brown lawns & the passage of time

I feel like I’m losing track of time. I never know the date unless I consult my computer or phone. Sometimes I forget the season for a sec, like I think the kids are in school when they’re not, or vice versa. Sometimes I forget the day of the week. Recently I woke up sad the weekend was half over, then realized it was Saturday morning and I actually had the whole weekend ahead of me.

I’m not sure where this lands on the scale of Concerning Lack of Mental Acuity versus Normal Human Experience. When gauging whether an elder is senile, a common question is “What date is it?” and I would hard fail that one. But there are easier questions like “Who is the president?” and “What year is it?” and I would get those (except in January I might forget the new year, but I think that one’s normal).

This morning, sponty said: “I somehow hard thought that today was Sunday so went o.O upon discovering it’s Monday and I have to work actually.” Which makes me feel better that it’s not just me.

The seasonal thing is interesting. I’ve never been much in tune with the natural world. Seasons haven’t been important to me since I graduated. So Sarah Cray’s whole thing with seasonal painting is a paradigm shift. For instance, I like fall foliage, but I don’t particularly feel more motivated to paint it in the fall. It’s just a nice palette. In any season I’m apt to shift my greenery to purple-russet-orange sunset tones, which is fall-adjacent but mostly just my own thing that I like.

Every so often I look at lawns in summer and think of that one book we read senior year, where a guy spent a whole day watching TV(?) and another day not watching TV(?) and turned his reflections into an entire book. He was disdainful of green lawns in summer. He said that if people were more grounded in time and place, they would let their lawns go brown. That’s the natural state of grass for most of the summer. If you insist on having a verdant green springtime lawn in August, you are out of touch with the world around you. Somehow that has stuck with me, despite never having a lawn and never wanting one. I respect the brown lawn.

(I also respect the purple-and-brown lawn, which has somehow become A Thing in a lot of my pictures…I’m not sure why I’m so enamored of this combo, but it feels good.)

Anyway these days I suppose I’m seasonally-aware-by-proxy, since I follow Sarah’s video drops and it’s all snowy scenes in December and flowers in March and beaches and oceanscapes in July. August will be desert-themed, which is at once exciting and a bit intimidating because the desert has a lot of rocks and I have no idea how to approach rocks. I once tried doing a desert rock monument for the bad g1 topic and it was so bad I couldn’t post it. So this will be a good learning experience.