I’ll wake up with the headache I went to sleep with so I lay back down while Caleb gets ready. The forecast is rain all day so we’ve made indoor plans. We’ll start with breakfast at Johnny Grits, a southern-style place with an agreeable menu close to our next stop. I’ll start with a green Popeye smoothie that has half a bottle of Suja mighty dozen juice, fresh spinach, and some unmeasured powders tossed in. I missed the fruit being added while watching the tables beside us – to the left: a guy on his phone with nothing on his table and to the right: three guys complaining about work and their table placement.

I’ll enjoy my Benedict and grits before the party of eleven arrives with their three kids on iPads. The waitress tells us, “If you want to live longer, don’t work at a restaurant.” Her timing couldn’t have matched ours better and we were out the door. Across the street is the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in the St. Petersburg College Tarpon Springs Campus Library which opens at 10am, except Sundays, and is closed on Mondays. The museum was opened to the public in 2002. It was accredited in 2013 by the American Alliance of Museums which provides membership-based educational programs for students and professionals (active and retired).

This distinction is held by fewer than 6% of all museums and offers scholarship eligibility, discount development programs, and special access to subscriptions and other resources. The initial works in the museum were gifted by the family of expressionist artists for whom the museum is named. The collection also included notable 20th-century artists and in 2011 grew to include contemporary Florida art since 1990. The guy behind the desk seems to prefer the quiet mornings here so we leave him to it and start with a visual arts exhibition in honor of the faculty’s commitment to arts education.

This show highlights the current work of the Fine Arts and Humanities faculty and is usually held every two years but was last held in 2020 during a time of transition. The Visual Arts courses include drawing, painting, ceramics, photography, printmaking, and digital arts. The next exhibit, Artistic Journeys, shows how personal and world events in the 20th century influenced the artistic careers of the Leepa-Rattner family. The last space of the museum focuses on more local pieces gained from the closure of the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in 2009 after 73 years of operation in Largo.

We seemingly have the place to ourselves but will hear kids at some point. We stop at the only full-scale reproduction of Guernica by Picasso on the way out. It’s still raining, as predicted, so we head to the house to read for a bit. I’m not sure if it was five or fifty minutes before Fallon got the girls to clean the kitchen cabinets so she could clear her counters. Anyone who has ever cleaned by or above their stove (or seen how built-up some people let theirs get) knows how stuck on grease, oil, lard, fat, and pure love can get on wood, ceramic, plastic, glass, and metal of the surrounds and hood vent too. For this reason, Caleb decided to help scrub the prior tenant’s goo off to make a clean space for shiny dishes.

Not being one to sit idly by, I grab the broom and sweep the house before beginning to help unpack boxes and break them down. Following an afternoon of this cleaning effort was a much-needed escape from the house for us all, downpour or not. I’ll grab a piece of sweet drippy baklava to renew my energy before we head out the door, no umbrella or galoshes, to see the manatees. We’re definitely wet by the time we get there and it’s not too cold (if not in shorts and flip-flops) so we stay a while pretending that the tree offers us any protection from the constant onslaught of water droplets.

The nice thing about having a house with multiple bathrooms is the ability for us all to shower at once. I don’t envy the electric bill considering how steaming hot the three showers will be to appease those of us who appreciate getting out with our skin red and our insides warmed thoroughly as a result. Next is to run a load of laundry so our wet clothes don’t mildew overnight (maybe not a thing, but I also worry about this after leaving them in the wash too long). I’m glad we brought tennis shoes and hiking shoes so that we have a dry pair to wear.

I forgot to mention that while we were cleaning, a couch was delivered, hence why we had to be clean ourselves to sit on its fresh light-colored upholstery. Fallon makes white chicken chili for dinner while we converse and it’s nice to sit at a dining table and share a meal, a rare occasion for Caleb and me these days as it’s been years since we owned a piece of furniture for that purpose. The cushions are big enough to spread out and to cuddle on, we do a bit of both while watching Men in Black (MIB and MIIB) to introduce the girls to a piece of our childhood, from 1997 and 2002. Some things are better left as nostalgic memories; though I still like the pug.