It’s eleven years since 9/11 and the destruction of the twin towers in downtown Manhattan in New York and yet it all feels so recent.

   I was in the kitchen helping my daughter get ready for school when I heard the news on the radio. I rushed to turn on the television and watched the images as they were replayed over and over again. First one plane and then another flying into the buildings, a plume of smoke rising, people running in the street and finally the buildings collapsing one after the other all in the space of about two hours. My immediate thought was if this can happen in New York then we are also at risk in New Zealand. I told my daughter she wasn’t going to school that day. I don’t know why I said that, the world suddenly seemed an unsafe place.

   On television we saw the firemen and those first on the scene going into the buildings to help and wondered if they would ever come out again. One woman passed a fireman on the stairs going up as she was coming down. She said: ‘He had such a nice face’.  Along with others I wrote an opinion piece for the Marlborough Express which was published. I talked about remembering to stop and smell the roses. It seems a bit trite now but it certainly gave us a feeling of community and of trying to spend more time with family and friends.

   Days later in the supermarket my daughter started crying and I asked her why. She said they were playing the same sad music they played on television when the Twin Towers were hit.

   A name started to surface as to who could be responsible, Osama bin Laden and an organisation called Al Quaeda. The President of the United States at the time, George Bush, retaliated by announcing the ‘War on Terror’ and invaded Afghanistan with the support of Britain. There was talk of Iraq having ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. Again I watched the bombing attacks on television and felt sympathy for civilians in another country.

   Osama bin Laden was eventually found in May 2011 and killed. Many believed the world would now be safer but conflict still continues in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It took a long time to decide on a fitting memorial for those who died on 9/11. A decade after the event the public could finally visit the site that had been referred to as ‘Ground Zero’ to view a National September 11 Memorial. The design enables people to walk past swamp oaks and lawns to the centre where the Twin Towers once stood. Here there are two huge pools set in the ground on the exact footprint of the original 110-storey buildings with waterfalls cascading down over granite. Around the pools are etched the names of the nearly 3000 people who were killed on 11 September 2001 in the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and on United Airlines Flight 93. There are also the names of the six people killed in the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993.  A museum is also planned for the site.

   The architect who designed the memorial, Michael Arad said in an interview that he wanted to create a place of 'quiet reflection' in the city and the sound of the water allows this to happen drowning out trucks and other city noises. With the creation of two voids, both with waterfalls and where the pools never fill and the water vanishes underground, he wanted to represent what is no longer here and yet in some way it still is. A tree which stood in front of one of the tower buildings survived the destruction, was removed from the site, nurtured back to life and replanted on the memorial site. It is the first tree to flower in spring, weeks ahead of all the others, a symbol of hope, and people have their photographs taken in front of it.

    As a result of 9/11 security was tightened at airports around the world, anti-terrorist measures were put in place and in Picton we lost access to the main shipping wharf.