Remember

Almost exactly nine years ago, my husband took me to New York City for my first visit. I had a feeling about the city – even though I had never been there. I just knew I would fall in love with it.

And I fell…hard.

I always say I must have been a New Yorker in a past life. :) It felt like home to me, from the very first trip.

That last week in August nine years ago, we took the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty, climbed to the top and my husband snapped this shot:

It is still so eerie to me that you can barely make out the twin towers in the background. Two weeks later they were gone.

If you’ve read this blog for long, you know we visit the city whenever we possibly can. I’ve been so fortunate to visit twice this summer – the last trip with a couple of my girlfriends. I took them to see Ground Zero, and we decided to visit the Ground Zero Museum.

It was so incredibly powerful, terrifying, humbling, inspiring and well done, I wanted to share some of the photos I took with you. I’ll let them speak for themselves:

Heartbreaking.

And yet at the same time, I was so filled up with LOVE. I couldn’t help but cry and cry and cry.

I know it gets harder every year to remember, but we can’t forget. We can’t forget the pain we felt, the devastation, the sorrow, the love.

When you didn’t know a stranger, because we were all hurting the same way. We can’t forget that desire to want to do anything…anything…to help.

The feeling of being so proud to be an American, you could just burst.

Out of my hundreds of beautiful pictures of New York City, my favorite isn’t a picture of Times Square, the park or the views from the Empire State Building. My favorite picture was taken on a trip about two years after September 11th, when the area around Ground Zero was filled with handwritten notes on the temporary walls from people from all over the country and the world:

Amen.