September 11, 2026
Twenty-five years ago this morning, an ordinary Tuesday stopped. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania, and the country has carried that morning ever since.
Where were you? Most of us can answer without thinking. A classroom, second period, when a teacher stopped mid-sentence and turned on the television. An office on Kirkman Road, everyone crowded around one desk. A kitchen in MetroWest, phone already ringing, a neighbor on the line asking if you’d seen the news.
We remember who was sitting next to us. We remember how quiet the room got. We remember being scared, and not knowing what would happen next, and having no idea how to explain any of it to the kids in front of us.
Twenty-five years have not blurred those details. Ask anyone in MetroWest who lived through that morning and they won’t give you a summary. They’ll give you a room, a face, a feeling. And for a whole generation of our neighbors who were too young to remember, or not yet born, those stories are how the day stays real. That is what this anniversary asks of us: to remember, and to keep telling it.
It also asks something else. September 11 is now a National Day of Service, built on the idea that the best answer to that morning is to be useful to someone else. Check on a neighbor. Give blood. Buy a stranger’s coffee. Small things, done on purpose.
If you’d like to gather with the community tonight, the Orlando Fire Department will hold its 9/11 Remembrance and Candlelight Ceremony at 7 p.m. at Fire Station 1, 78 W. Central Blvd. downtown, lighting 404 candles for the first responders lost that day. Details at orlando.gov.
Twenty-five years. We still remember.
