by Shannon Kaye November 13, 2012 "From the time I remember learning to write I also remember admiring my mother’s handwriting. Actually, both of my parents have beautiful handwriting. They never forced or even talked about it, that I recall. But they did both seem to take pride in their penmanship. So when other kids sat in church doodling houses and airplanes on the church programs, I’d ask my mom to lay out handwriting exercises lining up rows of hash marks and stacking dashes so I could practice matching the angles and sizes of my letters to her marks. I did it over and over. We must’ve all done it because each of my brothers and sisters have their own unique and gorgeous style writing." "This excerpt from The Little Prince, painted in French, is written on three walls of this room." "When I began my decorative painting business in 1999, I wanted to put handwriting and paint together to see what I could create. I offered my friend a glass of wine (only one!) to sit in my hallway and read an excerpt from one of my favorite novelettes, Van Gogh’s Bad Café by Frederic Tuten." (Read More)
"Twice a year, a team of cleaners equipped with long sticks clear out tens of thousands of written prayers and wishes crammed into the crevices of Judaism's Western Wall in Jerusalem by worshippers and visitors, making room for fresh ones."
A king of ancient Babylon was terrified when a man’s hand suddenly appeared, writing a warning message on his palace wall. What does it mean for us today? "The fifth chapter of Daniel records a noteworthy and revolting scene of lavish partying that occurred in 539 B.C. The place was Babylon, the capital of the Chaldean Empire." "The king (or coregent) of Babylon, Belshazzar, held a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and other guests. In a sacrilegious act of disdain for God, he and his guests toasted their pagan gods with the gold and silver vessels King Nebuchadnezzar had previously looted from the temple in Jerusalem. “As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone” (Daniel 5:4, New International Version)." "At the height of the festivities, the king was terrified when, without warning, a disembodied hand appeared and began writing a message on the wall. “Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking” (verses 5-6, NIV)." (Read More)
Speaking of Writing On The Wall, there's this 1770s tavern not too far from me that has interesting doodling on the attic wall. Shown below, the attic walls speak to a sensational murder. The Bigelow Tavern's attic walls have a series of drawings showing the 1778 execution of the notorious Bathsheba Spooner. Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner was convicted of plotting the murder of her husband Joshua Spooner, a prosperous farmer who went missing on March 1, 1778. She was hanged in Worcester, along with her hit men/lovers on July 2, 1778. Bathsheba was the beautiful and favored daughter of Tory Timothy Ruggles, who pressured her to marry well-known, prosperous, but not well-liked, Joshua Spooner for selfish, political reasons. Marital circumstances led her into the arms of some revolutionary war soldiers, whom she persuaded to dispose of Joshua. They killed Joshua when he was returning home from some event and dumped the body into his well. I found the well, shown below. As you can guess, the hanging of a beautiful woman and her lovers was quite the event in this nation-to-be at that time - so much so that a depiction ended up on the attic walls of a tavern.