A year ago in “Diary of a Tragedy,” the NEWS printed the personal

stories of several people directly affected by the attacks of Sept. 11. Recently, those people were asked to reflect on the last 12 months.

This is one of their stories.

Nancy Manter:

“It’s been a sober year,” Nancy Manter said. At the end of January, she and her family were able to move out of their temporary hotel residence and back to their home two blocks from what now is ground zero.

Soon after returning to their Manhattan residence, Nancy Manter came down with pneumonia, which her doctor said was caused by the toxins in the air. Though she is feeling better, Manter lost her art studio in the attacks, and there are still questions concerning the air quality in the area as roads and streets are still being reconstructed.

Manter has been vacationing with her husband and two sons at the family’s Mount Desert Island home in West Tremont for the past three months, and planned to return to New York on Sept. 3.

Her youngest son often asks her, “Are we in a dream?” and the family has frequently referred to their life as feeling very much like “The Truman Show,” a movie about a character living in an artificial environment.

At the time she wrote her “Diary of a Tragedy” column, Manter was determined and wanted to stay in New York; however, her feelings now are mixed.

“There’s a lot of concern that New York is a target.” Her sons have had to get off trains several times due to bomb and terrorist warnings.

“We’re in kind of a limbo state,” Manter said.

By the time they left to come to Maine this summer, the family was “feeling a little vulnerable,” Manter said.

As far as commemorating the events of Sept. 11, the Manter family is still unsure of what they will do. Nancy Manter noted that the people who live below Canal Street in the city have experienced things differently than the rest of the world.

“We’ve been commemorating ever since we moved back – every day is a memorial,” Manter said. She hopes that this Sept. 11 will mark the beginning of a new chapter in the family’s life.

“We talk about it almost every night anyway,” she said. “Hardly a day goes by we don’t bring it up in some way because it had such a profound effect in our lives.”

Nancy Manter is a Maine native whose mother, Margaret Manter, lives in Veazie. The family spends summers in the Mount Desert Island Village of West Tremont.