Five years later and 40 miles west of the Pentagon, beyond a guard and iron gates and as the sun falls into a warm evening on Chalfont Street, Roya Akhavan-Lovell does not think about Sept. 11, or terrorism, not exactly.

She thinks about what she can make her two kids for dinner -- "Should we order a pizzafi" her husband asked, arriving home with them from tae kwon do class -- whether she feels like a walk, what she has to do to get ready for a business trip to California in a few days.

Across the wide street, a lazy sprinkler waters a lawn, and several neighbors stand outside watching kids play in the cul-de-sac, discussing vacations and the weather.

In this particular corner of Piedmont, a gated golf-course community in western Prince William County, Va., no one lost friends or relatives in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. No one ran down stairs, dived under desks or felt a rolling cloud of choking dust.

If you ask how the largest terrorist attack in U.S. history has affected everyday life here on Chalfont Street, people tend to answer, not much at all.

And yet, as the emotional urgency of Sept. 11 receded like a huge wave, it left behind an altered landscape, both mentally and materially.

For some, there are lingering fears that have become part of the ebb and flow of day-to-day thought. For others, fears have settled into questions about all that has come after Sept. 11 and what it means. Questions have settled into a sober desire to understand the world. And even among those most supportive of U.S. policy after Sept. 11, there is skepticism now -- what one woman calls a "more cynical" view of U.S. power and its limits.

Then there are the more personal, elemental changes.

Pulling into driveways on this evening are several neighbors who moved to Piedmont, near Haymarket, Va., precisely because they wanted to be far from the bull's-eye that the Washington area seems to have become.

Among them are an Iranian, an Iraqi and two couples named Parsons, comfortably affluent professional couples with young kids in a booming part of the region.

Playing in the cul-de-sac is Amber, who is 4 now and who owes her existence to the emotionally intense fall of 2001, when Nicole Parsons and her future husband decided that life is short and had a child. Across the street are Tanya and Scott Charbo. They moved from Colorado when Scott got a high-level position at the Department of Homeland Security, an agency that did not exist before Sept. 11.

Next door is the mom who quit her job to be home with her kids after the terrorist attacks and only last month returned to work. A few houses down is the minivan whose gas tank never drops below half-full, a practice begun after Sept. 11 that has become habit.

And here is Roya Akhavan-Lovell, coming home from a long day at work and opening her refrigerator, where there is a bright-orange bottle of expired amoxicillin behind the A1 sauce.

"I had this fear of a biological attack," Lovell said, explaining she has kept the antibiotic for years in case it could protect her kids in another terrorist attack. "Who knows if this antibiotic still works, but I was kind of like, why not keep itfi"

Lovell, who works in financial services, would put herself with the 63 percent who responded in a national poll this summer by Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times that Sept. 11 has not changed the way they live.

But now and then, Lovell sees the amoxicillin. And she thinks about things.

"There's so much intervention, with us in Iraq, and the fighting in Lebanon. ... I don't know," she said. "There's more anger."

It adds up to her feeling less safe five years later.

Sometimes, wheeling down the bottled-water aisle in the grocery store, she thinks about stockpiling -- "I think, liquid, liquid, liquid," Lovell said. She will not fly in a plane with her children, because she imagines a scene in which they look at her and she has to tell them there's nothing she can do.

For the most part, though, these sorts of darker thoughts are confined to her morning commute, when she's alone for a solid hour, heading closer to the District, one of the most obvious terrorist targets in the world.

And so Lovell will zip along near Dulles International Airport, where five of the Sept. 11 hijackers boarded the American Airlines flight that hit the Pentagon. She'll see a plane and wonder, What would I do if it slammed into the carsfi

"It enters my head," Lovell said. "And I stop myself, because I could go on."

She pulled her daughter into her lap, and her husband, John, tapped an order for pizza into the computer.

"Definitely, over time I've thought about it less and less," John Lovell said, referring to Sept. 11.

For him, all the nervousness and anxiety faded at some point he cannot identify. What's left is something perhaps more permanent, more intellectual than emotional.

For one, he does not want to work in the District again. He has accepted the possibility of a terrorist attack as a cold, hard fact. And in the past five years, he has found himself more interested in learning about the rest of the world.

