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It's funny -- the one image that's stuck to my mind on this sad, strange anniversary is one I never actually saw a year ago.

As this (thankfully inaccurate) crawl flashed on the screen, I was stuck in traffic trying to pick Aimee up from daycare, hearing that and a dozen other equally inaccurate bits of information as I flipped from radio station to radio station. And while the long car drive out to Reston and then home to Arlington wasn't exactly panicked, I couldn't help but look skyward every time I stopped in traffic and wonder what might happen next.

Those are the kinds of things that stick to my mind a year later -- the memory of walking out of a hotel meeting room in Tysons Corner and seeing black smoke billowing up from the horizon as the Pentagon burned. Then walking downstairs and passing by the bar, where at least 50 people were standing there frozen, staring dumbstruck at a TV just beyond my line of sight.

One year later, my one capitulation to Grief Porn, as I called the nonstop coverage in an unguarded moment, was to watch AP's live video feed in a tiny window on my computer. It was mostly static shots looking down at Ground Zero, deserted between morning and evening events. As clouds blew overhead on this blustery day, shadows and sunlight floated across the site, creating a haunting elegy for the cloudless day one year before. At one point, I looked out my office window and saw a tree-planting ceremony in front of a building across the street -- a simple ceremony, a small, almost frail-looking sapling. As was the case a year before, those were the things that left me speechless today--my own memories, my own experiences.