First and foremost, I have to thank our bloggie hop sponsor, Shelley Graham Turner, for organizing and conceiving of this fun event! Happy Birthday, Shelley!
When I learned of this blog hop, I thought, "How perfect for me!" because the name of my blog is kind of odd. It comes from a long time ago, in my childhood.
Prior to this story, I have to talk about my maternal aunt. Aunt Julie had remarried, having divorced her first husband long before. Her new huband was Art Wermuth. He was a major war hero in the Philippines during WWII, he even has a Wikipedia page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_W._Wermuth Needless to say, she was besotted with this dynamo of a man.
I was 9 or 10, when Aunt Julie was getting ready to marry Uncle Art, as we called him. She had a small house in Denver, and was preparing to move into Art's home after the wedding. She had solid mahogany doors in her house, and was selling the house. She decided to keep the fabulous mahogany doors, and replace them with doors that were not quite so expensive, as the house was really modest, and didn't need fancy doors. Besides, let's face it, she wanted to keep those doors.
She put most of them into her new home, but had one door left. She decided to make it into a coffee table, cutting it down slightly to make it a more useful size, as well as removing the hardware holes. She then had wrought iron legs put on, and added a large piece of glass on the top. The table was large and absolutely exquisite in a late 1960's modern style.
Well, the love story, as many love stories do, became a bit complicated. Early in their relationship, Uncle Art was elected Sheriff of Jefferson County, Colorado. During his tenure as Sheriff, he apparently used prison resources to get Aunt Julie's house painted prior to the sale. Fast forward a couple of years, Uncle Art was accused of embezzlement for his misuse of the county resources in this painting project, and was politely asked to step down as Sheriff, and to leave the Sheriff's residence immediately. (Okay, it wasn't so polite, and he was tried and convicted.) Needless to say, my beautiful Aunt, who looked like Lana Turner, had to go on the lam with Uncle Art. When they moved, she couldn't bear to let the table go to strangers, so she gifted my mother, Margie, with the table, saying we could keep it for her until she came back. My mom loved the table, but we all missed Aunt Julie terribly.
Now, my mother also loved canaries, and she always had one in the house. We lived in the basement of a duplex, while my paternal grandparents occupied the upstairs. My mom was ill, she had severe, uncontrolled Type 1 diabetes, and a grave heart condition. So, we lived with the grandparents so they could help out with me and later my brother, in case my mom had to go on one of her many hospital stays. I loved most of the canaries my mom kept, but there was one, Petey, who just hated me. In our downstairs apartment, we had windows that were at ground level, for sun and to be able to pass food out to the patio for summer dining. I loved to sit on the end of our sofa, where the light came in, so I could read books. I have always been a bookworm, and our big overstuffed sofa was the perfect place to get all curled up with a book. However, then Mommy decided to put Petey's cage directly over the place I used to sit, so he got some light, too. Lord knows, we didn't want a depressed, evil canary in the house. So, every time I sat down to read, Petey decided it was bath time. He would splish and splash and make a terrible racket, and send water flying everywhere. (I told you he hated me.)
So, I started to move away from the bird bath zone, and I would lay stretched out on the glass of the mahogany door-table, and feel its coolness and look at the reflection of the sky from the window. And if I concentrated very hard, I felt as though I were falling into the sky. Hence the name of my blog. It was my first sense of free-falling into a wonderful place, where there were no worries about a sick mother, no problems at school and certainly no damned canaries.
To read more exciting stories of blog names, check out all the folks on this hop!
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