Sunflower Season

The envelope I watercolored ^ of Farmers Market mini-sunflowers to mail my aunt a thank-you note for the hat she knit. I was also thinking as I painted about how easy or not it might be to paint a sunflower, since that's the activity I'll be leading for people with memory loss as part of my job interview on Wednesday. 

It felt very easy to me, but I can't really judge from inside my intact brain,  how hard it would be… (And my sunflowers ended up looking more like brown-eyed susans.)

I was telling a regular customer at the Thrift Store that the parts of our brains that respond to color, music, touch, movement, and emotion are the last to go in people with Alzheimer's, while the "executive" functions of words and judgements go first.

He, a dancer, said he'd always felt his brain was that way.  I laughed, thinking of artist friends who are absolutely hopeless at the business of art.