From below.

Lo! a ripe sheaf of many golden days
Gleaned by the year in autumn’s harvest ways,
With here and there, blood-tinted as an ember,
Some crimson poppy of a late delight
Atoning in its splendor for the flight
Of summer blooms and joys­
This is September.

• Lucy Maud Montgomery, ‘September’.

The polls had been open for two hours when the first collision occurred. Words splattered all over the street that a small twin engine prop plane had crashed into the side of one of the towers. But when we looked across the East River, with the sky-scraping stalagmites in plain view, the flames spilling out of the top of the northern high-rise of the tallest building in New York City dispelled any rumor that a small aircraft caused that amount of damage. A trail of papers fluttered in the open air, like a horribly cruel ticker-tape parade, littering the Brooklyn sidewalks we stood on. When I picked one such discarded leaflet up— its edges singed, its surface sooted — the address on it read “1 World Trade Center”.

I didn’t see the second plane smash into the southern skyscraper, but I felt it. The explosion trembled throughout the atmosphere. This collision altered our reality. Fear suddenly replaced uncertainty. I remember falling against a tree just outside the poll site I managed that morning, trying to stabilize myself, when I heard President George W. Bush’s first words about the catastrophe pipe out of a nearby car’s radio: