Jigsaw Puzzles

It started with Mary Ellen.

She was the small, smiling mother of our friends Mike and Tom Starbird, and she loved jigsaw puzzles. My wife Yvonne and I, visiting the Starbirds each year, would at some point find her in the recreation room, moving puzzle pieces around a card table.

The years passed, and so did the puzzles. We met other puzzle lovers, one of whom showed us an ingenious wooden platform with four drawers, perfect for sorting pieces by color or shape. If you needed the table beneath it, you just slid the drawers closed and carried the platform into the other room.

Another puzzle lover introduced us to Liberty Puzzles, 500 to 600 pieces that were made of wood. The wooden pieces fit perfectly but quite differently from the cardboard pieces that we were used to. Liberty Puzzles were frustrating at first, but the longer we worked on them, the more beautiful we found them.

Mike and Roberta visited us recently, and our activities weren’t so different from the early years of our marriages: Roberta and Yvonne went shopping, while Mike and I worked a jigsaw puzzle, in this case a Liberty Puzzle.

Watching Mike concentrate next to me, I couldn’t help think of his mother, Mary Ellen, in her recreation room, placing pieces and looking on happily as they clicked into place.