AHWATUKEE (USA): Five years. Is it enough time to begin moving on?

Is it enough time for the physical scars to mend? A crater remains where the towers soared, but the hum of construction promises new life, one day, in the void.

Time heals, or so the saying goes. But when the hurt is so great, so unlike anything Americans have ever known, how much time does it take? And how much change does that time bring, to American as a people and as individuals?

Every day the past and the present collide in Barbara Minervino’s life — in a household chore, in other ordinary acts, in a stranger’s question.

“Are you divorced?”

On a cruise, a rare escape, another passenger wonders why there’s no man by her side.

“No, I’m a widow,” she replies.

“Oh ... heart attack?”

Then Minervino has to decide, yet again, whether to explain that her husband Louis was murdered by terrorists in tower one of the World Trade Center a few weeks shy of his 55th birthday.

At home, she balances the cheque book, changes the light bulbs, has to know which night the trash goes out on the curb. But she remembers how Lou once took care of those things, how she relished being his protected princess in their 25 years of marriage.

“I’m here. I’m alive,” she says at her home in Middletown, New Jersey. “But if you ask me if I’m living, I’m not quite sure about that because there were two parts, and he’s the other part that I’m missing.”

On September 21, 2001, Minervino and her two daughters held a memorial for Lou, although the family had nothing to bury.

On September 6, 2002, the New York City medical examiner’s office called to report a fragment of Lou’s right shoulder had been found. It would be another year before Minervino could bring herself to bury it.

Minervino has learned how to go on. But really moving on? That’s not so easy. Her mind says forgive; her heart screams don’t. Her mind accepts that Lou’s gone; her heart wants to keep him alive. “I still feel very much a part of a pair,” she says.

For a long time, the first year maybe, ground zero still felt like Esther Regelson’s Main Street.

She could picture the coffee shop where she and her boyfriend fed the sparrows. The Amish produce market where she shopped. The place she bought lottery tickets. The book store.

She lived two blocks from the World Trade Center for 23 years. The stores at the bottom of the twin towers were her haunts, as comforting as home itself.

On September 11, the second jumbo jet to fly into the towers went right over her apartment building. She and her two cats were evacuated by boat to New Jersey.

When she returned six months later, ground zero was closed off by police barriers while it was cleaned of debris and bodies, then guarded by a metal mesh fence while the prolonged battle played out over what to build there and who would pay for it.

Now, what Regelson calls ‘the Grand Canyon’ and ‘the big hole’ is as much a part of the neighbourhood as the tall buildings and the Amish market were. Work has begun on a memorial and a skyscraper that will extend 1,776 feet into the sky, or just over 538 meters. The height in feet evokes the year of America’s independence, and the structure has been christened the Freedom Tower.

Construction is occurring 70 feet (21 meters) below ground — heard but not often seen.

“I can’t even picture anything else there right now,” Regelson says. “It’s so become part of my subconscious.”

While she waits for something to emerge from the hole, the tiniest glimmers of her past have returned.

She calls them red-letter days. The day her hallway was cleaned of the white dust that congealed into stringy shreds in her hands and caked everything she owned. The day the electricity came back on. The reopening last year of a restaurant across the street that she never favoured — until it disappeared.

The big hole has gouged a permanent chasm in the quality of her life. But she can’t afford to move and really doesn’t want to. She was devastated last month by word that a developer’s plans to build market-rate condos could force her out.

Peter Chase sits behind his desk, his life before and after 9/11 on display all around him.

There is the picture of the carousel where he worked on his first job. The red, white and blue banner that welcomed patrons a few years ago to the newly renovated public library he now oversees in Plainville, Connecticut.

Then there’s the cartoon depicting a lineup of librarians under interrogation, and a poster that warns:

“Shhhhh! Keep silent while we rifle through your personal records.”

A soft-spoken man in shirt sleeves and striped tie, Chase once defended the right of libraries to stock a racy Madonna book. It was, at the time, a big controversy. Then came the Patriot Act, an FBI demand for library records as part of a terrorism probe and the fight that turned Chase into a champion of American ideals.

“I never expected to be called on to defend the Constitution,” he says.

The debate over the delicate balance between maintaining civil liberties and fighting terrorism has only intensified in the years since September 11, with details still coming to light about secret programmes conducted in the name of national security.

This year words like ‘warrantless wiretapping’ became part of the nation’s lexicon. Civil rights activists called for investigations into reports that phone companies had forked over records of ordinary citizens’ calls for a National Security Agency database.

And Chase was revealed as one of several ‘John Does’ in a constitutional fight challenging the government’s power to demand library records without a court order. The FBI directive prohibited Chase from acknowledging any role in the matter. He could tell his wife only that he was involved in a secret case. He promised his son that he didn’t ‘expect’ to be arrested.

The case ended in June after authorities discounted the threat they were investigating.

But Chase sees the world through newly cynical eyes. When he learned the government had been listening to international phone calls without warrants, he wondered if his own calls had been monitored.

“We have to swing much more back in the direction of freedom and open government and trust in democracy,” says the librarian who has found his true calling. “We are far too secretive.”—AP