25th Anniversaries Traumatic and Romantic

         It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11. We’ve decorated our house with red, white, and blue lights, because our flagpole is broken, so we can’t fly a flag. Later this month my husband and I will celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It’s the silver anniversary which is a big deal for a marriage. We are happier now then when we first started dating. I didn’t even know there was a level of being in love that went this deep and felt this good. It’s so different from the hormone driven, almost crazed “being in love” at the beginning of a relationship. My new writing goal is to someday put down on paper how amazing this feels but so far, all my fictional couples are, at most, hitting the ten-year mark. That deeper level of knowing and loving starts at twenty years of happily-ever-after.

            But what happens at the silver anniversary of a tragedy? We all have different answers to that question. We shared a collective trauma that brought us together as a nation in a way I hadn’t seen since I was a little girl.  New York Governor at the time, George Pataki would say later at the 2004 Republican convention, “On that terrible day, a nation became a neighborhood. All Americans became New Yorkers.” And he was right. Twenty-five years later and America is more divided than I have ever seen it. There are days when I don’t recognize the country I grew up in as the government on the news. Whereas my marriage has grown stronger, more of a partnership than I ever thought possible, our country feels on the verge of a divorce. But who will get the children? Who will get us?