Twenty years. There are many moments that stay with me from 9/11, memories from throughout the day that still resonate two decades later. The smell. The nearly-overwhelming emotions. The sight of the Twin Towers burning against the perfect blue September sky.

We did not have family or close friends in the Towers that morning, although we do know people who lost their lives and a number of people (many of them former students) who were working in the World Trade Center complex and survived. So what I remember about that day, how I felt then and now about the attack, pales in comparison to the grief and sorrow carried by the families of those who were killed as well as survivors and their families. That’s important to acknowledge here before I talk about how I experienced that day.

Gerry and I took the train from Sheepshead Bay that morning. He was on his way to teach at St. Francis College while I was going in to CUNY Graduate Center to do some work in the library before my class. As we neared the Court Street station, I decided that, since it was early, I would go to the college with Gerry for a while before heading into Manhattan.

When we got to St. Francis, a colleague met us in the hall and told us that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers. We went up to the roof and, like many other people, said that it seemed like something out of a movie. A while later, after hearing that a second plane had hit the other Tower, we went up again. Another colleague was on the roof weeping; she had seen the second plane hit. The third time we went up, the Towers were gone.

In the midst of all this, I was trying to telephone my parents. Time and again, the circuits were busy; I can only imagine what they were feeling. Finally, amazingly, I got through. We’re together. We’re in Brooklyn. We’re okay. That was what I told them, then I asked my mom to call my sister, my grandmother, and others because I knew I would have little to no chance to get another call out.

We were in a visual vacuum at the college. There were no television screens throughout the building as there are now, so we were getting our news from the radio and the reception was sketchy. As the day progressed, we decided to go up to the President’s Office because – having worked as Dr. Macchiarola’s administrative assistant – I knew that the radio would be working on that higher floor. A number of us were listening, stunned and mostly silent, as the reporters described what they were seeing at what would come to be called Ground Zero. Suddenly, a young man who used to work for Dr. Mac and who was now with the New York Fire Department, came in. I couldn’t process what I was seeing – at first, I thought he was covered with white paint, then I could see it was some sort of gray dust. Then he explained that he had been down to the collapse site looking for his wife. She had recently gone back to work at the World Trade Center after giving birth to their daughter. He wasn’t a firefighter but because he had FDNY credentials he was able to get onto the rubble piles. He did not find her and we would subsequently learn she was killed in the attack.

Our daughter by choice, a young woman we met when she was a student at St. Francis, was finally able to get a call through to us to let us know she was okay. She had walked from her job at Macy’s and was able to get on a boat and get off Manhattan Island. I eventually heard from a dear friend who lived on the Upper East Side, and he was okay. As the day progressed, we heard from the people we had been worried about, and they were all okay.

The New York subway system suspended all service at 10:20 a.m. (some trains in Lower Manhattan had stopped earlier because they lost power) but the good folks there were able to get most of the trains up and running again by about 12:48 that afternoon. A few hours later, Gerry and I headed home on the Q train, and I remember the gorgeous September afternoon sun, golden and bright, shining through the windows as we came above ground. There were people in the car with us, although it was far from full. Two women who appeared to be mother and daughter were speaking occasionally and softly, as were Gerry and I, but the car was mostly silent except for the rumble of the wheels on the rails and the squeal of brakes as we rounded a corner or came into a station.

When we got out at Sheepshead Bay, we were surprised to find that we could smell the Towers from down there at the bottom of Brooklyn. It was a distinctive odor, one I have never been able to describe, acrid and cloying and persistent. All that day and into the night, and then for days afterward, we could hear fighter jets passing overhead as they patrolled the city skies. Even here, reminders of the attack were ever-present.

On Thursday the 13th, Gerry was going in to teach. The Graduate Center was not yet holding classes, so I stayed in the apartment. He left for the subway and I remember thinking as he was leaving that it would be okay. Then the door shut and I heard him go down the stairs and I burst into tears. Everything about living in New York suddenly seemed incredibly dangerous. Everything was a target: subways, buildings, parks, plazas.

