Take Another Piece of My Heart

I did not like jigsaw puzzles. My husband did. Early in our marriage we discovered our irreconcilable differences and avoided the subject.

But, as is the case of many marriages, the arrival of children changed things.

Without discussion or warning, my husband introduced our young daughters to puzzles. They share just enough of their father’s Welsh DNA to be intrigued. But not enough to actually finish a puzzle. This was evident the first time he dumped 1,500 puzzle pieces onto the dining room table torn asunder for the sole purpose of putting them back together again.

For entertainment purposes.

As his British traditions went, I found puzzling less, well, puzzling than grown adults donning silly tissue paper hats to demonstrate their ability to have spontaneous good fun. Once a year, like clockwork.

I am not averse to games. Word puzzles — crosswords, Spelling Bee, Wordle — I do them all. I could, and probably did, brag online once or twice. I mean, have you ever done The Daily Mini in under 45 seconds? That is Gram worthy.

Yet, it was in the yin-yang, clicking together of opposite interlocking pieces of cardboard with my husband that I fell madly in love with him again.

I remember precisely how it happened.

We were at the coast with friends, five of us sitting around a beach house on a rainy afternoon. I don’t recall the season. It might have been any one of the four, as it rains approximately 185 days a year in Seaside, Oregon which holds the title of rainiest place in the state. Days tend to blur, much like the sky and sea, into fifty shades of gray.

And not the erotic kind.

The point is, no one was in a mood to venture far from the wood-stove.

“Let’s do a jigsaw puzzle,” said the host.

“I hate jigsaw puzzles,” said her husband.

“It was a gift,” she said, the words squeezed flat between clenched teeth.

She thanked the gift-givers, my husband, and myself.

I didn’t want to let on that I had absolutely no knowledge of this gift lest our hosts recognize me for the lazy spouse and louse of a house guest that I am.

“Jonathan loves puzzles,” I said in a noncommittal way.

The host gently tapped the puzzle box to pour pieces onto the breakfast table like cereal without a bowl. I resented that puzzle almost immediately.

No one was going to eat, or at least eat while seated comfortably until we finished the puzzle.

“If we all work on it together, it will be done faster,” said the hostess.

She made a puzzle sound like castor oil. Immediately, I felt a special kinship. So what else could I do but pick up a rectangular piece of mostly blue cardboard with three little tabs and an indent and search for its polymerous partners?

“Start with the edge pieces,” advised my husband whose puzzle skills were definitely dweeb-levell. The border soon took shape, and by soon I mean at least an hour of valuable life had passed by.

Only about 1,300 more pieces to go.

I picked up a longish greenish piece. And like a puzzling Carrie Bradshaw, just like that, I put it in its proper place. An odd sensation coursed through my body, something like electricity but not electricity. I picked up another and, without estimating shapes or colors, snapped it in place. And then another. And another.

I was in what is known, at least in my family, as the puzzle zone. The hand operates without conscious thought, plucking pieces from one area and effortlessly putting them in another, exactly where they are meant to be. Left brain logic takes a back seat to allow right-brain intuition to take the wheel. Even describing it in these terms does it no justice because it uses words and what occurs between puzzler and puzzle is beyond words. It’s transcendental. It’s in the present. It is be-here-now, baby!

I looked up. Across the emerging picture, existing in the very moment with me, was my husband.

He snapped a piece onto mine.

All negative thoughts I’d previously harbored about him being a jigsaw puzzle dork, evaporated. The fascinating, beautiful, wild Welshman I’d fallen in love with across a sunny courtyard in Rishikesh, India decades earlier when we were young wanderers in search of the meaning of life stood before me. Once again, I truly saw him.

And also the hundreds of remaining puzzle pieces.

About four days later, there was a picture, complete except for a single missing piece.

“Vivian,” my husband said my name like a poet, maybe Dylan Thomas because of the Welsh accent. “Vivian should have the honor of the last piece.”

Not even the hosts could argue with such gallantry.

I want to say something ironic like the completed jigsaw puzzle revealed a stormy seascape much like the one we were avoiding.

But the truth is, I have no memory of that first jigsaw puzzle picture. Instead, I treasure the moment when I released my cool common sense to join my husband in the utterly pointless pastime of jigsaw puzzling and rediscovered love.

I’d still rather do a word game, though.