Immediately after Sept. 11, he recalled, he was shocked to hear there were people who felt the United States somehow had brought the attacks upon itself. "I remember getting angry and thinking, How could they possibly think thatfi" he said. "But then that enabled me to start digging deeper."

He began paying more attention to the news, talking more to his wife's family, which is Iranian, and now finds himself to be "the voice of reason" as he debates Middle East policy with friends.

"I just don't assume that a perspective from the Middle East is the wrong perspective," said Lovell, who was raised in a conservative family in a small Virginia town and works for Fannie Mae in Bethesda, Md. "I try to take a look and understand it."

"He's a lot more calm than me," said his wife, before heading across the street to meet her friend Nicole, who was outside talking with neighbors.

Among them were people who had heard fighter jets overhead Sept. 11, who had gotten stuck in the exodus from the District. Mindy Parsons was not one of them, however. She was living in Michigan, and watched the whole thing on TV in a hospital, where her daughter was having surgery.

She and her husband, an engineer for Exxon Mobil, flew their U.S. flag in the days after, but the whole awful thing felt distant even then. When her husband was transferred to the corporate offices in Fairfax, Va., she had no second thoughts about moving to the Washington area.

"I think the chances of another attack are slim," said Parsons. "It's more the mechanical failure I fear when I'm flying."

When she really thinks about it, Parsons said, Sept. 11 probably did not change things much at all. People have always hated the United States, she figures. And there has always been some type of conflict in the world.

Five years later, she decided, what has really changed is us.

"In recent years, it seems like the U.S. has said, 'Our way or the highway,' and that's not necessarily a good thing," she said. "A lot of people hate our country. Understandably."

Carol Himes, who lives a few doors down, said the past five years have led her and her husband to reconsider their notions of U.S. influence in the world. Although they believed strongly in President Bush's idea of promoting democracy abroad as a deterrent to terrorism, the couple, who consider themselves moderate Republicans, have adopted what Carol calls a "more cynical" view.

"I just feel like at some point, maybe someone would just reflect on the fact that these people don't want our help," she said, referring to Iraq specifically and the Middle East more generally. "This just might be one thing the U.S. can't accomplish."

On a more personal level, Himes finds herself better off five years later, if only because Sept. 11 forced her and her husband to reassess their priorities. They decided to move to Piedmont to be farther from the District, and Carol decided to quit her job managing a health club to be home with their two children until they were both school age.

"It was kind of a reality check for us, especially being a generation of working people and career-oriented people," she said. "We realized that is not as important to us as we had initially thought."

She has talked with Roya Akhavan-Lovell and another neighbor, Faddia Gobi, who is Iraqi American. They have made distant conflicts seem more real: Lovell's mother and sister were visiting Lebanon when the recent conflict with Israel started; Gobi has cousins in Baghdad.

Gobi is the one who keeps her minivan's tank filled up, just in case; the one who has television news on all day, just in case; and who, like Himes, moved to Piedmont to escape the underlying fear she felt living closer to the District.

She sat in her living room recently on a sunny afternoon, looking out the window at the rolling green lawn.

"Look at how peaceful it is, how beautiful it is," she said. "But you never know when a bomb is going to fall."

Gobi's neighbor Nicole Parsons forgets sometimes, but the trajectory of her life changed Sept. 11, when she and her boyfriend got more serious and decided to have a baby. She left her job at the Washington Speakers Bureau, and they married and moved to Piedmont.

She'd never paid that much attention to world affairs before, but she's trying to now, she said.

It was dark now on Chalfont Street, and Parsons and Lovell set off for their nightly power walk.

They bounded along the sidewalk under the stars and laughed, kind of, about Lovell's amoxicillin in the refrigerator. They said words such as "terrorism" and "bombing" into the quiet evening. They walked along stretches of golf green and they joked about how they take note when Scott Charbo, the Department of Homeland Security official on their cul-de-sac, comes home especially late.

And after a couple of miles, they head back home.

"I'm very patriotic, and after 9/11, I was majorly patriotic," Nicole Parsons said, wiping sweat from her face. "But it's getting to the point now where everything is getting so out of control. ... I do get to the point when I think: When is it enoughfi When can we stopfi

"I feel like we're involved with everything that's going on in the world. I support my country, but at some point we have to stop. I just want it to stop."

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.