Our 9/11 story is far removed from those of our current neighbors and friends, many of whom witnessed the horror first hand here in DC and in New York. We were living in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the time and I had just dropped our only child off at school. As I did on most days, I went to the market before heading home.

Leaving the market at just before 9 a.m., an NPR announcer indicated that a small, likely single engine, plane had hit one of the WTC towers. He referenced an event like this happening previously, and said that while it probably was fatal for the pilot, the building was built to withstand something like a small aircraft collision. I remember not paying much attention because they went right back to programming, so I thought it must not be that serious.

By the time I got home, when they indicated a second plane had hit the other tower, I called my husband on the phone because we knew immediately, right along with everyone else, that this was a terrorist attack. We didn’t live terribly far from the Oak Ridge nuclear facility, and those were being locked down immediately because there were other planes in the air and they weren’t sure which ones were headed for where.

I immediately got back into the car and drove back to my son’s school, which was very likely headed into lockdown, but managed to pick him up and get ourselves home where we watched the news for what seemed like days. I remember when the non-stop news coverage finally took a commercial break and how terrifying it seemed not to have those announcers with us, even though their break was just minutes.

Our own connection to post 9/11 New York City happened two weeks later. We had a pre-planned trip to the city for a long weekend. We were supposed to fly into LaGuardia. I’d be lying if I said we didn’t consider canceling. It was right about that time that I got a call from a USA Today reporter who was doing a story on people who were going to be traveling to the city in the immediate aftermath of the attack — were we afraid, were we going to cancel, etc.

There was lots of encouragement by government officials to not cancel plans, and so I told the reporter that we were indeed planning to keep our date with the city, even though, up until that point, I wasn’t really sure whether we were going to be brave enough to go.I didn’t think we would be in danger, but I knew that it would be a difficult and sad time for residents there, and despite the encouragement to continue on with our lives, how that trickled down to folks who couldn’t really go about getting on with their lives in the city was an unknown.

So, we got on the plane looking each passenger in the eye as we walked down the aisle, unable to stop thinking about how those passengers on those planes just a few weeks previous must have felt.

What I remember of our four days there was what I know those living in the city had to endure day in and day out for months and months. Bits of paper were strewn everywhere, tiny, fluttering bits of paper. An overwhelming smell of jet fuel or burning rubber that just didn’t dissipate. Roads closed with hundreds of police officers and firemen in procession for funerals one after the other after the other. As the processions passed by, hour after hour, everyone on the sidewalks would stop for a silent moment of respect and gratitude, and then would continue walking.

The flyers affixed to every vertical surface in lower Manhattan were the hardest to see, two weeks in, when everyone understood that those flyers had now become memorials to the lives lost.