I can't remember what I was doing 5 minutes ago, but I can tell you exactly what I was doing that morning. My Rose was only 3 1/2 and DJ was a month shy of his first birthday. I had gotten them up, fed them breakfast and had turned on the news to watch while I folded laundry at the coffee table. The first image to come on the screen was of the Towers with smoke pouring out. I wasn't paying close attention, and I didn't realize what it was at first. To be honest I thought  it must be a slow news day, because I thought they were talking about the bombing that occurred back in 1993.
  Then I realized that this was live and that it was a plane crash. So now I'm thinking that something is wrong with the Air Traffic Control system. I was positive that something had to be wrong with the autopilot. Then the second plane hit, right on live TV and I sat there stunned. Those planes hit a building less then 15 miles from where I sat with my babies. Then the buildings started to fall and I started crying. Both my kids came to me and wanted to know what was wrong. DJ wasn't really talking, but he patted my hand and crawled into my lap and kept looking at me, trying to figure out why I was crying. Rose was just as upset. She kept asking me what she had done wrong, and I kept trying to tell her, that she was fine. But I couldn't talk.
 My husband came home from work and told me that when the first plane hit, he and his co-workers went onto the factory roof. He had a clear view of the second plane hitting and then watching the towers collapse.
  I can clearly remember the smell for weeks of the burning foundations of the towers. And the weird colored sky. I remember the first time we came over the Rt 9 bridge and I couldn't see my usual landmark, the Twin Towers. It was the first time I saw that they were really gone. Then I had to drive up to Sparta and almost the entire way, we could see the smoke plume from the towers. I was closer to PA then NY and I could still see the smoke from Ground Zero.
   I don't get emotional about much. But to this day I can't think about, let alone talk about 9/11 without getting choked up and starting to cry. Its why I haven't gone to Ground Zero. I know I couldn't handle it.  So much of my world was drastically changed. From the loss of my landmarks, to the loss of all those people, to the loss of so many freedoms and the loss of America's innocence that day. May those bastards that took over those planes rot in hell for the rest of eternity.
Ida