I bought a jigsaw puzzle at the grocery store today. The box features an ornate cathedral with red roses and blossoming foliage. The cathedral is in Germany. The puzzle cost two bucks.
My mother and I used to do jigsaw puzzles. Big puzzles. We did them together. I was no good at jigsaws, but she was an expert.
Long ago, puzzles cost seventy-five cents, and provided hours of distraction. We needed distractions back then. We welcomed anything that took our minds off my father’s untimely death, and the gloom that came thereafter.
My mother looked for distractions that made us laugh, things that made us smile, games, puzzles, crafts, or road trips.
Once, she took us to Branson. She took me to see a Dolly Parton impersonator. The show was spectacular. After the performance, the woman in the blonde wig hugged me so tight she nearly suffocated me with her enormous attributes.
When my mother saw me locked with the buxom woman, she shrieked and started praying in tongues. She yanked me by my
earlobe and drug me away. And I have been a lifelong Dolly Parton fan ever since.
Anyway, my mother loved doing things with her hands. She made large quilts from old T-shirts, she gardened, she did puzzle books, anagrams, crosswords, cryptograms, she knitted, crocheted, and painted.
She played cards with me, sometimes checkers, and she was a Scrabble fanatic. But jigsaw puzzles. Those were our thing.
My mother started each puzzle by saying the same thing:
“We gotta find the corners first, that’s how you do it.”
The idea was that once you found the corners, the rest of the puzzle would come together. Thus, we would sift through twenty-five hundred pieces, looking for four corners. Once we found them, we’d dig for the edges.
We’d place pieces into piles, then link them together. Piece by piece. Section by section. Mama and I could spend a…
