Gone.

      From T-town in the West, to Pleasant Grove and Guntersville in the East, the familiar scenes of devastation have appeared this Spring, as regular as the arrival of bright green new leaves on the trees.

     There were more of them this time.

     And more people died.

     But tornadoes come to us here like the aging of our parents, inevitable, unavoidable and despicable.

     Perhaps Jerry Falwell will come and count the broken two-by-fours and examine the scraps of bright pink insulation hanging from the trees, determining what sins summoned the killing to each block, to each home.

     About 5:00 this morning, the official death count, always a feature of  the stories we journalists write, the quintessential measuring stick for disaster, skyrocketed from 62 to 128, more than doubling the number of souls lost in the swirls. Now it's headed for an almost inevitable 200+ as more bodies are found, as more searches for the missing are abandoned for grief.

     The West has it's earthquakes. The North it's blizzards. We in The South have these demons of nature, ferocious, indiscriminate, deadly and predictable only in the most general of ways.

     It's Spring. They will come.