Museum & Gardens

Today we three visited one of our favorite while-away-the-afternoon locales--the Cummer Art Museum and Gardens. It's a beautiful spot right on the river with hedge mazes and reflecting ponds to explore. The interior is air-conditioned and they have this cool room of hands-on artistic play for kids. And the art is great, too, if you happen to be able to glimpse it as you chase pre-schoolers through the hall to the "less boring" stuff. But the best part? It's free after 4 p.m. on Tuesdays.

Today we drew pictures, crawled under foam tubes, painted postcards and got our jeans dirty in the garden. I love afternoons like this, when we can just hang out in a fresh venue. We all were feeling crabby around lunchtime as we paced the ruts we carve ourselves by midweek. We found ourselves reading once more the same 10 library books we always read, dragging out the same old toys we just can't bring ourselves to use in any different playtime scenarios and I continually checked to see if anyone had responded to my latest blog entry so I could feel some small connection to another adult for just a moment in my child-filled day. The museum was just the thing we needed.

We appreciate one another all the more when we see each others' faces under different light, in front of new scenery and with creativity spinning around in our brains. Even L and C tolerated each other better after our afternoon at the Cummer. On the way to the museum L whined at C for looking at her book while she was reading it. On the trip home I glimpsed her holding his hand, singing to him and smiling while he gazed up at her with complete adoration.

Before we left the museum, we swung by the gift shop and I exchanged salutations with the employee who happened to be manning the register. I looked up mid sentence and was struck by just how much she looked like me, or what I might look like if I hadn't been raising children for the past three years. She was slender, dark-haired, wore smartly tailored clothes and had a warm smile. She remarked at how beautiful my children are. I thanked her and told her I like them, too. As we left I wondered about that woman and pictured myself in her life. What if I had followed my passion for art and built on my art history minor instead of my journalism major from college? And what if I worked around paintings and sculptures from Titian and Picasso instead of making Popsicle-stick puppets and Play-Doh snakes with people who drink from sippee cups. I'll never know. Perhaps that woman looked at me with the same questions--wondering if she might have my life one day.