LITTLETON, Colo. -- Already, in this brief yet endless week, the weather has cycled through several seasons: Warm enough Tuesday that many of the students who fled their school, hands on heads like prisoners of war, were wearing shorts. Wednesday, the skies emptied a bitter rain. And then it snowed, in big, wet flakes as cold as permanent winter.

But now, the weather forecast promises that the sun will come out tomorrow.

People here are dazed with grief and anger in the aftermath of the violent siege in which two students blazed their way through Columbine High School and killed 12 classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves. And yet, many residents can see that they'll have to begin moving beyond their despair.

The funerals for the dead are continuing. Today, a memorial service, which will be led by Vice President Al Gore, is expected to draw tens of thousands. Thursday, Columbine students will return to class, albeit in borrowed quarters at another high school because their own remains yellow-taped and filled with investigators meticulously gathering evidence and bomb squads looking for remaining explosives.

While much work remains, students, parents and community leaders are uniting in their resolve: They are ready to take back their community from the horror inflicted upon it and find a way to rise above it.

Despite the continuing trauma, the heart of a community, broken into a million bits, perhaps is starting to mend.

Searching for 'release'

A lone woman in a lavender jacket trudged across a rolling field in Clement Park, blanketed in fresh, unblemished snow. Every now and then, she reached her arms out to the side, fell back into the pillowy expanse and began scissoring her limbs like windshield wipers.

The snow angels were Karen Butler's contribution to the tributes left at the park that curves around Columbine High School.

"I came here looking for release. I thought I would find a way to share with my community, to find the healing," said Butler, who lives nearby. "But it's not here. The show is here."

With a wall of dozens of reporters and cameras focusing microphones and cameras on the impromptu shrine there, Butler couldn't find what she was looking for.

So she walked and walked until she was alone, just the stilled baseball diamonds to one side and the mountains off to the distance. By her fifth snow angel, she was feeling better. And ready for the future.

"I need to reclaim this park because this is where my children play," said the mother of three. "And I need to find out what I can do. There has to be action, and I will be involved in some way.

"It hasn't been shown to me how, yet. But even if it's just us moms turning off the TV, the video games, throwing away the toy guns one person can make a difference."

A plea for more humanity

While Littleton is the dateline by which this tragedy is known, Littleton is actually five miles from the school. Yet the city is not going to abandon Columbine, located in unincorporated Jefferson County, and run from the black mark that the tragedy has inflicted on it.

At City Hall, just outside a downtown historic district, officials have been accepting condolences and flowers and concern from around the world.

Christian Gibbons, the city's director of economic development, can see any number of offices across the courtyard from his and point to co-workers who have suffered in the high school shooting: A firefighter's nephew is Patrick Ireland, the boy who, though wounded, broke through a window and hung there until police rescued him. A maintenance worker has a daughter who was trapped in the tiny choir room as mayhem broke out all around.

Soon after the shooting became known Tuesday, e-mail began streaming across cyberspace into Gibbons' computer. As head of the city's economic development program, Gibbons has numerous contacts around the globe.

They sought details, but mostly they wanted to console. Gibbons responded by telling them, "The early reports are not good. It is a sad day in Littleton."

"I have a very bad english," a Venezuelan apologized before continuing his message in Spanish. "En fin," he concluded, "mas humanas," a plea for more humanity.

Rather than distance themselves from the shooting, Littleton officials have been meeting every night to begin planning their response, an effort that has them discussing everything from allocating funds for a memorial to developing youth assistance programs.

"Littleton's got a strong sense of itself," Gibbons said, trying to explain why the city hasn't distanced itself from the incident for fear of its damage to the civic image. "We are going to become a catalyst. The nation's going to be looking at us for a long time, and we're going to make something happen."

Bracing for the inevitable

As he does whenever there is spectacular local crime involving guns, Tom Christy grabbed his record books Tuesday to be sure his store, Firing-Line, didn't sell the weapons to the killers. As far as he knows, it didn't.

