it all in on my camera phone", she said. "It's a beatiful building." And then perhaps because it was another September day and the sky was again a clear blue, she added, "I miss the Towers."



For the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, sunflowers were planted around the city. On the morning of the anniversary, they appeared all around the World Trade Center site, their stems woven into the surrounding chain link fences. Sunflowers and sunny blue skies: this is the weight of the days, the wait of these days, leading up to the inevitable remembering.



"It's on a Tuesday again this year." I keep hearing that, again and again, especially in these last few days of summer, even on this holiday weekend when everything is caught in the still dazzling rays of the sun. How could anything bad happen when the light hits the water just so? Maybe it's just me listening for it but over and over I hear it. "See that empty space between the buildings? That huge-ass gap? That's where the Towers once stood..."