On this page, I try to write about funny, book-related, and / or weird personal observations.

Today's post is a bit more somber.

When asked, "Where were you on 9-11?" I answer, "Living immediately outside the beltway of Washington D.C."

I heard the plane hit the Pentagon from my house, 15 miles away. And then I heard...quiet. I lived in a flight path. For days, the skies stayed silent and flight-free.

The day began like so many others. As a mother of young children, I'd run errands, culminating with a trip to the local bakery to get bread and other goods. I pulled into our driveway, parked and exited the car, and leaned into the backseat to get my one-year-old daughter out of her car seat.

Something exploded.

I took my daughter from the car and, along with my four-year-old son, the three of us wandered over near the street to see which transformer blew. A few weeks before, a squirrel met an untimely end by triggering a transformer explosion, and this blast sounded like an amplified version of the same noise.

The explosion was, obviously, not from a downed transformer.

We waited for hours to hear the welcome news our next door neighbor worked in a different section of the Pentagon that fateful day. Like the rest of the country, we watched the horrific events unfold on our TV sets. We prayed and hoped and reminded ourselves we were one people, one country.

On this eventful day, the nineteenth anniversary of 9-11-01, may we once again remember we are one people, we are one country.