How nation celebrates the inauguration

WASHINGTON — The Philadelphia woman stood with her back to a steel security grate, her shoulders draped with one blanket and her head covered by another, trying to block the damp winter wind that ripped across the National Mall.

Natania Macy had arrived at 1 a.m., waiting five hours outside at a checkpoint before being allowed onto the grounds. Now she stood half a mile from the Capitol, so far away that the man she yearned to see would be all but invisible, her constant companion the below-freezing cold that bit at cheeks and noses.

She didn't mind.

"It's a beautiful day, a beautiful day," said Macy, 32, who was born in Jamaica and now lives in the Northeast. "I wasn't going to miss it for anything in the world. I wanted to be part of history, and I'm here."

At 12:05 p.m. Tuesday, she joined hundreds of thousands of others — children and grandparents, wealthy and worse-off, black and white and every color in between — in emitting a thunderous, rumbling roar as Barack Obama was inaugurated as the nation's 44th president.

"It's a blessing to be here to see this," said Samie Coleman, 63, moments after Obama took the oath of office. She had traveled from Akron, Ohio, to see something no one in America had ever seen — the inauguration of an African-American president.

On a day when the sun fought from behind clouds, people found themselves drawn to the frozen patch of earth between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, believing that at this hour, at this moment, they had to be there in person. The air was filled with tiny American flags, held aloft by multitudes.

Teri Quinn Gray got here by plane, bus, subway and foot. She came from Jackson, Miss., but she didn't come alone. With her traveled the hopes of relatives in the South and the ghosts of ancestors unknown.

"I represent an 88-year-old grandmother, a 63-year-old mother — who thought this day would never come — and a 13-year-old son," she said. "I'm here representing generations."

Philadelphia native David Alston stood near the Washington Monument, watching the proceedings on one of the giant TV screens. In 1963, when he was a boy, his mother had asked him to come along to a civil rights march in Washington.

"I said no," recalled Alston, who lives in Fort Washington, Md. "So now I'm finishing her march."