BALTIMORE — Volunteers are transforming the garden, which dates back nearly a century, recapturing some of its original beauty in memory of the victims of 9/11, and it’s personal for Jayna Powell who wears an image of one victim whose life was cut short at the age of 27.
“Honor Elizabeth Wainio is from Catonsville and I am also and she was on Flight 93,” said Powell, “Before the plane crashed, she called her mother on the phone and talked to her mother until they were running into the cockpit.
Volunteers here learn Elizabeth’s story—-a graduate of Catonsville High School and Towson University who had landed a job in New York with Discovery Channel Stores and was returning from a business trip to San Francisco when her plane was hijacked.
Their sweat equity has far more value than simply cleaning up a corner of Clifton Park that’s nearly been forgotten.
“So I worked with that family,” recalled Powell, “and I said to her mother, ‘What’s the best thing we could do to remember and honor Elizabeth and all the other victims?’ and she said, ‘I don’t want revenge. I don’t want hate. I think you should go out and make a difference in the world.’”
Civic Works performs cleanups, like this one, throughout the year, but the focus on 9/11 has special meaning, especially involving Mother’s Garden.
A park dedicated to the mothers of Baltimore in the 1920s on the heels of World War I where more than a hundred thousand soldiers lost their lives.
“It kind of transformed into mothers that have lost their children in violence in Baltimore,” said Powell, “and now it’s just a garden for mothers and so when I told Esther, who is Elizabeth’s mother that, she was very touched by that. She can’t really come on 9/11. It’s too hard, but she said, ‘I’m going to go to Mother’s Garden. I want to see what you all did in Elizabeth’s name so I think it’s cool that we’re at Mother’s Garden for all the mothers who lost people on 9/11.”
