Lisa's Laws: September blue sky, from a child's view and from 9/11

My niece Katie, who just started first grade on Wednesday, has taken to using the word "glorious." We're not sure where she picked it up, but it has become her very favorite adjective. "This is a glorious hot dog," she'll say, or "Aunt Lisa, that is a glorious dress you're wearing."

Katie's new favorite word came to mind Wednesday morning, her first day of school and truly glorious. The sun was bright and the morning chill promised to give way to, as she would say, a glorious summer day. My Bella and her pal even jumped in the pool, the water cold from the September nights, but Wednesday's sky, blue and utterly cloudless, poured warmth down.

It was the kind of sky that pulls your face to it, caressing it until you lean your head back to you can feel soft heat. Here in New York we know that days like last Wednesday will soon give way to cold autumn rains and long, dark nights. So I indulged in that moment, feeling the sun and listening to the girls splash. Then I remembered how a blue and cloudless sky once held nothing but dread, and how 12 years ago it seemed impossible to ever look up and see it any other way.

Bella was an infant, only weeks old, on Sept. 11, 2001, and from her child's perspective it's part of a past so far away that it can't be reached, like Woodstock and black and white television and the Clinton administration. But of course she'll learn.

In school they talk about 9/11, even in elementary school. Bella has learned about the attacks, the war, the new Freedom Tower. She's seen the photographs and the memorials, even the twisted, tortured pieces of steel from the Twin Towers on display at the Liberty Science Center, where her sixth-grade class went on a field trip. Her dad and I talk about it with her, too. We answer her questions as best we can, but it's almost impossible to adequately answer how, and why, and will it happen again.

And we also talk about how, for a while after, when a firefighter in bunker gear would step onto a subway car or into a deli, or a firetruck would drive down the street, people would applaud. And how, for a while, it seemed that the American flag flew in front of nearly every home, from front porches and on flagpoles on lawns and in apartment windows. How everyone donated blood, and how, when we drive across the George Washington Bridge into the city, our gaze drifts to the right because when we were her age we always looked for the World Trade Center, and we still do.

If she hasn't been told of it yet, someone, surely, will mention that sky, and how so many of us will always, always remember how blue and perfect and open it was that morning, and then how chillingly quiet and empty it became. And how from now on a perfect sky, a rare gift from nature bestowed on these dwindling summer days, will break our hearts.

Could it be, though, that Katie and Bella will look up on a day like Wednesday and think only, as the sun kisses their upturned faces, "How glorious"?

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