By Sean Kirst, Post-Standard Columnist

Lockerbie, Scotland - The blast rattled the floors of the tiny rowhouses on Rosebank Crescent. "Another one!" Landele Rae said to himself. He froze for a moment, listening, before he dared to look out the kitchen window.

 Nothing. Not this time. The glass remained intact.

 That was two weeks ago, when a gas explosion rocked a stone house on nearby Park Place. Within hours, a demolition crew was bringing the place down. Landele leaned against his garden wall to watch the bulldozer, and he was still watching when Marion Alderman Jablonski walked up with her flowers.

 Marion had come all the way from Rome, N.Y. Her daughter, Paula, and her son-in-law, Glenn Bouckley, were flying home to Clay 10 years ago on Pan Am Flight 103. The fuselage from the shattered plane smashed the house of Ella Ramsden, who lived on the other side of Landele's garden. Landele's daughter had just parked her car and walked inside. He stood at the kitchen window. The glass burst in his face.

 The gas blast made all of that seem fresh again. The fuselage dropped six miles, crushing Ella's home, although she somehow escaped. At dawn, Landele walked into his tiny yard. Everyone on the plane had been killed. Dozens of passengers were lying all around him. He goes to bed with their expressions, with what he calls "the fright."

 "It's always there," Landele said. "It never really goes away."

 Glenn Bouckley's body was found next to a Park Place telephone pole. Marion could see the pole through Landele's kitchen window. When she goes to Lockerbie, she leaves a flower on the street. Landele asked Marion to come inside his house, and then he hurried off to rummage in his garden shed. He came back carrying a fork and a small tray.

 The fork, he said, came from Pan Am 103. Landele found it in his garden, just as he still finds American change when he plants bulbs. The tray was filled with coin-sized shards of plastic, fragments of the plane he has taken from the earth. He saves those shards for the families who come from around the world. They walk the lane looking for something where the real damage is unseen.

 Landele gives them coffee, and then sets out the tray.

 He brought Marion into the kitchen, and he put out cookies as she poked through the jagged plastic. She picked up a tiny piece that read, "Property of Pan-Am." Landele told her to take it. He told her how his wife, after the disaster, never liked the kitchen window. He told her how they stopped growing vegetables. It was the jet fuel, Landele said. The earth held that smell for years.

 Instead, in this town of perfect gardens, Landele planted flowers. He retired from a job in a cheese factory, and he came home to nurse a wife whose heart was growing weak. Isa died not quite two years ago, leaving Landele, 69, with too much time to think.

 He volunteered for daily duty caring for "the wee ones," his grandchildren, the focus of his life. Each day, he unfolds a tiny table in his living room. He arranges coloring books and crayons for both of the children. There is a red cup for his granddaughter and a blue cup for his grandson.

 "I'd be lost without them, aye," Landele said in a soft voice.

 He worries about what Lockerbie will offer in future. Factory jobs are dwindling and farmers are in trouble, and there is the shadow they all live with every day. "Hardly a thing here for the young kids to do," Landele said, sitting at the window that his wife would not go near.

 In the morning, he wakes up to arrange the cups and chairs, and he walks beneath gray skies to chat with his neighbors. Every now and then a Pan Am family wanders past, pilgrims seeking something they all feel but cannot see. Landele greets them warmly, then he goes to his garden shed.

Sean Kirst's column appears in The Post-Standard on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him by calling 470-6015 or by e-mail at citydesk@syracuse.com