---- — So much more than the New York City skyline changed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Our lives are affected  daily by the attack that felled the city’s tallest buildings.

We’re at war. Suspicion and tension heightened as the threat of terrorism became very, very real.

And there are smaller changes to how we do things that are normal now.

It’s hard to imagine kids will never know what it’s like to greet a loved one at the airport gate or to drive to Canada on a whim without a passport.

The morning the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked and another plane went down a couple hours from here near Shanksville, Pa., everything stopped.

The sense of shock was universal, but it didn’t sink in for me until I saw television footage of the planes hitting the towers.

Those images pack just as much of a wallop now, as does a visit to Ground Zero.

My husband Jeremy and I recently traveled to New York to visit our cousin Colin D. Jones, a Greenville native and busy costume designer who’s lived in the city about a year.

It was Jeremy’s first trip and only my second; it had been 16 years since my first when I took a photograph of the Twin Towers from the top of the Empire State Building that to this day hangs on my refrigerator.

Our hotel was in Jersey City, so our first and last daily stop in Manhattan was at the World Trade Center metro station.

Each time we climbed the stairs to the street level we were reminded of what happened 11 years ago and how unfathomable it must have been to the people who were there and in the weeks and months that followed.

My mother and I also recently visited the Flight 93 National Memorial off U.S. 30 outside Shanksville for the first time as our GPS took us right past it on a trip home from Virginia.

It’s a solemn place, far out in a field in the hills of rural southern Pennsylvania. A path along a short, black wall leads to one with the names of all the people killed when the hijacked plane went down.

The site of the crash is marked by a boulder in a clearing and it’s impossible to comprehend what those people went through.

My story from Sept. 11, 2001, is one I share with anyone who attended or worked in Sharon High School at the time.

It was the second day of classes, the school year pushed back by a construction project. I was student teaching in 11th grade English and that Tuesday I was supposed to take over all the classes and hit the ground running.

That didn’t happen.

In truth, I probably blew off the first couple kids who came in and claimed someone’d bombed us. I was nervous and that was such a ridiculous notion they had to be exaggerating.

I didn’t have an empty class until several hours into the day and when my supervising teacher turned on the television I was stunned silent.

I couldn’t process what was happening and had no clue how to deal with the freaked out teenagers who really weren’t much younger than I was.

We let the students talk about it and gave them a couple days before I bounded ahead with “Of Plymouth Plantation” and tried to make the kids care about the pilgrims who came to this country to practice their religion freely.

Those lessons were oddly applicable to what was going on in America as the nation wrestled with new fears and perceived enemies, some of whom were neighbors.

I had several Muslim students and a few of them opened up about what the aftermath of the attack was like for them and how people treated them differently.

In the decade since, I’d like to think that’s one more thing that’s changed.