Staying warm with narps, nerps and nubbins
On these dark, frozen winter nights, let us turn to the warm mystery of spades, narps, nerps and nubbins. Oh, and boots, of course.
And I don’t mean snow boots, although I did have to go looking for mine. It’s been so long since Western Pennsylvania has had much snow that I needed a January reboot. I found my snow boots at the back of the upstairs closet. And there, too, I found a box that held some of the other kinds of boots.
A boot is the name for a certain shape of a jigsaw puzzle, and there on the shelf were my boxes of jigsaw puzzles, forgotten since the first dark winter of COVID. During the lockdown, I’d lost my will to read or to cook. I remembered a friend whose husband always had a puzzle in progress on the dining room table. I remembered the neatly satisfying moment when this patch meets up with that patch with one single piece. And so I began.
The first puzzle back then was a nicely-segmented and doable photo of quilts, each of a unique color and pattern. I’d cleared the low, wide coffee table and set to work there; sitting on the sofa allowed me to see the whole thing as it came together – first assembling the frame and its straight edges, and then pecking away at the middle. Next, I progressed to more difficult puzzles including cluttered libraries, a sky full of hot air balloons and then a landscape.
I started over again this week with the quilts, on the same sofa and table in a different house. As I spread the pieces on the table I remembered what that puzzling had done to my lower back. All those hours of leaning over the low coffee table caused next-day stiffness and pain. I moved the puzzle to the dining room table.
As the frame came together so did some of the memories: of building the COVID puzzles while watching – or mostly just listening to – documentaries on PBS. I remembered the names I gave the different shapes: angels and hooks, puppies and lions. And my favorite, the half-stripe, which is what I call any piece whose little nose has a vertical or horizontal stripe through it. Those are easy to match with the corresponding holes, which I call a divot.
Speed puzzlers, as they’re called in competitions, don’t necessarily all use the same names for the different shapes, but narps, nerps and nubbins seem to be commonly accepted. An elite puzzler can finish a 1,000-piece puzzle in about three hours, and a 500-piece puzzle in about a half-hour.
A half-hour is how long it took me to even find my puzzles (and my boots). This time around, it took me about eight hours to complete the quilt puzzle, but I am rusty. It was strange, though, to find that I remembered certain pieces from those years ago: half of the puzzle was done but there was a hole in the middle of one of the quilts, awaiting an angel with a striped nose. The search for it diverted me for long moments. It was among the last pieces left, and it didn’t look like I thought it would. And that’s the challenge: Too often, the piece you want is not the one that will fit.
The frozen weather is supposed to stay here for the next week, but I have another puzzle to keep me company, the one with the balloons. All the blue sky will be tricky, but it will fill the cold hours.