The year was 1936. I was seven years old. My family like millions of other families was caught in the monstrous tentacles of the depression. We were living in a four-floor walk-up on East Forty-Fifth Street in Brooklyn. It must have been sometime in the spring that my mother told me and my three older sisters - - at seventeen, Silvia was the oldest, Roslyn was a year younger and Gail was either fourteen or fifteen - - that we would be moving in a few days to a six-floor walku

Finding Words by Betsy Housten My city's drowning in ash. Folks been walking around in dust masks since the buildings fell. No cars allowed below 14th Street. Even the subway is quiet, listening. The President is calling for war. I do not want war. I do not want hot grey flakes of ashes to blanket any other city, nor the dead quiet that follows explosions and briefly masks the rending chaos on its heels. Enough streets have known such oblivion. Eleven days before Fall begins,