While this picture doesn’t contain the beautiful architecture that exists at the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C., I find this one the most symbolic of my memories with this place. Not long after the World Trade Center attacks, my parents took my brother and me to Washington D.C. for Independence Day, and one of the places that we visited was the Arlington National Cemetery. It has several beautiful pieces of architecture, including an amphitheater and the Arlington House, where Robert E. Lee lived before the American Civil War. My dad is a former Marine (and now my brother is a Marine), and with that, I’ve never experienced something as humbling as this place in all the rest of my life. Even as a kid, it made me feel a tremendous sense of gratitude, and reflecting on it afterwards gave me a new perspective of the kinds of things in my life that I, like most people, took for granted.