Dioramas and disasters

Diorama factoid from the Bell Museum: River otters once lived near Minnehaha Falls.

Winter Sunday afternoons when I was little were spent endlessly looking at the same dioramas, mammoth tusks and backlit quartzite stones in the basement of what I now realize was a truly amazing museum for a small town, complete with planetarium. Many a post-church trip to the Country Kitchen buffet ended at the Sanford Museum, where I circled the same small collection continually until the adults were ready to leave whatever occupied them at the exhibits upstairs.

So Sunday was a flashback when we went to the Bell Museum of Natural History to check out the current Audubon exhibit. The outing was part of another of my resolutions this year: to at least monthly check out a museum or historical site, making sure we enjoy our fair city to its fullest. While the Audubon exhibit is indeed worthwhile – it will reopen Feb. 1 and run through June 8 – the real fun for me were the hallways filled with visually stunning dioramas that dwarfed the tiny vignettes I found so fascinating as a child. Look! Dioramas! Clearly, the throngs of excited offspring of families taking advantage of free Sunday admission were testimony to the fact that the video-game generation still appreciates a good diorama in a quaint setting. It’s not quite lions and tigers and bears, oh my, but there are bears, and moose and lynx.

Luckily, Dave survived. The roof not so much.

Then we came home and made the mistake of looking up. Never do that. There were telltale stains on the office ceiling indicating ice dam problems after this weekend’s snow. Dave went up on the roof in an effort to cure the problem while I kept anxious watch out the upstairs window. Usually this drama ends in wonderful anticlimax. This time after watching him clear mounds of snow there was a horrifying crunch as the porch roof collapsed, the porch frame separated from the house and my husband’s head disappeared. I set a land-speed record running downstairs and outside to find out that he had survived the 10-foot fall, unlike our porch. He was unhurt and mainly wondering how to get off the porch on which he was now trapped. We managed to wiggle him in through the back door. And we’ve now settled the question of whether it’s time to spend money fixing the back porch.