It happened. Yesterday, I succumbed to the call of the unopened cardboard in our storeroom and opened a jigsaw puzzle box, unleashing the mystery known to others as 'puzzling'. During my earlier married years - BK (before kids) - I was an avid puzzler and several of our 'early married, shabby-style (no chic for us) pieces of artwork(?) on the walls were puzzles that I had completed, decoupaged (there's a seventies word), framed and hung. The framed puzzles matched perfectly with the style of furnishings throughout wherever we called home - apartments, duplexes, townhouses, and, finally, our first house that we built. My 'puzzling' career came abruptly to a self-decreed end when I knew I had to choose between the safety of our then three-year old daughter or the puzzle I was currently working on. The puzzle was a solid red circle, dubbed "Little Red Riding Hood's Hood". Each 'connection' took me about an hour and I had roughly fifteen pieces in place when our toddler-daughter became curious and rearranged the fledgling puzzle. After a milli-second of decision making, I collected the pieces and later gave the puzzle away. During our kids' later years, puzzles reappeared and family members would take turns at the puzzle table, each spying a hard-to-find piece, until it was assembled in total.
My choice, last night, was a Santa Claus-themed puzzle I selected because of the vibrant colors that I knew would be both vexing and challenging - just what my mind needed. The thousand-piece puzzle took a long time for me to lay out, the majority of the pieces needing to be turned over and I wanted to arrange them by either border-style or color family. After my back tired from three hours of bending over, I left the table and my SO took over. Later, in the middle of the night when events awakened us for about forty-five minutes, what did we do? We both ended up circling the puzzle table, gleefully proclaiming each connection that we made. Finally, common sense overcame our puzzle addiction and we returned to bed.
This morning, as we groggily stumbled from under the warmth of the covers, my SO and I looked at each other, laughed and just shook our heads. Our behaviors have long puzzled others, and now we, too, are 'puzzled'.
Ancora imparo