A pine-paneled store and shooting range in Aurora, about 10 miles northeast of Columbine High School, Firing-Line bills itself as the largest gun shop in Colorado, a state that embraces its Wild West heritage and fondness for firearms.

Christy is braced for the inevitable assault. Unlike random crimes or riots that send people flocking to gun shops for home protection, massacres like Columbine's tend to send people to their legislators demanding tighter controls on guns.

As with many in the interlocking suburbs surrounding Columbine High, the crime has personal elements for Christy. He attended Littleton schools. And his wife, a Jefferson County engineering department supervisor, had left a meeting at the high school barely an hour before the rampage began.

Christy is clearly conflicted about guns, violence and kids. He acknowledges that crime would drop if guns were eliminated. But that is a practical impossibility in the United States, and anything less is bound to work in the favor of criminals, he said.

Guns are a part of the nation's culture, especially in Colorado. But Denver has grown more hostile to weapons in the past decade and has a more restrictive assault-weapons ban than the federal law.

A self-described moderate on issues of gun rights, Christy says it is natural for people to question the firepower on U.S. streets after a school is shot up. But he disdains those who say that more laws could have prevented the tragedy.

"Last time I checked, murder was against the law. So is taking a firearm into a school. So is possession of a handgun by a minor," Christy said. "These guys were already acting outside the law."

'I'd seen it all, I thought'

Littleton Fire Department Division Chief Chuck Burdick has seen more than his share of excruciating death and disaster over his long career -- including a 1970 plane crash that killed 31 college football players and supporters, and a 1997 medical helicopter crash in which all aboard perished.

On Tuesday, the normally desk-riding chief decided he had better join his crews responding to the shooting at Columbine High.

"My life is changed forever," he said. "I'd seen it all, I thought. But I saw things I hope I will never have to see again. It's just overwhelming. Even in a war, there's some sense to it. There is no sense here."

At the school, he watched one crew dodging ricocheting bullets to bring three injured victims to safety. And then, the long wait as the two gunmen took control of the school and police and rescuers were stuck outside waiting seemingly forever until it was safe to enter. Their adrenalin built, but there would be no release.

"We had at that point 35 rescue units waiting to go in. And then came the word, just send in one unit," Burdick said.

"We knew then these were fatalities, and nothing was salvageable."

A lifelong resident of the area, he struggled to curb his emotions and his thoughts that his kids, who attend another area high school, could have been those victims.

Thursday night, "I turned on the Colorado Rockies game, and I saw them wearing the Columbine High School patch, and that's what set me over the edge," he said, a bit abashed. "That was it for me."

His department has contacted its counterparts in previously traumatized cities such as Jonesboro, Ark., and Springfield, Ore., to borrow from their experience and begin closing this chapter of his professional career. But he is not limiting his role in the community's recovery to how his department will handle future fire and rescue operations.

"I'm hoping our organization can help facilitate the community moving on. We need to go past it. We need to identify why and how this happened," Burdick said. "This is a normal city with normal kids who have normal problems. No one's at fault for not identifying them. We can't have every kid with purple hair locked up.

"We can look at some key values, ethics, that are important and develop them and add strength to them and instill these values in our society."

Mending friendships

When Matt Kechter didn't show up for his shift at Nick-N-Willy's, his co-workers knew exactly what had happened. Most of them, after all, attend Columbine or recently graduated from the school down the street from the pizza place.

Nick-N-Willy's closed after the shooting, no one much wanting to prepare food that no one much wanted to eat. It reopened later in the week, though the downcast employees could barely keep from crying whenever they thought of the quiet sophomore who was killed Tuesday. The staff is planning to put up a plaque to keep Matt in their midst.

Erin Boortz, who is graduating next month and escaped the school at least physically unscathed, is anxious to resume classes, even without Matt and two other friends who were killed.

