Opinion : The view from my corner of the world

It's a date and time everyone remembers. It's the event that our generation will always remember.

At the time, we were living in Washington AND Independence.

Washington had just been hit with a storm similar to our July storm around September 9th, 2011. We had just returned to Washington, opened the door to our apartment to find the ceiling had collapsed.We spent the night in the soggy apartment and left to come home on the 10th. On the 11th, I THOUGHT we'd get to sleep in and recover from the 400 miles we had travelled in the last 2 days.

September 11, 2001. Shortly after 8:46 a.m. Bethany came running into my room, "A plane just hit a building in New York!" I assured her it was an accident.

At 9:03 she came running back in to tell me the second plane had hit. Immediately I knew we were under attack.

At this point Dean was 100 miles away...I had all 6 of the kids, and didn't have a clue what was happening. I immediately [VIDEO] called him at the office to tell him.

I hurriedly got the kids dressed, made sure their tummies were fed and headed to my parents house. When you don't know what to do, you run to mom and dad.

We sat and watched the reruns, time after time, and still couldn't believe what we were seeing.

After a long day of trying to figure out what was happening, and deciding it was safe in our little world, we returned home to gas lines across the street from our house, where people were lined down the street to fill their gas tanks. The last time I saw that was in the 80's, and knew that this wasn't good.

The stations had spiked the prices of gas which was around $1.50 a gallon to over $2 and $3 a gallon our town and it continued to rise the rest of the night.

Now, I usually put up with a lot of junk from people around me, and don't confront them about it. But this kicked my backbone into the stiff position, and the more I realized what exactly had been done on OUR soil, for no reason at all, it made me angry.

When we returned to our house, which prominently sat on main street, I sent the boys to the attic to locate some cardboard flag signs that we had. We decorated our balcony with flags around the front of our balcony and dug out the Christmas lights, to light the flags up. As we did it, I explained to the kids that we were under attack, and explained that this is what we were going to do to send the message to the bad guys that they may have hit us, and hit us hard, but we still believed in our country!

I remember one of them asked, "What good is this gonna do?" I explained that of course it wasn't going to help anyone in New York, but it WAS helping us, and it was a reminder that we have something really special here, a free country...and we needed to stand together as a country at this time, so that's what we were doing, we were showing everyone where we stood.

It was one of those times that your heart swells out of your chest, and you knew it was the right thing to do. For the next few days we had cars drive by and honk.

We heard "God Bless America" sung, played, spoken so many times over the next month. No one complained one time that we needed a separation of church and state at this time. As a matter of fact asking God to bless us was probably the ultimate insult to the Muslims who believed that their God had instructed them to initiate this destruction.

There was prayer everywhere, everyone begging God to protect us. To help our country. To be with the rescue worker. To be with the injured. The families of the missing, injured and dead.

For the first time in a long time, everyone was flying flags. Everyone put politics aside and asked how they could help.

The numbers of enlistees jumped in all the military branches.

As Americans, the attack made us a stronger country. It made us all stand together.

It hasn't been an easy recovery, especially for those who lost a loved one or was injured in this attack.

The political fall out from going to war, has been great. I honestly don't get that. I remember the feeling on 9/11 that whoever had done this needed the favor returned.

I remember hearing how America deserved what we got.

Today we still hear how we were terrible to go and kick some butt overseas...but I will never forget the fear, the anger, the rescuers, the tears on 9/11.

This wasn't the first time we'd been attacked, we had been in '93 as well.

We lost 7 people then and others injured. Maybe it was the lack of internet ability, but now, 10 years after 9/11 these folks will finally be remembered.

The ones responsible for this attack have changed a lot of things for our country. Mainly our thinking, and bringing us to the realization that we are no longer in a peace loving world, we probably never were, we were just naive.

To all of our men and women who have served, to the rescuers that served, to the folks that we lost, that were injured and the families that still suffer everyday because of this, we won't forget.