Jan 7, 2022 3 min read

That one piece over there, the one with the two tabs and the one hole with the red line going through it? I picked up and tried that one piece in this corner at least 8 times, never losing hope that this time it would fit.

It hasn’t yet.

For the first time in years, I’m working a jigsaw puzzle. While pulling some Christmas stuff out of storage, I came across the box and thought, winter’s here, this might be fun.

Unless you are a Mensa-level thinker, doing a 1,000-piece puzzle is not really what many would call fun. Challenging and diverting, maybe. But what’s so fun about an activity that provides a dose of frustration every second?

I poured out the pieces on the wide, low slung coffee table and had at it. I’d selected this puzzle so may years ago because of the drawing – an old-fashioned sewing room with a machine, two cats and bolts of colorful fabric stacked in corners. This would be “easier” because there are so many different shapes and colors – the exact opposite of those solid-color puzzles.

What would it take to do that one?

I found my answer on YouTube, where a young woman has a channel about solving jigsaw puzzles. She was working on the solid red one, showing how she sorts the pieces according to shapes. The pieces with the 45-degree angle points are called castle pieces, who knew, and all pieces have “blanks” and “tabs.”

The key to puzzle mastery is in the sorting, and the experts spend a lot of time on it. Me, I don’t have the patience for it, and so with the pieces scattered across the table, I went digging for edge pieces.

And boy, are they ever sneaky.

Pick 50 of them and start building the border and you realize there are probably 50 more hiding in the jumble. It says something notable about my personality that I’m not able to move on with the interior of the puzzle until the border is complete. Those last flat-edge pieces were hiding somewhere, and because it appears they will be pink, how hard would that be to find them?

As a teenager, I did puzzles with my grandmother, sitting at her formica kitchen table and talking about this and that as we worked. She would be the helper, pulling random pieces out of the stack and presenting them to me, one by one – paying no mind to whether I was actually looking for them.

I smiled at that memory as I picked through the pile for those last border pieces. Are they actually missing? Maybe I should abandon the hunt and get going on the interior.

Even with all its variety of colors, it’s a difficult puzzle. A friend told me when her son was in elementary school he was able to build one of those adult-level 3-D jigsaw puzzles in just a few hours. There’s a kind of brain that understands spacial relationships, and I don’t have that brain.

Four days and 6 hours into this, I’ve completed most of the border and about 30 pieces of the interior. I had a deeply satisfying moment when the section with the sewing machine came together and I linked it to the border. Maybe I’ll peck away at it again over the weekend. But it’s just as likely the unfinished puzzle will sit there, abandoned, until I finally fold it all up.

At least I’ll have my coffee table back.