It was a beautiful clear warm September dayin the Hudson Valley. That’s where I live in the Hudson Valley of N.Y. Twenty minutes from Manhattan. It was my first morning in my new apartment. I had no tv, no phone, no radio reception. I woke up to a plane flying overhead really low about 8:45 am. Being on a mountain my whole house shook. I remember hoping it wasn’t a regular occurance. I set about cleaning and unpacking, enjoying the opened window weather after a hot summer. At 9am my landlord ran out of his house in a rush. At about 11 am I started hearing all the siren from all the surrounding towns. Being the Daughter of an ex fire chief I knew something big had to be going on.When my friend knocked on the door at 12:15 pm, I thought he had heard some joke on a radio station. But his eyes were red when he told me “we’re under attack,it’s all gone. The trade centers are gone and the Pentagon was hit.” I felt the terror travel from my head to my toes and back when I realized this was no joke.

My thoughts immediately went to my brother an EMT for FDNY, and volunteer firefighter, and my dad who worked for the New York City Transit Authority and also a firefighter, and fire instructor. I thought I lost them, and on the drive to that friends house to a phone and TV I prayed as I watched the fighter Jets stream across the cornflower blue sky. I thought my world had just crumbled around me, and I was probably one of the last contious people in the US to find out. I was lucky, my brother was on his way home from a midnight and got called back in, but wasn’t near the towers when they fell. My dad never went in to the city that day, a miracle in my eyes. His words to me that day are permanently etched in my mind he said “we are all here ok,but Shawn(my brother) is down there he’s ok too, but we’ve lost hundreds.” Iknew what he meant. The firefighters who are bound by code to put their lives before others and police too. They were all members of our family, even ones we didn’t or will never meet.A brotherhood truly discribes it, a whole world in it’s own.

The relief in having my father and brother home could never overshadow the lives lost that day. Family, friends,mentors, strangers.The memory of that day will never die and neither will the spirits of those we sayed goodbye to two years ago, they’ll live on through us and those memories forever.