The letter appeared in my South Florida mailbox in late August 2001.

It was hand-written by my younger brother, on dog-eared pages torn from a yellow legal pad I imagined he’d been carrying around for weeks.

It made me happy because it was a report from home — northern New Jersey, the New York Metropolitan area, the place where I grew up. I had moved to the Sunshine State four months earlier, and was still kind of homesick.

“Hey Mo. It’s a new day, even hotter than yesterday, and I’m sitting 112 stories below the top of the World Trade Center, sipping a beer, hiding from the sweltering heat outside that I must soon re-enter,” he wrote.

I remember smiling because I knew exactly where he was. It was a bar two floors below street level, beneath the 110-story twin skyscrapers that towered over Lower Manhattan. It was a place we sometimes met as we each commuted to and from work daily on the light-rail PATH train that ran under the Hudson River from New Jersey and into the station below the towers.

I worked, for about a year, a few blocks from the World Trade Center. That was my station. My brother got off at the next stop to get to his job in SoHo.

Little did I know how important that letter would become to me.

My brother wrote it two weeks before those buildings would be gone forever. It’s the only physical evidence I have of my connection with a place that — though 30 miles from Parsippany, N.J., where I grew up — I considered part of my neighborhood.

I was at a Starbucks in the Palm Beach Gardens Mall the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A man in line said someone had just bombed the Pentagon. Filled with dread, I left the coffee shop and went into the mall seeking information. I found a store selling televisions and watched, on a bank of TVs, as the news started to hit home.

I stood there, speechless, and watched the recorded footage of the planes crashing into the towers, the smoke, the flames and all the other horrific images we’ve seen repeatedly for the last 15 years.

I was frantic, and started calling N.J., trying to reach my parents and my brother on the telephone to see if everyone was alright. The lines were busy, busy, busy. Calls could not go through.

My brother was my greatest concern. He worked right there.

I tried calling his home in Jersey City for the umpteenth time and he answered. He had stayed home from work that day because he wasn’t feeling well.

I haven’t heard my brother cry many times in our adult lives, but he was sobbing. He was standing on the roof of his building, directly across the Hudson River from the towers, watching them burn. He saw them come down.

“They’re gone. They’re all gone,” he said.

That was all he could say.

No one in my family lost a life that day. We didn’t lose our homes, or our places of work, so I’ve always minimized the emotional impact 9-11 had on me.

The truth is, it changed everything for all of us, for every American.

For me, and others with New York City connections, it was just more personal. Almost everyone I knew had a friend, relative or association with someone who died in the towers. There were 64 people from Morris County, where I grew up, who lost their lives there.

I went back for a visit in 2002, and went downtown to Lower Manhattan, my old stomping grounds.

It was a difficult day. I had a hard time looking at the gaping hole where I had spent so much time with friends and family, or just walking through every day on my way from the train to work or home. I still can’t bear to think of the familiar faces, the people I bought coffee or lunch from, who were probably still there on that September day in 2001.

Memorials, wreaths and handwritten messages of tribute, thanks and despair still, a year later, adorned walls, fences and poles. I watched an old woman sob as she bent over and held her hand on a message scrawled on a hallway wall. It was overwhelming.

But the thing that affected me most when I returned was the lack of shadows from the towers. They were gone. I had a hard time finding my way around the area I knew so well, because it affected my sense of direction.

The sunlight felt wrong, like vulnerability.

Those skyscrapers and the shelter they provided from the sun once seemed so permanent, a towering testament to U.S. prosperity and ingenuity, and now they were gone, wrenched violently away from us, along with our sense of security.

I recall standing there near Ground Zero and feeling consumed with emotion as I considered the magnitude of our collective, traumatic experience as Americans.

Yes, it changed everything for all of us.

• • •

Maureen Dolan is city editor at the Coeur d’Alene Press. She can be reached at mdolan@cdapress.com.

Editor’s note: A version of this column was published in 2009.