It was the mid-1950s, and we

were in Dave's old Studebaker coupe heading for a weekend home with our

families.

About halfway to Harrisburg

from Gettysburg where we were students, we'd reached the darkest stretch

of U.S. 15, when suddenly the sky east of us lit up in a massive, pulsating

red glow.

The radio station continued

playing music without interruption. Traffic neither sped up nor slowed

down. There was nothing to tell us the meaning of the bright light on

the horizon.

For a long time after our initial

"What's that?" neither of us spoke. But we were both thinking

the same thing: The capital of Pennsylvania, or perhaps the Navy supply

depot at Mechanicsburg, had been the target of an atomic attack.

We were frightened, deeply

frightened, especially that such a horror could have happened while everything

around us looked so normal.

We learned much later that

the glow in the sky was caused by the pouring of molten slag at Bethlehem

Steel in Steelton, reflecting from a cloud bank. But that night, all we

knew was that we were living in times when the Soviet Union and the United

States had enough weapons pointed at each other to wipe out civilization

worldwide.

We knew people were building

fall-out shelters to protect themselves and their families. To what avail?

we argued. To live for weeks in subhuman conditions, only to emerge and

discover the world we had left no longer existed? And to face the certainty

of lingering radiation and terrible death?

A few years later, we had two

beautiful little girls and a brand-new baby, and I sat nursing her in

stark terror from news reports that the U.S. and Cuba (hence, the Soviet

Union) were facing each other down just 90 miles from our shores. Clearly

I remember wondering what kind of a world I had brought these children

into.

Young mothers think a lot about

"what ifs." What if there were a nuclear war and somehow our

babies survived us and were left helpless? It was more than we could bear

to think about.

What if Dave went to work one

ordinary morning and was hit by a car ­ he used to ride a bicycle

or a motor scooter to the plant; even with insurance, how could I pay

bills and a mortgage and take care of those children?

What if we were invaded and

our precious babies taken from us by harsh strangers?

Every one of these scenarios

has happened somewhere in the world, some time in our history. War in

one's own country, the loss of a spouse, single mothers working to survive,

homes torched, marketplaces blown up. From biblical times to this very

minute, these are the subplots of the history of the world.

I remember Pearl Harbor dimly,

as a child who noticed only that the grownups were very serious and worried,

but I remember the Cold War when it sometimes blew hot, and I remember

the death of a young president and not knowing whether it was the first

in a series (it was ­ a series of gifted leaders). I remember the

pit-of-the-stomach hopelessness that descended over me when I read, like

a fool, Nevil Shute's "On the Beach."

(I smile now, but it was so

real then that I nearly canceled an appointment to have the children's

teeth cleaned. What was the point of having perfect teeth if we were all

going to die?)

I remember the deaths that

paced alongside our lives: Daddy first, then my younger brother, then

a daughter, in-laws, mother) and I remember reacting, as so many do, to

ordinary, normal things. Look at those people walking down the street,

laughing, window-shopping, as though everything was all right. Don't they

realize it isn't?

You, you young toughs with

your sullen faces and dangling cigarettes ­ my brother was so bright

and good and talented. How dare you go on sneering and wasting your lives

when such a treasure has lost his?

It's different now. Our children

no longer need us and we feel free to leave this life, if it comes to

that, knowing they can do more for themselves than we can. The pit-of-the-stomach

despair is not part of what I'm feeling right now, although it probably

should be.

Deep sadness, yes. Death has

scarred us permanently. But we've seen, and seen, and seen the images,

and we've heard, over and over, the stories, heard stern rhetoric from

our leaders, and yet the cardinals are busy on the sunflower feeders.

The wren is warbling a new song she saved for the end of summer, and the

squirrels are raining walnut shells down on the porch roof.

Our sky is a clean, clear blue,

not a smudge of smoke or dust in it, and the mail comes and choirs practice

and school buses run. The library is open, committees still meet, the

church looks just as it did before Sept. 11, solid and safe, and sunlight

sifts through green leaves, spangling the deck. Contrails make chalk lines

on the sky, the Internet connects, and the crack of the bat is heard once

more, interspersed with commercials: "We'll be back after this."

Yes. We'll be back after this.

...

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