A life forever changed

By Lyn Riddle  

SEPTEMBER 8, 2011 11:13 a.m. (0)

Karen Clardy was in New Jersey on Sept. 11, 2001 to work with a jewelry consultant.

When she left her hotel for the meeting, people were looking up at the sky, across the Hudson River to New York City.

“Something just hit the tower,” someone said.

“My husband, my husband’s in there,” a woman said.

She saw the smoke, and then later came the smell – thick and metallic and oddly like hair set on fire.

Her dad, Den Childress, was flying from Greenville to meet her. She didn’t know where he was. His plane was due to land about that time. Was he in that plane? Her cell phone didn’t work.

Meanwhile, in Greenville, her mother was caring for Clardy’s children, then ages five and one.

“She hit the floor when she saw it,” Clardy said.

Clardy spent the day in the consultant’s office, then walked back to her hotel. People were coming off the ferry from Manhattan. White dust covered them.

“They looked like ghosts,” she said.

The hotel was out of food and water. People were laying around the lobby.

“It felt like a war zone,” she said.

She talked to a group of women who could not get back home to New York City. All transportation had closed. They told her about a friend – a single mother – so distraught over what was happening with her child, she jumped the National Guard barricade and ran through the Lincoln Tunnel.

It was much later that Clardy learned her father’s flight had been diverted back to Charlotte.

The next day she went to a friend’s house in another part of New Jersey, rented a car and drove home.

In the years since, Clardy has had another child, remarried and her 20-year career in the jewelry business ended when she closed Childress Jewelers.

“It was time,” she said. She’s since become a stay-at-home mom and taken up oil painting. She has a child in high school, another in middle school and her youngest in elementary school.

That day in 2001 for her was a brush against one of the nation’s most tragic events, a footnote to history.

But it has had lasting effects.

Ten years later, she knows that day changed her life.

“I learned not to take anything for granted, our freedom, our life,” she said. “Take risks, say yes.”