Perhaps Porter was missing Europe and our museum-overload, I don't know. But the Morse Museum is free on Friday evenings this time of year, so he suggested we visit. As usual, it was delightful. There's always something new to see if you take the time at the Tiffany windows, and their beauty evokes such a calm, peaceful atmosphere. After refreshing ourselves for a while with the windows, we moved on to a new exhibit: Dickens To Benton—Rare Books and Works on Paper from the Morse Collection.
The Park Avenue area of Winter Park does feel a little bit like Europe, with its small stores, its cafés, its park...and the Morse. Here, as in Paris, we enjoyed works by Cassatt, Manet, Whistler, Gauguin, and Cézanne—and if they were sketches and etchings of the kind that we passed by quickly at the Musée d'Orsay in favor of the artists' paintings, at least here there were no crowds to contend with and the works could be better appreciated away from the shadow of their more famous cousins.
We concluded the evening with a stop at Chamberlin's for kefir, kombucha, and other interesting drinks, then went home to make mushroom-and-spring-greens stuffed chicken breasts served with cole slaw and asiago cheese bread, and followed by a decadent treat of Ben and Jerry's ice cream (on sale, six pints for ten dollars, at Albertsons). I guess we both miss Europe!