When I went in to classes the week following 9/11, Gerry rode in with me on the train. When we went up on the Manhattan Bridge everyone on the car grew silent and we all turned to look toward where the Towers should have been and saw nothing but sky. In my class, the professor asked that we pull our tables closer together, saying he didn’t feel like being so far away from us. Every time a subway train would stop unexpectedly, we wouldn’t think that someone was ill but instead would wonder if there was another attack. We told our friends we loved them much more often. We looked to the skies every time we heard a plane. And, in time, we settled in to lives that were changed but still livable.

Whenever I think of the events of 9/11, there is one memory that persists. This is the memory that I hold onto, the one that offered me solace in the midst of sorrow and fear on 9/11 and continues to do so today:

When it was time for Gerry’s afternoon class, the college was fairly empty. Many people had left when the subways began running, but we waited because Gerry said that he wanted to be in the classroom if students showed up. He told me he would stay for a little while and if no one came to class he’d come back and we’d go home.

Five minutes turned into 10 and I started to wonder whether he was actually teaching a class, so I went down and peeked into the room. There was Gerry, sitting in one of those student chairs with the writing surface attached to the arm with a hinge. Just in front of him, not quite close enough for her knees to touch his, sat a young woman, a student, in the same type of chair. She was speaking, and he was listening. Those of you who know my husband know what it means for Gerry to listen to you. He focuses on you. He really hears you. He really sees you. As the student spoke, his entire attention was on her and what she was saying. When she paused, he began to speak quietly.

I did not try to hear what either of them was saying. This was a moment between the two of them and I didn’t want to interrupt or interfere. So I turned and went back upstairs and waited for my husband to finish what he was doing. When he did, we left for home.

That is the memory I cherish, the one that helps anchor me when I am watching anniversary broadcasts and reading first-person accounts of 9/11 and its aftermath. The memory that shows me that even in the midst of devastation, there can be moments – small and quiet as they might be – of grace.

Next week a new academic year begins, and we are preparing to reenter what a friend of mine called “the maelstrom that is our lives” in academia. This means we are finishing up things here in Maine and preparing for the roister and roil of a new semester in Brooklyn.

Which has me thinking a lot about the idea of “home.” What do we mean when we talk about our home? When my childhood friends ask, “When are you coming home?,” by home they mean the town in which I grew up, the town where my parents still live. My friends in New York ask the same thing, but by home they mean Brooklyn. And wherever we are living at the moment, I will refer to that place as home (as in, “Look at the time! have to be getting home.”).

Obviously, this is not a problem. We are lucky to be able to spend time happily in two different places. What I mean when I say I have been thinking about the idea of home is that I have been considering what “home” means to my students (and, by extension, to me).

I teach in a commuter college, so many of my students still live at home with their parents. For them, there is no hanging out in the dorm’s common room until the wee hours of the morning, eating pizza and watching junky movies. More often than not, they leave the college to go to work, then to their family’s home to study before getting some sleep. They have not yet made homes of their own, a prospect that both excites and worries them as they contemplate graduation, finding a job, finding a spouse. Yet even as they face life after commencement, they are grounded to their sense of home as a physical place to which they return at the end of each day.

This is not the case for the students who come from someplace other than the five boroughs. Some of them are from other states, some from other countries. In my freshman courses I am always amazed at the number of students who say they arrived in New York mere days before the start of Fall classes; while some are staying with family, others have to find apartment shares or other places to live after they arrive.

For these students, the ones whose families are far away, the idea of “home” is a lot more complicated. Even if they have not explicitly thought it through, they have an innate understanding that they have, in some way or another, lost the home they once had.

I don’t mean to suggest that a student who moves to New York to go to college can never return home again. She most likely will go home, whether to visit family or to live, but something will have changed. Or, rather, some things will have changed. Her home will seem different because it is different (despite the childlike belief we all have that when we leave a place it goes into stasis until we return), but it will also seem different because she is different. The very act of moving to another place will have fundamentally changed her, and she will not see her home in the same way as she did before. Yet some part of her will always consider that place home.

