It was a beautiful morning, clear and dry and temperate. There had been many of these mornings, all summer long. I would sit on the deck drinking in the warmth of the early sun with my morning tea, savoring each day’s glory from my rural perch. The scene was all the more precious for its short duration, the July/August break from city life. I don’t recall any gray mornings; there must have been some.

On this morning I was in the city and its beauty wasn’t evident until I walked outside with my daughter on her way to school. We were settling into our urban routine. I was feeling happy about the children’s schools. My sense of connectedness to Tribeca was renewing with each encounter with old friends and familiar faces. We had started our family here 15 years ago in the community anchored by the gleaming silver towers of the World Trade Center.

I feel like I remember every step of our journey that morning: choosing to walk south on Greenwich Street so that I could stop at the elementary school to greet voters with my political club’s voting cards, while my daughter walked down Chambers Street and over the highway bridge on her own, my eyes following her red hair through the throngs of students. This was her next step toward independence, walking the last block to school alone.

I wore a dress, uncharacteristically, and I felt groomed for meeting voters and introducing candidates. My name was even on the ballot, I pointed out to friends, as I encouraged them to take my literature. Kathryn Freed, our city councilperson, was there with Alan Gerson, our candidate for her seat being vacated by term limits. We were encouraged by the freshness of the morning air and the thickening crowds of families flocking to school to deliver kindergartners on their first day.

I saw many children I had cared for in my little playgroup for toddlers, who are now first-graders, middle-schoolers, even high schoolers. There were smiles all around me, a sea of friendly energy and excitement. There was political banter, too. Another candidate’s hawker touting his man as the “best banana in the bunch.” “Well, he is a banana,” I mumbled softly.

I was talking to someone when the groaning whine of jet engines drowned our voices and drew my gaze upward. I saw the flashing silver belly of a jet with its distinctive inverted V-shaped wings fly down Greenwich Street, frighteningly close, directly toward the north tower of the Trade Center six blocks south of us.

I followed its image as it sailed into the tower and was swallowed whole by the steel structure. Time seemed suspended as the triangulated scar of the plane began to glow.

As I ran crying, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God...” I felt as if I were clinging to “my God” for dear life, for clarity in utter confusion, and in horror.

We escaped the war zone, our family intact, but I know we have not escaped the war. My husband and I are in a kind of daze, both bone-tired, from the stress of fear. This is terror, I thought; this is what it feels like. Amorphous fear and the recurring image of disaster and death at arm’s reach. Life as we know it was shattered in an instant of brutality.

Here, at my house on the river, I feel a little less depressed, more able to function, but no less scared really, and too aware that this morning’s blue sky and sunlight say nothing about the day to come.