Glass Bird

I have a fairly recent collection of  Finnish glass birds hand blown by Oiva Toikka. He has been making a new one every year since 1972. I've put a couple of them in extras. Although small and glass, they are hardly tiny so for my main photo I have chosen a chubby little glass bird that was given to me as a wedding shower gift. He has a lot of character and has traveled around with me for at least 60 years.

I don't know who made this little glass bird, but I do remember who gave it to me...a friend of my parents whose name was Betty Williams.  She 
had a daughter Barry, (shortened from Barooyer) my age who was a school mate. Betty was from a patrician New Orleans family and married a fiery Armenian artist named Jerry Zorthian. They lived on a sort of ramshackle farmstead with a scatter of interesting buildings, including his studio...fascinating to us kids, but I don't think Betty liked it much. Barry had to ride her horse to school and tether it in a field across the street. I thought it was pretty exotic, but Barry hated it.

The marriage didn't survive, and Betty and her kids moved down the hill into town where she bought an interesting property with a large elegantly remodeled  house, and a cook named Millie and her husband Marcus who did a little bit of everything around the place. They had their own house on the property but seemed to be ever present when needed.

Betty always seemed sort of elegantly unattainable to me, yet she wasn’t at all. She once installed a series of wood framed cloth (muslin maybe?) screens in the dining room and let us kids paint on them. For as long as I went there (probably until I got married) those screens were in the dining room, and surprisingly looked very nice despite the rather abstract childish designs painted on them.

The third extra is a little print which hangs on the wall above the birds. I can't remember where I got it but it mirrors the form and shape of my little glass bird and I have always kept them together.

Funny how something that has been around for ages and taken 
for granted can bring up a lot of old forgotten memories when one starts looking at it.