Picture Puzzle Piece
One picture puzzle piece
Lyin' on the sidewalk,
One picture puzzle piece
Soakin' in the rain.
It might be a button of blue
On the coat of the woman
Who lived in a shoe.
It might be a magical bean,
Or a fold in the red
Velvet robe of a queen.
It might be the one little bite
Of the apple her stepmother
Gave to Snow White.
It might be the veil of a bride
Or a bottle with some evil genie inside.
It might be a small tuft of hair
On the big bouncy belly
Of Bobo the Bear.
It might be a bit of the cloak
Of the Witch of the West
As she melted to smoke.
It might be a shadowy trace
Of a tear that runs down an angel's face.
Nothing has more possibilities
Than one old wet picture puzzle piece.
—Shel Silverstein
When COVID hit (almost four years ago - can you believe it??) and out of the blue I found myself home full-time with my girls, all of a sudden we became puzzle fiends. We would buy puzzles, or trade with neighbors, and somehow the dark days seemed lighter when we were deep into solving a jigsaw mystery.
This mania faded when I went back to work and school resumed, but then, last year, when I was home for eight long months caring for Ash, and everything was chaos - my job and then my hunt for a new job, and Ash’s school placement and therapy (both still miserably unresolved) - I suddenly found myself back to puzzling. This time my girls rebelled and would not help me, but Ben was game, and so the coffee table in my newly-added sunroom became a sea of pieces, picture after picture emerging from the chaos.
Because that is what puzzling is all about, isn’t it? Pulling order from chaos, sense from senselessness. There is a beautiful satisfaction that builds as, bit by bit, the picture on the table begins to resemble the picture on the box. And putting in the last piece? Pure bliss.
At the opposite extreme is the heartbreak of the missing piece. Sure, per Shel, finding a missing piece is an invitation to imagination. But from the puzzler’s perspective, there is something deeply upsetting about an incomplete puzzle, as if some fundamental law of nature has been violated. In a world where the puzzle cannot be finished, what else is possible? Will the lamb hunt the lion? Will Trump win reelection? Will the sun suddenly sputter and blink out? Who knows, but I do not like to think about it.
I wonder if mom thought this way when she sat in her dining room in the year she was dying, piecing together puzzles. (She also learned to crochet, courtesy of my sister-in-law, Emily, and I have been learning to crochet recently as well, but maybe that is a coincidence? Or maybe pieces and rows bear a strong resemblance to stitches and rows, in terms of healing, meditative effect? I do not know.) In any event, I have to imagine the thought crossed my brilliant mother’s mind at least once, that each puzzle was just a little bit of order amid the deadly chaos of leukemia. I hope it did, that she felt the peace of pieces, of puzzles that were too simple for her extraordinary brain, yet maybe just what she needed.
Ben and my kids must all have sensed last year how much my fragile mental health was perching precariously on the solace of puzzles, because - without consulting with each other in advance - they both gave me custom photo puzzles for my birthday. How cool is that?
And then, last spring, as everything with my job and everything with Ash was really and truly falling apart, the rabbit puzzle arrived.
It looked innocuous enough, sitting on my doorstep with no note or explanation. It didn’t look like a portal to hell; it just looked old and slightly worn. I was puzzled (get it?) as to where it came from, but when inquiries among my friends and neighbors turned up nothing, I figured I would just put it together and then pass it along to some new lucky person.
Oh, how innocent I was.
I brought it into the house (first mistake), and emptied its thousand pieces onto the coffee table (second mistake).
I noticed quickly that the pieces were shaped in unusual ways, but (silly me) I thought that would only make the puzzle easier (my third mistake). Bravely, with a devil-may-care gleam in my eye, I set out to make order out of chaos.
Many many hours later, I had made stunning progress. One small section of one bunny’s face! And I had also realized what I had missed at first: The oddly-shaped pieces were only making every thing worse. And the bunnies - which were starting to seem like fluffy demons sneering up at me from the cardboard - were drawn in a narrow array of similar colors, with markings that looked distinct but truly were not (when viewed in scattered pieces).
Now my treasured hobby was turning into a nightmare. My beautiful sunroom, only just completed the summer before, and heretofore a place of rest and repose, had become a path to hell, paved with bunnies. And I could not stop (my fourth mistake). I was bound and determined to finish that puzzle, if it was the last thing I ever did, which it seemed very likely to be. I was doomed.
Cue Ben. Remember Ben, my wonderful and devoted partner? Ben, who loves me and cares about my mental wellbeing? Who sat with me throughout our shared COVID quarantine, working puzzle after puzzle, contentedly? Who knows me about as well as any person ever has?
Well, my darling, protective, loving Ben, one day about a month into the bunny puzzle madness, sitting on the daybed in my sunroom working peacefully on his computer, stretched his leg reflexively, and kicked his entire mug of coffee all across the 1,000 miserable pieces of the puzzle.
What happened next? I screamed, he jumped, and we raced like mad to contain the damage. We grabbed paper towels and dish towels and mops and sponges and raced against the fragrant tide, but to no avail. The soggy cardboard pieces began to come apart, little bits of bunny separating from their backings, curling, dripping, and disintegrating. The puzzle was dead. Long live the puzzle.
At first, I was beside myself. I had gotten into my head that that damned puzzle - like so many other aspects of my life at that time - was not going to get the best of me. And now it was gone. Ben felt awful, and immediately set out to try to find it online. Meanwhile, I texted my friend Heather.
“Well, Ben just kicked a full mug of coffee over and ruined the puzzle.”
Less than a minute later, she texted back: “Thank god!!!”
Wait! I thought. That puzzle was my Everest! My solo flight around the world! My Guinness World Record! And now it is gone, and with it all of my hard work and determination.
Then I paused. I pondered Heather’s reaction. And in my head, the vision of bunnies turned to whales…white whales to be precise. The puzzle was not some grand challenge that I would have conquered with determination and focus. It was a source of stress, an obsession that was taking me from time with my girls, and a dangerous distraction from solving the real problems in my life.
I looked at Ben, who was just about to buy another curséd bunny puzzle. “Stop!” I told him. “That puzzle was a trap. I’m glad it’s gone. I mean, I’m sad a little, but I’m happy. Thank you for releasing me from its rabbity spell.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Really,” I said.
And so, instead, a week or so later, two new puzzles showed up at my house (Ben was still a bit remorseful), and we set out to peacefully piece together autumn pumpkins and then Monet’s gentle water lilies.
Well, mostly peacefully. As I am an Order Muppet and Ben can be a bit of a (lovable) Chaos Muppet, I tend to work each puzzle row by row, slowly but steadily building the picture from the bottom up, while Ben finds a section that intrigues him and assembles it, and then another random section somewhere else, and on and on. I like to trash talk his scattershot methods, but in the end it is all okay. Together we create order out of chaos, piece by piece, puzzle by puzzle. The mysteries of the bunny puzzle will never be solved, but we have moved on. All is as it should be.
In a world where chaos and order are becoming interchangeable, I'm grateful to know you've vanquished the real enemy - the bunnies!❤️