Before they built the Flight 93 National Park here, the locals would open up their homes with glasses of water and the use of their bathrooms.

It was and remains the best of America here.

It is hard to imagine that I’ve been coming here for 21 years. It is equally hard to imagine that God-willing, I won’t continue to come here for the next 21 years. There has never been a time I have not been brought to my knees in prayers and grief. I doubt there never will be.

For many of us, the thunder on this mountain that day is forever etched into part of who I am. I’m not sure what happened to the keepsake my children and I left here the day we came in 2001. It doesn’t matter, really. It was what we needed to do.