Weekly Photo Challenge: Dense

This week’s photo challenge made me immediately think of my city’s landscape. New York City is dense, to say the least. This photo however, is not one of my best, but it is one of my favorites of New York City. It was taken with an old point and shoot having maybe 5 pixels. I knew nothing of how to use a camera, but I did know that I caught something special. September 11, 2011… the ten year anniversary of that tragic day.

I remember, clear as day, watching the devastation unfold on 9/11/01 as I curled up with Dale on the couch in our Rochester apartment. I had just began my first year as a teacher only days before and we were in the middle of planning our wedding. Finding myself widowed and actually living in New York City ten years later was not even something I could have conjured in my wildest dreams, or nightmares.

But there I was on 9/11/11 living in New York City and a fresh widow of only 4 months. My parents were in town visiting that weekend because my son was born on 9/9/09. I decided to take advantage of having them there and took off to the Brooklyn Bridge to see The Tribute in Lights.

It was a cloudy night. Dense. So dense that the 2 spotlights that stand in and represent The Twin Towers looked instead like one bright light. What I found to be so powerful about this night and the imagery that was created by the clouds was that they absorbed the lights and dispersed it on top of the entire city. New York City glowed that night and it was absolutely mesmerizing. It was heart-wrenching. It was solemn. It was beautiful.

I was so captivated that I found myself crossing the bridge from Brooklyn into Manhattan and down to Ground Zero. The people, the emotions, the aura… that was a whole other level of dense.

Dense