9/11

Today is almost as beautiful as it was 11 years ago today. It's also Tuesday like it was that day, too. I didn't know it, but it was my last year of teaching in a public High School setting.

I remember it like yesterday. LuAnn and I were newly married and had taken our first camping trip across America. She was working for the Clermont County Planning Commission in Batavia and I was up the road at CNE High School.

She called during second period class and said a jetliner had just hit the World Trade Center. We both knew it was probably no accident so I turned on the classroom TV but it was wired to the school cable and I couldn't get a local station.

I got a clothes hanger out of my office and made a crude antenna on the back of the TV after unhooking the cable. I could get all 3 Cincinnati TV Stations. I got it on just in time to watch the second plane fly into the south tower with my juniors and seniors. Perhaps it wasn't right or moral or ethical to do that but that's what I did.

My job quickly turned from teacher to counselor like it usually did. My students came to school with heaps of problems every day and I always felt like I had to counsel before I could teach. Maybe that's why the main office sent me so many troubled students.

The power of the moment reminded me of being back in Blanchester when a similar thing happened. My agricultural science class was watching the launch of the space capsule that exploded at the second stage and took all the astronauts lives. I did a lot of counseling that day, too.

We knew at both moments that life as we knew it would never be the same again, just like WWI or II or the stock market crash and so on and so on. We were watching history happen very quickly.

Life is much different now. Americans are much less trusting people, at least some of us are. Airplane travel will never be the same. America is different, the world is different.

Some things haven't changed, though. I am still scouting soybeans for seed. I was on my way to Xenia listening to coverage about 9/11 on EWTN on my favorite AM radio station. Those beans are almost ready to harvest but resistant weeds will slow that harvest and dirty the sample.

I saw Allen Collett shelling his dead Pioneer corn hard and fast and wondered what the samples were like. You know farmers are curious and I am really curious. I would guess 150 bushel plus, 20% moisture and decent test weight. I almost stopped to asked but I don't know Allen or his crew that well.

I did hear that a load from Clermont County got rejected for aflatoxin. That is not good news from my area but I also heard many are coming back zero so hopefully it's an isolated case.

Aflatoxin and ADM is in the news on Crop Talk and it is not good. We shouldn't have much if any here but anything is a possibility, especially with this sick corn I have been telling you about now for a year.

Just like 11 years ago, things are not the same from simple everyday life to very complex national world issues. Things have changed in my life and I am sure they have in yours, also.

Kudo's to the fire departments with ladder trucks, flashing lights and flags out. I do remember and I won't forget to pass this on to my grandchildren.

Ed