By Ande Jacobson

Like so many of us, I remember exactly where I was 25 years ago today when the twin towers were attacked on 9/11/2001. I was at work during a week I spent in the greater Washington, D.C. metro area. Although we were mostly cutoff from the outside world while at work, we were just outside the beltway, and within less than 10 minutes after the first plane hit everyone at our location knew that it happened. When I was able to contact my manager back in my home location later that morning, he told me that my colleague and I were not authorized to drive across the country to return home. We were to stay at our location until we could fly home. We were scheduled to fly back on Friday that week, but our journey got complicated, and our stay was slightly extended. We were lucky. We were safe, and although we weren’t able to return home until Sunday, we had a comfortable place to stay, food to eat, and work to do. The story of our attempts to get home is a bit jumbled, but in the grand scheme of things it is unimportant now compared to the trauma others suffered that week and in the weeks and months that followed. Continue reading →