Corn harvest Palmer's

When the cursed planes struck the World Trade Center towers that awful morning 14 years ago, I had just walked up from the New Haven train station to work at the Yale Alumni Magazine offices. I remember that it was an absolutely gorgeous late summer day—warm and clear... and completely inappropriate for what was about to come. I was told later that if you got to the top floors of one of New Haven's tallest buildings, you could actually see the smoke rising from the carnage in New York City, some 70 miles to the southwest. Today, on the anniversary of 9/11, the weather is somber, appropriately so. Half the local silage corn has been cut and the stubble has the feel of an elegy, each shorn stalk a quiet tribute to the nearly 3,000 people killed senselessly by madmen.