The Subtle Changes Since 9/11

She has had conversations on the subject with Roya Lovell and another neighbor, Faddia Gobi, who is Iraqi American. They both have made distant conflicts seem more real: Lovell's mother and sister were visiting Lebanon when the recent fighting with Israel started; Gobi has cousins in Baghdad.

Gobi is the one who keeps her minivan's tank filled up, just in case; the one who has television news on all day, just in case; and who, like Himes, moved to Piedmont to escape the underlying fear she felt living closer to the District, which, even here, she can't quite shake.

She sat in her living room recently on a sunny afternoon, looking out the window at the rolling green lawn.

"Look at how peaceful it is, how beautiful it is," she said. "But you never know when a bomb is going to fall."

A few weeks ago, she was visiting her family in Staunton, where her sister lives on 100 acres. They were out on the deck, having dinner and a pleasant conversation in the early evening.

"And we were like, 'Okay, if something happens, this is where we're meeting,' " she said. "We were joking, but it's not a joke. . . . It's in the back of your mind constantly."

Gobi's neighbor Nicole Parsons explained the effects of Sept. 11 this way: "I almost think it's an underlying, unspoken bond. My mom never talked about [World War II], but she lived it."

She forgets sometimes, but the trajectory of her life changed Sept. 11, when she and her boyfriend got more serious and decided to have a baby.

She left her job at the Washington Speakers Bureau, and they got married and moved from Alexandria out to Piedmont, where Parsons hoped they could escape a little bit from all those worries.

"It's almost like we're in our own safe little world . . . like when you go on vacation," she said.

Still, the worries have managed to seep in.

"It was 9/11, then it was Iraq, then all this fighting and the war in Lebanon and North Korea. And the more you hear, the less safe you feel. It's almost like 9/11 is what got the faucet going," Parsons said. "Now it's Hez-bo-llah -- I don't even know how to pronounce these things."

She'd never paid that much attention to world affairs before, but she's trying to now, she said. And if she doesn't fully understand how all the pieces fit or don't fit together, she knows one thing: Five years after Sept. 11, she is exhausted by it all. She is craving some relief.

It was dark on Chalfont Drive, and Parsons and Lovell set off for their nightly power walk in the neighborhood.

They bounded along the sidewalk under the stars and laughed, kind of, about Lovell's amoxicillin in the refrigerator. They strolled past spotlighted houses and white picket fences and said words such as "terrorism" and "bombing" into the quiet evening. They walked along stretches of golf green and talked about how they felt less safe than ever.

They passed a man taking out his garbage and joked about how they take note when Scott Charbo, the Department of Homeland Security official on their cul-de-sac, comes home especially late.

And after a couple of miles, they headed back home, breathing heavily.

"I'm very patriotic, and after 9/11, I was majorly patriotic," Nicole Parsons said, wiping sweat from her face. "But it's getting to the point now where everything is getting so out of control. . . . I do get to the point when I think: When is it enough? When can we stop?

"I feel like we're involved with everything that's going on in the world. I support my country, but at some point we have to stop. I just want it to stop."