Washington ? There’s been no repeat of last year’s Sept. 11 terror, so where’s the sigh of relief?

A march of ever-shifting worries anthrax in the mail, explosives in shoes, fear of “dirty bombs,” a national terrorism alert bumped up to the second-highest level has kept the public on edge and undercut the comfort that passing time is supposed to bring.

“You never want to forget what happened and the people who died, but at some point you just have to move on,” Jeff Adkins, 24, said as he watched his nephew’s high school football scrimmage in Hoover, Ala.

Still, he said: “I’m not resting easy yet.”

The anniversaries of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President Kennedy still revive searing memories for some but pass by most years with little public note. Already, few outside of Oklahoma observe the anniversary of the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Yet the enormity of Sept. 11 will make that date live on as a “symbol of something dreaded, feared in the minds of Americans,” predicts Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

For now, there remains a sense of vigilance: A woman in a Georgia restaurant reported hearing Middle Eastern-looking men talk ominously about terrorism, and Florida authorities found the men and shut down an interstate for hours to investigate Friday. The men were released without charge after being detained 17 hours.

“It’s not like it was when nearly everybody was afraid to get on an airplane,” Poussaint said. “But still there’s a fear an expectation that something may come out of the blue somewhere.”

Like shock waves, that lingering fear diminishes as it moves away from ground zero and the people who suffered personal loss or witnessed tragedy firsthand. It’s easier to feel at ease in California than in New York or Washington.

“We’ve had so many warnings following the attacks, I’ve stopped paying attention to them,” said Jeff Womack, a 33-year-old hotel administrator in Los Angeles.

Indeed, it seems people can adapt to almost any threat. Consider Londoners during the World War II blitz.

Mostly, people in the United States are going about their lives again, keeping nervousness pushed to the back.

National polls suggest that people are less afraid than they were a year ago of coming under attack but almost as likely to worry about an attack somewhere in the United States. About two-thirds say they are scared that there will be more terrorism, as government leaders have warned.

Pelham, Ala., contractor Hank Giles, pausing as he shopped for a new truck, put it this way: “I’m sure something’s coming, but who knows when.”