Historical Coincidence?

My mother was an elementary school teacher the last sixteen years of her professional life. I remember her talking about reading to her students, many times from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books about “The Little House on the Prairie.” They meant little to me at the time as I didn’t read the books as a youngster   and the TV series was more contemporary with my two sons’ growing up years.

However, when Mom died, I inherited many of her books, among them being the Little House on the Prairie volumes I’m sure many of her young students enjoyed. Being the inquisitive reader I am, I set out to read through the books Mom had collected and after reading them I could understand the interest in the era these books portrayed.

I’m sure Mom was delighted to discover that Laura and her husband actually ended up settling in the southern part of Missouri and I remember that one summer Mom and Dad actually made a trip to Wilder’s home in Mansfield.

While I was in the midst of reading through the Wilder books, my husband and I went to a garage sale here in Elko, Nevada and there in a pile of tattered, disreputable looking books, I discovered a Wilder book not included in Mom’s collection. Farm Boy is actually Laura’s description of Almanzo’s life on an upper New York state farm in the 1870’s as he progresses from age almost-nine to age ten. Her description of farm life in those days is priceless since farm life as I knew it in the 1950’s and 60’s was totally different in the fashion in which work was accomplished.

My reason for reflecting on all this stems from the parallels I see between Almanzo Wilder and my great-grandfather Reber, both of whom came west to Missouri to farm, Wilder to south Missouri, Reber to northeastern Missouri. Contemporaries in age, occupation, and, perhaps, vision. Yet they never met—or perhaps they did? 

Brush Strokes

The characters standing for the animals pictured are a method of communication, in this case extending back thousands of years. Instead of thinking specifically of the animals pictured, I preferred to envision the genius of the first person who marked a surface of clay or papyrus or strips of bark with a pointed object or paint brush of some type, all towards the end of communicating with others.

How individual marks came to mean specific or general objects or even thoughts is an awesome process to me. This led me to research the beginnings of written communication. Surprisingly, the first site to pop up on Google was a greeting card site with a handy little time line of what probably happened when.

Around 3000 BC a Sumerian discovered the concept of marking a clay tablet with a pointed object. Whether he was tallying his sheep or communicating the fact he was traveling from Ninevah to Byblos is unknown (to me, at least).

Next, our timeline takes us to Egypt between 2500-2000 BC where an ingenious person discovered they could dry strips of reed to make papyrus and paint their hieroglyphs on this surface. (This was much more satisfactory than etching the forms in the dirt as their lofty thoughts had a tendency to wash away during the the rainy season.)

The next timeline marker using a different writing surface for communication spotlights a Chinese brushing pictograms on an animal shoulder bone some time in the 1500 ‘s (BC, that is).

Between 1500-1000 BC we move to a different part of the world as well as a different writing surface. This time we see the Aztecs who used beaten bark from tapa, (barkcloth originally from the paper mulberry tree), amate (bark paper from ficus trees), and hunn (paper made from rice) to paint their designs which I presume were forms of communication.

The Greeks come to the forefront in 600 BC when some enterprising person developed parchment by stretching sheepskin and soaking it in lime for two weeks. As a side note, vellum, made from calf or goatskin in a similar fashion to parchment was used by the Romans.

By now I can see my ideas on communication via brush strokes have veered to the surface on which the brushstrokes reside, but I must travel on to paper.

We are once again back with some ingenious Chinese who first developed paper in 200 BC made from silk shreds. Very expensive. Ah, but now we focus again on brush strokes of a sort. Believe it or not, the Chinese invented the first printing press in 593 AD.

That brings us full circle, in a way, to the idea of brush strokes or communication. Lower species of the animal kingdom communicate aurally as do human beings. But we have obviously realized the need for our communication to have a more lasting effect than interaction carried via sound wave.

Brushstrokes—communication—interaction—relationships. How do our brushstrokes affect others? A question probably worth a few moments pondering.