It was a beautiful day, sunny and cool after weeks of rain. A perfect gardening day. I was outside early, carrying tools, bags of dirt and new plants to a corner of the yard back of the deck where the rocky ground sloped away to the fence. I'd been planning to do something with this little corner for a while, just waiting for the heat of summer to pass. I walked Monty to the car, kissed him goodbye, and turned to go as he started the motor. He said, "This is weird. NPR says a plane has hit the World Trade Center." I said, "What? An accident?" He replied, "I don't know." Shaking my head, I turned and went back into the house for a bottle of water to keep at hand for the sweaty work of putting in a new flower bed.

As I walked in the door, the phone rang. My best friend said, "Turn on the TV, the World Trade Center's been hit by a plane. They think it's terrorism." Still holding the phone, I reached for the remote and turned the channel to CNN, watching in horror and disbelief as the second plane tore through the other tower. The phone line was silent. What could we say? After a few words, we rung off to check on family and friends.

I woke up my daughter in San Diego to make sure her husband wasn't traveling, as he'd been to New York recently. He wasn't. She and I watched, eyes glued to the television, ears glued to the receiver as the Pentagon burned. What on earth was happening? It all seemed to surreal, just like a disaster movie. We stayed on the phone for an hour, watching, listening, trying to comfort each other. Monty called, saying his family couldn't reach either of his cousins, one of whom worked in the Pentagon, one in the World Trade Center. I called my office to ask about our company's office in New York: 200 employees in the WTC, 2,000 two blocks away. No one knew anything yet.

I sat in front of the television for hours, unable to look away, watching the same footage over and over, trying to absorb what had happened. I felt like I'd been punched me in the stomach and swallowed a boulder. Finally, I reached a saturation point. I walked outside, around back to my sacks of soil and pile of tools. I decided that my way of dealing with so much horror and ugliness would be to create something beautiful. This corner would become a memorial garden.

I turned up rocks and soil, edging the bed with large stones gathered from my mother's place in the hill country. I went inside to the television to see if there was anything new being reported. Back outside to work in the new soil and set the plants; tough, hardy things that can take the Texas heat and occasional vicious cold snaps - caladiums in the back where the shade was deep, rock rose and buttercups with their sprawling color, mounds of chrysanthemums, and variegated ground cover to fill in the gaps. Back to the television. Outside with water hose and fertilizer. Finally, filthy and exhausted, I plopped on the ground to look over my work. The sky was bright blue, the sun shining through the late blossoms of the crepe myrtle, and spattering my little garden with light. I tried to open my heart to all the beauty and all the horror, the dark and light of the yin/yang circle.