Fitting the Pieces Together
Since 1979, when Kerro first came to Eagles Mere and the Coo entered him in the Lake Swim fifteen minutes after he got out of the car, we’ve been doing jigsaw puzzles each summer—I’m sure we did them when I was a little girl, but my memory of working on them only stretches back to Kerro’s first summer when we played Perquacky and cooked elaborate meals and debriefed our summer theatre experience—setting the stage for what would become our annual practice.
The puzzle in the dining room cupboard are made of wood and cut with a jigsaw, no guiding image on the warped cardboard carton’s lid to tell us what picture we were trying to put together. The puzzles seem as much a part of Self Help Lodge as the rockers; were they were here when my grandparents acquired the house in 1927? Or did Pop Pop have a predilection for puzzles? I don’t know. Most are certainly as old as I. They are landscapes and country villages—complicated scenes. The best ones have particular pieces cut into recognizable shapes: an axe, a vase, a heart, a sword—these were named Whimsies in the Victorian era and are always tricky to fit into place.
Kerro is the impetus behind puzzle-doing, sometimes completing two or three if he is here long enough. What would the family record show of Kerro? He is like my shadow brother, though he has three sisters of his own. Without any conversation, he filled in as a quasi-older brother after my first year in college—it was as if he perceived the gap and filled the role. He came to Eagles Mere after we spent a hot summer dong children’s theatre, touring Connecticut in a van without seats. We still quote lines from those play. When we founded ETC, Kerro was there—faculty member and then relief pitcher during tech week. He is part of the landscape of our lives, the person who often leavens family tension, is loved by Seth and me and our children equally. When he works on a puzzle, his concentration is absolute; he’s in the zone. Puzzles and games delight him—crossword puzzles, Dominion, Ticket to Ride, backgammon. He is good at all of them and is often the instigator, inspiring all of us to join him.
We unfold a card table and put it on the hammock side of the porch, drawing up straight chairs. We spill the pieces out and sort them. Edge. Sky. Foliage. Foliage with sky. Sky-edge, which we name “skedge.” Each piece, disconnected those that had incorrectly fallen together in the tangle of the box, gets turned over, painted side up. Kerro swiftly pieces together the sky edge, which will be the top. I go for color, sorting emerald to one corner and sludge-brown pieces to another. Diva, our blind dog, jumps up, in pursuit of some strawberry-rhubarb bread that I had stupidly placed on the table. Pieces cascade. We rescue the plate—minus a few bites of bread--and restored the fallen pieces, glad Diva had not wolfed them down, too. This week’s effort, Red Coat Inn, does not have a date on its box, which means it’s possible we may have never done it.
After color, I look for shape, how a nubbin of one color might link to the next. This puzzle is well made, but that means it’s not easy, and I need breaks—otherwise, all the pieces start to look the same. I go to change the laundry, come back and see how two more pieces fit together. Kerro finishes the edge, fills in the sky, but leaves my little corner of pieces for me to play with.
Porch puzzles are communal affairs. Sometimes a neighbor, stopping by for a chat, slides a piece into place. We oooh over the whimsies: a vase, a hatchet, a fish, a sword. I like the process of doing a puzzle. I don’t want to rush it, the sense of leisure and purpose—combined. The edge serves as the frame; we fill in the picture as we go, aware that one artist painted the picture, and another cut it up, giving us the pleasure of putting it back together
Puzzles are leisure pursuits—they require time and patience, stillness, focus, a certain willingness to wait for your eyes to tell you exactly where a piece goes. They also ask us to keep trying, to try to put pieces together because the effort sometimes brings unexpected triumph. The puzzle waits while we scurry around accomplishing other tasks. It is not unlike writing—during the process of putting together the draft of my memoir that I submitted for my MFA, I thought about doing puzzles in Eagles Mere, the patience required to assemble the inside after the frame was complete. In tackling the memoir, both frame and innards were elusive. What story did I really want to tell? Were there bits I was avoiding? Why was it so hard? When I submitted 235 pages about my life, I understood it was not finished. There is another draft—maybe multiple drafts—to come, but the work of choosing what to write about and the effort of rearranging the words, the paragraphs, was no more wasted that the moment when I try to fit a green nubbin into an opening where it doesn’t fit: trial and error and luck sometimes lead to serendipity! My boss, Sandy, once said we learn the same lessons over and over again. Puzzles and memoirs both ask me to risk and fail, to be unafraid, to persist. Puzzles are pretty low stakes endeavors; they remind me not to take my memoir quite so seriously. Look away. Look back. The piece may fit. The right structure and the right theme for the memoir will emerge, but I may have to look at it from an angle rather than straight on.
The puzzles wait. On the card table, in their boxes, in the cupboard. They are without agenda, without a to-do list. My memoir is waiting, too. When Kerro puts the last piece in place the last piece, we sigh in satisfaction. After a few hours or a day, we will break the pieces apart again, tuck them into its dull gold box—now dusted. We’ll inscribe 2023 on the outside of the box, keeping track of which puzzles we’ve completed.
Summer puzzles are a family ritual—soothing, joyful, something to punctuate the season. And a good reminder for this writer, too, about patience and waiting.