In the aftermath of Tuesday, she has felt a change among schoolmates that gives her hope. Columbine, she said, deserved its reputation for its stratified cliques, which some believe figured in the rage of the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

"The popular clique is really tight. I know some of them who won't socialize with anyone outside the clique," said Erin. "But I can tell already, people who have had bad times with each other or grudges against each other are coming together and giving each other a hug.

"I had some bad times with one girl. We had been friends but hadn't talked in about two months. She called me the other day and wanted to make sure I was OK and see if I wanted to talk."

'I do know God is good'

The shooting had barely stopped when Ben Martin's phone began ringing. Teen-age members of the youth ministry he operates out of a cramped basement office at the Colorado Community Church called to raise a point of theology that had suddenly been stripped of its abstraction.

If there is a God, how could he let children slaughter other children?

Martin is predicting that members of his youth group, which includes two Columbine survivors, won't let the event shake their faith.

"I can't answer why God saved 2,000 kids and let 15 perish. But I do know God, and God is good," Martin says he's telling the youths.

Martin is new at this. A seminarian, he faces practical and spiritual challenges that even veteran members of the clergy have not encountered.

He has talked to students, prayed with them and, Friday, convened a meeting at Colorado Community, a contemporary, tan brick church in a suburb wedged between Denver and Littleton. Elsewhere across the Denver area last week, countless other vigils and memorials and counseling sessions were held.

Tuesday's violence has changed him and, he believes, many around him. He has less tolerance now for the glorification of violence in popular culture. The Columbine killers were fond of shock-rocker Marilyn Manson and frequented Internet chat sites obsessed with death.

"I used to be a little soft on those things -- 'It's just a movie' or 'It's just a video game.' "

And he finds himself viewing the scenes of destruction coming out of Yugoslavia with less detachment. "How many of us have watched the reports in Kosovo and not shed a tear?" he asked.

But his faith, he insists, is not diminished. And ultimately he thinks the faith of his students will be strengthened by last week's trauma. Such is the essence of Christianity, he said.

"God will turn all this, and out of the rubble he will create something even greater," he said. "It must be frustrating for Satan."

'I'm just walking around'

Seventeen-year-old Daniel Ruiz spent two frantic days following the killings on the phone and watching television to see which of his friends at Columbine High had lived and which had died.

By the end of the week, a numbing shock had set in, keeping him from school or the usual social activities. And he began to recognize how his life, and those of his friends, would be forever changed by the massacre.

A former Columbine student, he attends a different school this year, with plans to return to Columbine in the fall.

"I probably have school today," he said Friday, standing coatless in the snow amid shrines to the victims near the school. "I just haven't checked. I don't think I could concentrate. I'm just walking around."

Daniel had wandered down to Clement Park, not knowing what else to do. He tried going to a concert held by his church youth group the night before, but that didn't help either. "I just came and sat in the back row, but I couldn't concentrate or really hear it," he said.

He hopes that people will take more seriously the anger of troubled youth and that affluent suburbs such as this no longer will see themselves as immune from violence.

"Most of the parents in this neighborhood are completely oblivious about what we do. They think they know, but they don't," Daniel said.

"What they don't realize is that we have a lot of problems."

As for himself, he is rethinking his plan to return to Columbine.

"I'm just not sure I could go back in that library," he said. "I'm not sure I want to go back."

Hopes for the future

This is personal, says Gerry Difford. "How could these kids do this to my school?"

About 25 years ago, Columbine High was merely a name and a dream for Difford, who would become its first principal, and for about 150 parents who lived in the area. The countryside was disappearing into suburban sprawl so rapidly, three high schools would be built that year.

The day after the shootings, Difford, semiretired, rushed to meet with faculty members and cry with them. One, though, was missing: Dave Sanders, whom Difford had hired as a kid barely out of college and who was killed in the rampage.

While some students say they can't bear the thought of entering those haunted halls again, Difford urges them to reconsider. He hopes to see the school repaired and reopened by fall.

"It's part of the healing process, to face their friends again, to miss the ones who are gone," he said.

"That's the only way you get over it, even though it will always be with you."