Jigsaw

Were it not for the coronavirus pandemic, my wife could have gone through life having never done a jigsaw puzzle.  But now she knows the immense satisfaction of watching a thousand small, random and misshapen pieces come together to make one coherent picture. One puzzle completed. She’s ready to start on our second.

It took the two of us five days, working four to five hours per day, to complete the puzzle.  Initially we completed 998-pieces of the puzzle.  When we got to the end, we discovered that two pieces were missing, but still we felt pretty good about what we had accomplished.  The picture was mostly complete, minus two small holes.

Two pieces missing out of a thousand, two pieces leaving two obvious holes in what otherwise would be a totally complete and perfect picture.  All that work and effort for a flawed picture?  Not content to leave the puzzle in that state, the carpet below the table was carefully searched.  And there in the shag of the carpet we found the missing pieces.  It’s hard to explain why a 1,000-piece totally complete picture feels infinitely more gratifying than a 998-piece picture.  But, it does.

My wife mused that I seemed more enthusiastic about completing the puzzle than I was when we had our children.  I responded that the very dumbest animals know how to reproduce, but it takes special skill to complete a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.  It takes organization.  It takes patience and perseverance.  It takes a keen eye for small detail.  And it takes time, something right now that my wife and I have plenty of.

After the puzzle was completed, my wife and I stared at our work for a very long time, recalling the joys we shared, adding this piece or that to the puzzle.  My wife put a layer of mod podge over the completed picture so that we could lift the puzzle intact and find a place of honor for it in our home.

By the way, this is the 80^th piece of my blog, a blog that has been an assortment of small, random and occasionally misshapen pieces.  My goal is to get to 100 pieces.  Who knows?  Maybe by then the pieces will fit into some sort of coherent picture.  But there will be some missing pieces.