The day I left home, 9/12/01

Forgive me if today I blog about something a little more serious, and somewhat less _Flossy, than usual. It was exactly five years ago that I packed everything I owned into a station wagon and left home for good. This is a short piece remembering 9/11's less infamous but for me no less momentous neighbor, 9/12, accompanied by photographs I took along the way.

I had just graduated from college and was preparing to move from my childhood home in Florida all the way to Portland, Oregon. I had never been to Oregon. Its main attraction for me was sheer geographical distance: the route from Florida draws an impressive diagonal straight across this country's broad midsection. I had left home many times before "“ to go to school in Ohio for six months at a stretch, to go abroad for eight "“ but now my leaving meant more, and I wanted the move itself to symbolize that.

I was busy packing the station wagon, my mom fretting over small things, when we heard the news. It was raining fire in three states, and I sat slack-faced before the TV for the rest of the day. I left the next morning, as planned, but the trip had changed somehow; now it seemed like a journey across alien territory, from a home I didn't quite recognize to places uncharted. Was it even safe to travel through cities? It was only 9/12 -- no one was sure. Yet there was nothing I wanted more than just to drive, and feel a sense of forward motion; anything but the paralysis we had endured the day before.