As she knelt on the sidewalk to zip up his jacket he asked, "Mommy, where is your work?"

"It's gone, baby. That's why I brought you here. So you can see."

The child put his hand on his mother's shoulder and looked solemnly into her eyes. "No, Mommy," he said, "I mean your Tower. Where is your Tower?"

"It's gone baby. It's all gone," his mother said, lifting him up to look.

The site of the destruction is strangely intimate. It is like a doctor's waiting room; someone cries and you feel terrible for them, and you feel intrusive, and you feel scared. Everything going on there has a quality of closeness. But it is like something else, also.

It doesn't smell the way I thought it would. I expected the smoke, described by many as acrid, to smell like a house had burned. Not so. The air is filled with heavy grit and smells like burning electrical wires. It is a dreadful, unnatural smell. It seems to penetrate your clot

This ground was profaned by an act of such wickedness that we still can't fathom it. It is as if the Devil himself brought his huge fist down in the center of lower Manhattan and left a smoldering, stinking hole heaped full of melted dreams and families and industry. When our President began to refer to the conspirators and perpetrators of this horror as "the evildoers" I remember thinking it was a little too theatrical. Now I think differently. I wouldn't choose those words, but I think I understand where they come from. We really cannot connect the results of these acts to a human initiator, not even to a conspiracy of human initiators. We can't get our minds around it. Or our hearts. We want to believe that this evil is supernatural, that it has nothing to do with us, or how we are made, or how we think and act. We want to believe that we can have no part in it. Ever. These acts destroyed much more than buildings and even lives. They punctured our confidence that we are safe. They ridicule the ideal of fair play that Americans worship (even if we imperfectly act out that ideal).

This place is holy ground, and as the song reminds us, when "we are standing on holy ground...there are angels all around." Today the angels are resting in eternity. They are digging a ditch. They are gazing silently at a broken building. They are lifting up their little son to see why Mommy doesn't go to work anymore. They are the most powerful encou

Some topics in this essay:
Yolo County, Tower It's, Ground Zero, Mommy It's, Ground It's, Trade Center, Apostle John, holy ground, it's gone, gone baby, standing holy, it's gone baby, death camps, ground ground, holy ground ground,