Puzzle, Puzzled, Meta-puzzled

I have an addiction that I need to confess to, though I suspect it is one that many of you might share. I’m not talking about buying yarn - that is a given. I’m talking about one that I’ve had most of my life and that has been growing in popularity over the past year - namely doing jigsaw puzzles.

Opening up a jigsaw puzzle box is a bit like opening a box of really good chocolates. Once you get started it’s really hard to walk away - it’s always there calling you back. I have to be very conscious about when to allow myself to start in on a puzzle. It has to be at a time when I have no pressing deadlines or other important things to be working on. I pretty much can’t think about anything else until I get it done, and have been known to stay up all night working on one.

Three years ago this month I taught a workshop in Atlanta and stayed with Diane Totten, queen of crimp cloth. She had a card table set up with a partially finished jigsaw puzzle with a scene from Butchart Gardens. We worked on it together each night that I was there, and we had to set a timer to tell us to stop at midnight so that we would get some sleep before tomorrow’s class.

My partner Nelson isn’t so much one for doing jigsaw puzzles as he is one for designing puzzles for other people and having them custom made. He has a distinctly devious side and likes to make them difficult. He also likes to hide the image so that you don’t know what it is going to become. For me, spending time with the image is one of the things I really enjoy while I am doing the puzzle, and I don’t consider that to be cheating, like he does. He is in the process of starting his own company called Bonner Badass Jigsaworks.

A year or so ago he gave me a commercial 1000 piece puzzle with an image of a grouping of purple succulents. It was a lovely photo and didn’t look particularly difficult at first glance, but it turned out to be exceptionally challenging.

I worked on it over a period of a couple weeks and finally got down to the last 150 or so pieces. At that point every piece looked like the same nondescript dark color so I resorted to separating the pieces by shape into some colored plastic bowls that I have. Then it was down to trying out every piece of a specific shape into a space that needed that shape to fill it in.

Since I don’t have a dedicated space that I can have a card table set up for puzzles I do them on a piece of masonite. Then I can work on the puzzle on my kitchen counter, where the light is the best, or at my dining room table, where I can be more comfortable sitting. Then I can move the board with the puzzle to somewhere else when I need to cook dinner.

Just before the holidays last year we held a party for a group of about 20 friends. I needed both my kitchen counter and my dining room table for food. I couldn’t move the board to the guest bed because we needed that as a place for people to put their coats. I tried to think of a place where it could be completely out of the way and I could move it back the next day after the house was all cleaned up again. What I came up with was the roof of my car - nice big flat surface, and I wasn’t planning to go anywhere the next day.

When I woke up the next morning I decided that it would feel really good to go to the gym and get in a workout. I got in my car, pulled out of the driveway and started down the street. You know where this is going. When I took the first turn I heard a sound that made me think I had hit something. I stopped and looked in my rearview mirror and saw some brightly colored objects lying in the road. At first I couldn’t think what they could be, but finally it dawned on me.

I live on a dirt and gravel road, and what I found was five plastic bowls, the masonite board, the box from the puzzle, and 1000 puzzle pieces scattered all over the road and along the sides of the road embedded in the dirt and the gravel.

I put the board and the bowls into my car and started to gather up all the puzzle pieces that I could into the box, but it soon became clear that there was no way I was going to be able to dig them all out of the dirt and gravel. Besides, was I really going to want to start building that puzzle all over again? I gave up and went on to the gym.

A few months later my birthday rolled around and Nelson gave me two identical wrapped up boxes, which I could tell right away were jigsaw puzzles. The first one was a 260 piece puzzle with a photo he had taken of the box of the original purple succulent puzzle. This one was much quicker and easier to put together than the original one had been.

But the second box! Nelson had gone out and taken a photo of the puzzle pieces I had left lying in the gravel and had that made into a 1000 piece puzzle. This one was probably equally as challenging, or perhaps even a little more so than the original puzzle had been, but I persevered, and after several weeks had it completed.

There’s something very satisfying and comforting about having a jigsaw puzzle completed, with everything in place and no pieces missing. It makes you feel like there is order in the world and that somehow you have some control in your life, even as you know that it’s time to get back to reality. There’s a sweet movie that came out a couple years ago called Puzzle that makes another nice way to spend an evening relaxing.

It has been over a year now since the original puzzle and associated parts flew off the roof of my car. Over the months following that event, as we took our daily walks with our dog around our neighborhood, we occasionally spotted one of the puzzle pieces that was still lying out there along the side of the road. We still look, but after all the months of cars going by and our road being graded a few times, nothing remains as far as we can tell. Every now and then I’m tempted to take the box with the pieces that I was able to salvage and strew them out on the road again. Just to keep the story going a little while longer…