Jigsaw Puzzles

One of the things my family enjoys is doing Jigsaw puzzles. It was amazing to me just how much of the extended family also does them. A few weeks ago when I took my mother to Michigan we had a little family reunion. As we were waiting for everyone to arrive my mother was sitting at a card table working on a puzzle. As members of the family; cousins, nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, friends, arrived, they stopped at the table and visited with my mom and put a few pieces in before going out onto the deck and greeting everyone else. At one point I was going to take the puzzle away, but everyone else said to leave it up because they all wanted to see it done. Finally after a few hours the puzzle was complete, my mom moved away from the table and began to socialize with the rest of the family.

Each Christmas there was always a jigsaw puzzle under the tree. Once Christmas dinner was over and the dishes put away, the dinning room table became the puzzle table. As we grew older the puzzles became harder and larger. On more than one occasion when I was my sister and I would stay up all night finishing the puzzle, even after she was married and her husband would go home to bed leaving her there knowing she wouldn’t stop until it was done.

It is the challenge of the puzzle and then seeing the progress that keeps me doing them. Now I have to be selective when I start a puzzle because too many other things don’t get done until I finish the puzzle and if I leave one set up overnight the cat tends to take some of the pieces. I wonder if she is just trying to take one so she can say she finished it like my dad would do when we were growing up. He never sat at the table with us to work on the puzzle but at some point he would take a piece when no one was looking and put it in his pocket. At the end we would all be looking around for that one last piece and he would walk over and say he finished the puzzle for us.

That last piece of the puzzle was the easiest to put in, but without all of the other pieces being placed before it, it meant nothing. Like the pieces of our lives each piece may not mean much until the end, but without just one we are incomplete.