AUSTIN, Texas, Apr. 12, 2006 — I've had a few springs spoiled now. I just flipped through the last four years of springs via my journals. Springs haven't been kind.

Oh, there were joys. But some springs have really been downers.

2002...Mom spirals into illness and just before Memorial Day goes to the hospital. She never gets home and is dead before Labor Day. There are springs of poison ivy. Last spring, Dad's fractured vertebrae and his TIA. This spring, two friends with cancer going through treatments, friends' parents in crisis, Dad has unexplained headaches and

neck pain that are making his life miserable. (I'm taking him for an MRI tomorrow.) And death sneaks up on a friend only a year older than I in the form of a massive stroke.

Spring can be so lovely. Flowers, those delicate leaves on trees. Days like some this week, cool and sunny.

But I'm starting to flinch when I think about springs.

Some times are sad and scary and you feel like you have endured some sucker punches to the gut. But we go on.