NEW YORK Kathleen Britton is back visiting from Charlotte, and we're walking around her old neighborhood. This is the pocket park where kids play soccer, and over here is where the nice Chinese place used to be, and here's the esplanade where you can see the big Colgate clock on the other side of the Hudson River.

It's a warm and lovely Saturday in New York, and there's not much better than walking in New York on a beautiful day.

We go into an atrium called the Winter Garden and up a set of gorgeous marble stairs. At the top, there's a glass wall and a railing. People are leaning on the railing, looking out.

Kathleen has been talking the whole time. Now she's quiet.

Finally, she says: "This is where it was."

The hole that used to be the World Trade Center spreads out before us.

Today, 10 years after 9/11, we will try once again to fill that hole. There will be a long ceremony here at the World Trade Center site where people will read the 2,977 names of everyone killed in the 9/11 attacks, plus six killed in the World Trade Center attacks in 1993.

They also will grieve in Washington, where a plane hit the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pa., where another jet crashed into a field and where they dedicated a memorial on Saturday. But the world's attention will center on New York. Here is where the terrorists caused the most deaths, in the biggest buildings, in the most famous city on the planet. You can sum up the impact of 9/11 in five words: Our towers crumbled and fell.

Except Kathleen Britton can't quite see it that way. Because to her the towers weren't symbols or icons. They were where she shopped.

"Duane Reade, the drugstore, that's where you get your Target-type stuff," she says. "Godiva chocolates - soooo good. All the restaurants we could just walk over to. It was like the neighborhood mall."

Kathleen grew up in Charlotte, graduated from South Meck and then UNC Chapel Hill. After working a few years, she came to New York to get an MBA from Columbia and started working for investment banks. She stayed in New York for 20 years.

By 2001 she was working for Merrill Lynch and living three blocks away in Battery Park City. Forty years ago the neighborhood didn't exist; it was built on landfill from construction sites, including the dirt and rock excavated to build the World Trade Center. Kathleen had a condo on Rector Street and could see the twin towers from her bedroom window. They were only about 400 yards away.

She was about to leave for work on 9/11 when she heard the loud whine of a jet. She knew that noise, in that part of the city, wasn't right. But she looked out the window and didn't see anything. She couldn't see that the first jet had hit the north tower on the opposite side from where she lived. By the time she got downstairs, she saw the flames.

She had almost made it to her office when she saw the second jet flash overhead, just before it struck the south tower.

She wouldn't let herself be scared. She showed visitors where to go to find boats to get off Manhattan. She walked back home and called her mom. She was looking out her window when the south tower collapsed. Debris flew in all directions. A dust cloud covered the windows. Then, she was scared.

She remembered the nuns at St. Ann's back in Charlotte telling her it was OK to make an emergency confession. She figured she was about to die. So she took a shot.

Now she closes her eyes and she can see all the shoes on the esplanade. People ran right out of their shoes.

Ten years later, so much has changed. Merrill Lynch, crippled by 9/11, laid Kathleen off at the end of 2001. She eventually came back to Charlotte and now consults for companies including TIAA-CREF. She never works on Sept. 11.

At first she came back to New York every couple of months. Now it's been two years. They're rebuilding at the World Trade Center site - not just a memorial, but four new skyscrapers, including one that will rise to 1,776 feet - even higher than the twin towers.

But right now it's hard for Kathleen to see anything but the absence: "If you weren't here, and didn't live here, it's hard to understand what it's like to have two 110-story buildings rising over everything, as part of your neighborhood... and then to not have them there."

New York is still New York. You can hear 12 languages in line at the deli. A room-service omelet costs 25 bucks. Over at the Winter Garden, there's a read-a-thon for kids - and all of a sudden they turn it over to a punk band called Care Bears on Fire. "OK," the lead singer says, "the name of this first song is 'Barbie Eat a Sandwich.' "

New York is still New York. But not completely.

Kathleen Britton, survivor, looks out over the railing at where the World Trade Center used to be. It's full of construction cranes and dump trucks and men in hard hats.

But looking at it now, from up so close, it's hard to see how they can ever fill the hole.