My memories of the first edition of the Current Newspaper – published five years ago this week – are indelible. We were putting the finishing touches on a new newspaper when planes crashed into the World Trade Center.

The debut of our little paper was not the best edition of the Current ever produced, but it gets points for even coming out.

I had arrived in Maine the month before to help publisher, Lee Hews Casler, start the paper by Sept. 13. She and I shared a standing joke.

“How hard can it be? We’ve done this before.”

It turns out with all our years of experience, we had never done what we were about to do – put out the first edition of a weekly paper as the entire country reeled from a terrorist attack on our own turf.

No cognizant person alive then can forget the horror of seeing the explosion of the twin towers, and nothing else seemed relevant or important.

All our planned stories looked feeble next to the only thing people cared about – that somebody had flown planes into the World Trade Center and thousands were dead. We all felt vulnerable.

I did what a lot of people did that night – I cried, called my mother and prayed.

And, then the staff at the Current got to work and put out a paper. We had one reporter, Jeff Inglis, out on the street, and the other, Kate Irish Collins, was stuck on the West Coast under the no-fly rule. I remember Jeff lamenting that people didn’t really want to talk to a perfect stranger for a story in a newspaper they’d never heard of.

I still wince when I see the headlines side by side: “Blasts shake community’s peace of mind” next to “Learn to grow a giant pumpkin.”

The best work we did that week was preparing to make the next week’s edition better and the one after that even more so, until you see what you’re reading today.

In a lot of ways, the growth of the newspaper company was a mirror of what was going on in the country. Dedicated people shook off their own personal grief, put one foot in front of the other, and got the job done.

The Current is now part of a newspaper group of eight wonderfully local newspapers that give people in more than 30 communities a voice and a forum. The editor is someone I’m proud to say I hired as a reporter – Brendan Moran – who continues to make next week’s papers better than the week before.

My life too has changed in positive ways.

In the weeks leading up to Sept. 11, I met my husband, Robert Wallack. He convinced me to move my newspaper career from Massachusetts to Maine.

I fell in love with someone who not only got me through the incredible sadness and isolation of 911, but always sees the promise in tomorrow. We got married on Sept. 6, 2003.

He is now the general manager of this newspaper group, and I cover the State House for these papers and others up the coast.

My anniversary wish is that we remember how close we grew as a country after 911, and try to get that feeling back – neighbor helping neighbor, leaning on one another to stand. Or, as my husband convinced me when I agreed to marry him: We are better together than alone.