Days off are the best, even the rainy ones.
Sunday morning dawned dark, raining, and below fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Several light bulbs in my room had mysteriously blown in the night, so even with all the lights on, it was dark and gloomy in the apartment. It finally felt like winter in Texas.
I looked at the rain falling so prettily on the still-lush Texas foilage and just had to photograph it. The gardens around my apartments just weren’t doing it, so I grabbed Rodger and headed out to the city. It was time to go museum hopping in Houston.
My first stop was at the Menil Collection, of John and Dominique de Menil. The museum is a carefully designed work of art in itself: it stood out like a white and green pearl in the rain.
Inside were incredible works of antiquity that I couldn’t take pictures of, so I took pictures of the neat wood floors…
…and of myself trying to undertand art (it’s hard).
My next stop was a little coffee shop called The Black Hole. It smelled of grunge hipsters, burned grilled cheese, crumbling storefront. I loved the bathroom with its floor of pennies, tarnished mirrors, and bizarrely artsy ceramic tile walls.
Then I drove to Bayou Bend, a 14-acre estate with a giant house in the middle of River Oaks, one of Houston’s most affluent neighborhoods. The ticket lady looked at Rodger suspiciously but let him in for free. We explored the grounds together. Rodger remarked several times that it reminded him of his home beside the lake in the Kingdom of Gastropods. It was fine land for a snail, he said.
We played in the garden for awhile. I sat on a bench and felt like queen of fall turning winter, with the bare trees around me.
Just around the corner in River Oaks, Rienzi is another offshoot of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, a beautiful European-style house and gardens. The kind security guard lent us a bright yellow umbrella and I took pictures of the flowers in the rain.
I ended the evening with my computer at Fellini’s in CityCentre, writing stories as the rain still fell outside. The coffee was strong, the lights bright, my heart full.
Sundays don’t have to include sunshine to be beautiful.
~ The Dauntless Princess ~