First let me give credit to my husband, who designed and built (for our Newport cottage) the rose arbor that you see on my home page. The climbing rose on the left is "Kathleen" and the one on the right, "La France". Both are fabulously fragrant.

I don't know about you, but I'm one of those people who dreads the coming of spring. Yep, you heard me. I always assume that winter will be a season of catching up: catching up on the wallpapering, the closet organizing, the searching through boxes of snapshots to enlarge old favorites for framing ... all those satisfying indoor projects that no one in her right mind would want to do during gardening season.

And then March arrives. The walls are half stripped, the closets a mess, the snapshots untouched. And as for that manuscript that I hoped would be three-quarters finished--it ain't. And meanwhile, the sun feels warmer on my back as I walk the neighbor's dog. The crocuses are pushing through the ground and the daffodils are ... surely they're too early! But no. Spring is coming. I can smell it, I can feel it, and I'm helpless to resist it. Out I go, abandoning all those cozy projects that now seem constricting. I WANT OUT, DAMMIT!

(Well--abandoning all those cozy projects except the book, naturally.) And that reminds me: here are some of the photographs I promised you a couple of weeks ago. Dottie MacKeen, the community events coordinator at Borders Bookstore in Framingham, Mass., arranged a booksigning for several of us, including chocolate and coffee for all! That's Dottie standing and Stacy Brown, one of the authors, seated.
	The next picture is of (left to right) me, waving my hands around wildly as I speak; Suzanne Brockmann; Judith Arnold; and Stacy. We all had different slants on writing romance. No, wait. Actually, I was the only one with a different slant. The other three are wonderfully prolific and fast writers. I'm horrendously slow (um, see paragraphs one through three, above).
	This picture is one I particularly like. It's of some of the brave women in the assembling audience who didn't mind being photographed for my web site. Later on, a few men joined in as well. Who says men don't care about books? (I know what you're thinking, and never mind.)
This next to last picture is to get everyone in the mood for my May book, A CHARMED PLACE. My husband and I were on Nantucket recently and we came across this sort-of-lighthouse-looking structure. That's me in front of it, dressed in cheery spring colors.
	I can't resist sticking in the latest snap of Tommy, the new beast in the east, getting ready to climb this skinny dracaena. Once he's at the top, I have to unpeel him. He's crazy. He's fun. We adore him.

Happy Spring!

Antoinette Stockenberg

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