This is what we are getting at when we talk about someone’s hometown. “Hometown” is understood to mean the place where a person grew up, not necessarily the place where she makes her home now. “Hometown” acknowledges that we are influenced in many ways by the place where we grew up, and that we continue to be influenced by it (some more than others) throughout our lives. And that each of us — even those who end up living their whole lives in their hometowns — finds that in some way or other we lose that home as we get older.

Which brings me back to those students who are living at home while going to college. For they, too, will find that their homes have changed by the time they graduate. The separation is not as sudden, nor as obvious, as it is for the students who move to the city to attend school. But in the end that separation does occur. That physical place, home, will seem different to them in much the same way that it seems different to students “from away” (as we would say up in Maine). And this is as it should be.

This question of leaving/losing home is one that recurs throughout my teaching. In many courses (both composition and literature) I use the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. This villanelle talks about “the art of losing” and examines the ways in which personal loss, even devastating loss, can be borne. In the poem Bishop talks about losing names, cites and places (among other things), and I find that often the most fruitful and rewarding discussions we have as a class will be about the question, “How can you lose a place?” My students from away often nod in agreement as we discuss what it means to move, to leave behind a home, a family, even a country. The students who still live at home also recognize something of themselves in this idea of a lost place; they may still have to “practice losing farther, losing faster” before they recognize the loss, but the loss is there nonetheless.

Most of them don’t know it yet, but the “art of losing” a home is bittersweet. It is what fuels nostalgia, what gives a hint of melancholy to even the most enjoyable trip back to one’s hometown. It is why I think wistfully of how my hometown will look and feel as August gives way to September and the days shorten and cool, while we are “back home” in Brooklyn. It is why I miss the ocean when I am away from Maine (yes, I know, New York is a port town, but I mean the ocean that opens before you and sends waves rolling to crash against the shore) and why I find myself thinking it would be nice to stay put instead of taking the train south next week. This doesn’t mean I don’t like living in Brooklyn; I do. It just means that, like my students, I have lost the home I once had and, while I have a new home where I am very happy, I still haven’t quite mastered “the art of losing.”

So. . .the title.

While contemplating starting this blog, I found myself thinking a lot about who I am, what my interests are, the things that amuse and enrage and downright puzzle me. About my artistic and academic work, and the places where those two parts of my life overlap (imagine a Venn diagram with rhymes).

I found that I kept coming back to the Victorian idea of the “unnatural woman.” Perhaps it’s the phrase itself. Or the Victorian paradigm of the Angel in the House and how everything (and I mean everything) that fell even a little outside of that paradigm was considered unnatural for a woman.

The list of things that made a woman “unnatural” in the Victorian Era is long. (And let’s be honest and acknowledge that we could say the same thing about today, although some items on the list have changed.) A woman who was an author was unnatural. A woman who married late, or not at all. Women who entered into a Boston Marriage. Women who worked at a job outside the home. Women who traveled alone. Women who wanted the vote. Women who wanted an education. Women who were artists. (When I discuss this with my students in class, I point out to them that I fit into an appallingly amusing – or is it amusingly appalling – subset known as the “unnatural wife”: a married woman with no children. They are horrified, and indignant on my behalf, which is kind of sweet when you think about it.)

These women who lived outside the norm were the unnatural women. The “odd” women. The “redundant” women. They were known by many names (not all of them unique to the Victorians): bluestocking, suffragette, spinster, adventuress, strumpet.

These were my sisters, the ones who came before. Not just them, of course. But in thinking about how I would describe myself for this blog, it was “The Unnatural Woman” I kept coming back to.

So. . .here I am.

I have no set expectations for this virtual journey, just an idea that there will be things I wish to write about that don’t fit neatly into either my poetic or academic lives (there’s that idea of fitting in again). Will I blog at least once a week? I hope so. Can I promise I will do so? Um, no.

However often I do post, I will be talking about teaching, about poetry, about feminism. About those things that amuse and enrage and puzzle me. And I hope that you will enter into a dialogue with me about these things. That you will join this Unnatural Women on her journey.