Origin story

Every super hero has an origin story, and so does every blog name!

Mine is no exception, though neither it nor I are super heroes.

I have written about the name, a long time ago, but here it is again :D

When I was about 25, I decided I wanted a tattoo.

"What does that have to do with this blog?" you ask. Bear with me, I"ll get there.

I wanted something feminine but meaningful, so I decided to get flowers, but not random ones. I chose to combine emblem flowers of the places that in a way define me.

As a military brat, I have moved a lot, and somehow, the question "where are you from?" is always hard for me to answer. I could tell you where I was born, where I lived longest, where I spend my most formative years, where I liked living the best, ...

But I can narrow it down to 3 general areas that define, if not who I am, at least the path I have taken in life. I was born in Saskatchewan, Canada. I spent all my childhood in France, where all my family is from and still lives. And I have lived all my adult life in Ontario, Canada. Growing up in France, my birthplace was rather unusual and I loved that. I felt it set me apart and made me unique and "exotic". I've always felt very common and unnoticeable, so I enjoyed telling people about being born in Moose Jaw. But of course, with my whole family being from and living in France, it is that culture, language, history, etc., that informed much of who I am. And in the end, I chose to move back to Canada and ended up in Ottawa, Ontario by accident, but felt at home right away. I don't know if any other city or province would have been the same. Maybe, maybe not. But that's where I met some of my best friends, where I excelled in school (which had never been the case in France), and of course where I met my husband.

So when I chose my flowers, I chose the prairy lily for Saskatchewan, the poppy for France and the trillium for Ontario! I gave my idea to a tattoo artist. And he never called back. And somehow the desire for a tattoo went away and I didn't get it. A couple years later, I still really liked the concept and to keep me busy during March break, I drew what would have been my tattoo with watercolour pencils. I have never been a good artist. I have no imagination and can only copy, and not that well at that. But I did an okay job and hubby liked it enough to hang it on the wall.

Fast-forward a couple of years, I decided to start writing a blog. It was mostly to showcase my digital scrapbooking pages and the little freebies I offered for a short while. But before I could write it, it needed a name. I still really liked this idea of the three flowers behind my identity and started playing around with the flower names. I tried many combinations and ended up liking Poppylium the best. I extracted the flowers from a photo of my painting and made them my logo and the blog was born.

So the short version is that it stands for Poppy-Lily-Trillium, lol. And it's not just the blog name, it's sort of my creative identity.

Hope you like the name and the story behind it!

And just for reference, here's the painting which still hangs in our dining room:

Lastly, let me mention that this post was inspired by a prompt from a Blog-It 52 project by La"Shawn of March to December. If you want to know where the name of her blog came from, go read here and if you have a blog and write about its name, go share it with here, I know she's love to read about it!