A T-shirt covered in ash and dust from the destroyed World Trade Center towers is seen at a media preview of a New York Historical Society exhibit presented in New York City in 2006 for the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

A few days after 9/11, I laced up my husband’s filthy sneakers to go find myself some new shoes. Accepting donated clothes felt strange — we were used to giving, not taking — but we had become two of the thousands suddenly homeless.

Brian’s shoes were two sizes too big, but better than the flimsy flip-flops I had worn for days. As I walked through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, a rancid odor clung to me. At first, I thought it was my unwashed clothes, until I looked down at Brian’s sneakers, still caked with the ash that had covered us when the towers collapsed.

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When the second plane struck on 9/11, we fled our building, 24 flights down. Brian had been awake for hours, but the first impact tore me from sleep; I bolted barefoot in my pajamas from our apartment six blocks away from the World Trade Center complex, plunging into a choking storm of debris as the towers crumbled around us. Convinced we wouldn’t survive, we had prayed together in Battery Park, the air barely breathable with smoke and dust.

Now, several days after the attacks, I sat down on a curb, determined to find the source of the putrid smell. I sniffed my pits, my shorts, my shirt. Then a whiff of the shoes made me gag. The odor was like a dead squirrel, something I remembered from growing up in the woodsy Florida Panhandle. It was........

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